A&P

Yeah.

Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.

Anyhow-

The great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company

...

I would say, good people, ponder the word free and see if it really is free.

[laughs] Shout out to Superfresh.

A&P, dude.

Grew up going to a Superfresh.

Um, [clears throat] let me ask you this.

The meatpacking companies can't compete.

And give that ten, twenty, thirty years, out of that comes supermarkets, A&P, and all that.

It creates a space for the large supermarket chains.

The theory behind that is countervailing power, that maybe you can't stop combination of large firms because it's more efficient, but you can prevent them from dominating the whole industry by allowing other firms to compete with them for the dollars.

We're seeing in both Walmart and other companies like it, vertical plays into the food system.

The concerns a century ago was a lot of the vertical plays, both by the meat packers getting into retail, but also A&P was a large grocery store a century ago that also got into the production,

making food.

Walmart now has its own milk plants.

He has made everything beautiful in its time.

In his book, Good to Great, business leader and author Jim Collins compares A&P, one of the world's largest retail organizations in the 1950s, with Kroger, a smaller value-based supermarket chain that was also doing well at the time.

Both of these companies realized that the world was changing with technology.

Smartly, both companies conducted research and hired qualified analysts to forecast how these changes would impact future business.