A first-term Republican congressman who runs a small grocery store chain in Ohio worries that Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposal to control food prices would hurt family-run businesses like his.
“We deal with a lot of stuff. Grocery stores have a net margin of about 1.5 percent. [percent] “If it’s really working, it’s $1 and 3/4 dollars. Simply put, it’s about $1.50 for every $100 that goes through the register. And what we’ve seen over the last three or four years has been pretty appalling,” Rep. Michael Rulli, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview.
“This will be an end to this industry in a way that no one could have imagined.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris announced a controversial plan for food price controls last week. (Getty Images)
Rulli won a special election in June to replace retiring Republican Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio.
Previously, he served as a Republican state senator and helped run Lurie Brothers, a mid-sized grocery chain that his father founded in 1917.
To illustrate how price controls would affect his company’s business, Mr. Lurie held up a bottle of Tide laundry detergent, made by Procter & Gamble Co.
““If the Harris administration were to tell Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble that Tide, which sells for $4.99 today, must remain at $4.99 for the next four years, Procter & Gamble would simply choose not to make the product,” Rulli said. “And that would happen quite often.”
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He pointed to barcodes called stock-keeping units, or SKUs, that identify individual products, and said his store, for example, carries 38,000 different barcoded items, while major grocery chains have many more.
“So why does it matter to viewers? It matters to viewers because this is the luxury of living in the United States of America, where the average blue-collar worker — Joe Bag of Donuts — has the opportunity to buy the nice things in life,” Lurie said.
Rep. Michael Rulli, an Ohio Republican who was elected in a special election for the House of Representatives in June, owns a small chain of grocery stores in Ohio. (Getty Images)
“What’s going to happen in four years of a Harris administration is we’re going to go from 38,000 SKUs to 5,000 SKUs and we’re going to be living in Cuba or Venezuela.”
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Part of that is a pledge to ban food “price gouging” for the first time, which right-wing critics say will stifle economic growth in the same way dictatorships such as the former Soviet Union and Venezuela have.
Harris’ allies point out that big food manufacturers have been posting record profits in recent years: Hershey saw its net income grow 62% between 2019 and 2023, while companies like General Mills and Kraft Heinz both saw growth of 48%. The Wall Street Journal.
But groups like the National Grocery Association call the plan a “solution in search of a problem.”
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Harris promised to “make it clear that big corporations cannot exploit consumers.” (Image direct from Fox News Digital)
“Independent grocers, who already operate on razor-thin margins, are suffering the same inflationary pressures as their customers,” the group said earlier this month.
Announcing the plan in North Carolina, Governor Harris promised to “make it clear that big corporations cannot unfairly exploit consumers.”
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But Lurie argued that it would also hurt small and medium-sized grocers.
“A lot of these small, independent grocery stores are going to go out of business. We’ve already seen them slowly going out of business over the last 20 to 30 years, but I would say just recently, within a 80-mile radius where I sit right now, we’ve had five grocery stores go out of business in the last two years,” he said.
Fox News Digital has reached out to Harris’ campaign for comment.
