The lone member of the House of Representatives to run a family grocery store chain has issued a bleak warning about the effects of Vice President Kamala Harris’ plan to ban purported price gouging — predicting to The Post it will “slowly turn us into a Third World nation.”
“It’s going to be a lower standard of living for the whole continental United States,” added freshman Rep. Michael Rulli (R-Ohio), who won a special election in June to represent part of eastern Ohio and is one of the third generation to operate the Youngstown-based Rulli Bros. Markets chain, which has been in business since 1917.
That background, an emotional Rulli told The Post this week, has given him unique insight into the economic struggles of many of his new constituents.
“Our people are literally being starved to death,” he said. “If you go into a grocery store, any grocery store in this country, you look at these people going through the register, and you see how much they’re getting. They’re getting half of what they used to get, and it’s not even what they want.”
“They can’t get their favorite soap, they can’t get their favorite meat, they can’t get the healthy vegetable. They can’t get any of it. It is the saddest thing in the world,” he added. “We need to fix this.”
At times, Rulli said, he has dipped into his own pocket and footed the bill for some of his regular customers.
Yet the Republican was adamant that any attempt to artificially drive down prices would lead to ruin.
“Stores … will be shutting down business in droves. And then the second problem you’re going to see is the selection on the shelf is going to shrink dramatically. So you’re going to actually damage the quality of life,” Rulli added, predicting that the problem of food deserts will grow worse and “it will feel like you’re in Havana, Cuba.”
“The first people that are going to go out of business are going to be the food desert, urban [ones],” he said of Harris’ proposal. “The second people that’ll go out of business is going to be definitely the medium-sized grocery stores. And then the third will be the larger ones.”
Harris has been very light on details of her economic plan, which is widely seen as a bid to undercut former President Donald Trump’s advantage in polling on the issue.
While Republicans have faulted the Harris-Biden administration and congressional Democrats for decades-high inflation by signing off on trillions in new spending, Harris has blamed pandemic-induced supply chain snarls for soaring prices that she contends have been kept artificially high by corporations ever since.
“Price fluctuations are normal in free markets, but Vice President Harris recognizes there is a big difference between fair pricing and the excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business that Americans have seen in the food and grocery industry,” a press blast from the Harris campaign argued earlier this month.
Defenders of the Harris plan have noted that dozens of states already have price gouging bans on the books, typically intended for emergency situations such as extreme weather events.
Multiple Democratic senators have previously introduced federal legislation barring price gouging by granting the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general broad authority to go after companies.
Critics have sweated over what the details of what such a ban would look like and some have likened it to government price controls, which economists warn have triggered massive supply shortages and other shocks in countries around the world.
Rulli explained that profit margins for most grocery stores tend to be pretty slim, due both to the high cost of doing business and competition from bigger rivals that can sell products at a higher volume.
Last year, the Food Industry Association assessed that the average grocery store profit margin was about 1.6%.
“There really is absolutely no money in grocery stores anymore,” Rulli said.
The Ohio Republican’s solution to help struggling Americans is to bring down the cost of fuel, which Rulli contends is the main cause of economic strain.
“I think that the Biden administration has done so many horrible things to throttle our energy,” he said.
Annual inflation came in at 2.9% for the 12-month period ending in July, well below highs of 9.1% in June 2022 and the first time that figure rang in below 3% since March 2021.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has teased that an interest rate cut is coming, saying Friday that “the time has come for policy to adjust” — though he did not say when a reduction might come.
