Back in 1962, the first Walmart opened its doors in Rogers, Arkansas. It was a single discount store. Nothing fancy. By 1988, the chain had muscled its way into groceries with the launch of the first Supercenter, and the American food shopping experience started to shift in ways nobody fully anticipated. Today, roughly one out of every four grocery dollars spent in this country goes straight to Walmart. That kind of dominance doesn’t happen quietly, and the stories behind it are stranger — and more troubling — than most people realize.
Squeezing out everyone else
Here’s a scenario. You’re a small-town grocer in Kansas, and you’ve been running your family’s store for decades. Then Walmart moves in, prices everything just low enough that customers start drifting away. You can’t match their costs because, well, you’re not the largest retailer on the planet. Eventually you shut down. And then Walmart is the only place to buy food for miles around. This isn’t hypothetical. According to a 2019 analysis, Walmart held 83% of the grocery market share in Bismark, North Dakota — a metro area of over 135,000 people. In Atchison, Kansas, it was 95%.
Stacy Mitchell, executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has written about how Walmart’s sheer buying power lets it force suppliers into steep discounts. Those suppliers then make up the difference by charging smaller stores more. It’s a cycle that slowly strangles the competition. U.S. antitrust laws start raising red flags when any company holds more than 50% of a market share in a given area. Walmart has blown past that threshold in at least 43 major metro areas.
FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya put it bluntly in an interview with Time: the people left without options are often the poorest, living in the most underserved areas. Rural communities and urban neighborhoods alike end up stuck. Some small grocers have tried forming co-ops to stay competitive. Most of the time, it hasn’t been enough. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance summed it up pretty starkly: “No other corporation in history has ever amassed this degree of control over the U.S. food system.” That’s a heavy sentence to read.
“Great Value” isn’t always
Walmart’s store brand, Great Value, is supposed to be the budget-friendly alternative. The label practically screams it. But people have been doing side-by-side price comparisons online for years now, and the results don’t always favor Walmart. Aldi’s house brands regularly come in cheaper. Even Costco’s Kirkland Signature line gives Great Value a run for its money on certain items. So the name is doing a lot of heavy lifting that the price tag doesn’t always support.
Then there’s the post-pandemic price creep. Shoppers started noticing that Great Value products — the ones they’d been counting on to stay affordable — had gotten significantly more expensive. Some social media posts claimed prices doubled on certain items. Walmart CEO John Furner blamed inflation, calling it a “nagging problem.” That explanation didn’t sit well with everyone.
University of California Berkeley professor Robert Reich pointed out on X that Walmart’s net income spiked 93% to $10.5 billion toward the end of 2023. Senator Elizabeth Warren has echoed similar criticisms, arguing that corporations like Walmart have used inflation as convenient cover for padding their margins. Whether you call it greed or smart business depends on your perspective, I suppose. But when the store brand that’s supposed to save you money keeps costing more while the company’s profits soar, something feels off.
The egg problem
Speaking of things that don’t add up — Walmart made a big public commitment in 2016 to switch entirely to cage-free eggs by 2025. It was a bold promise, given that the company sold more than 11 billion eggs per year. That’s an almost incomprehensible number. By 2022, it was already clear the target wasn’t going to be met. As of 2024, only about 27% of Walmart’s eggs were certified cage-free. So, not even close.
But the cage-free pledge is only part of the story. A customer filed a lawsuit in 2018 claiming that eggs labeled as organic at Walmart had come from hens confined indoors — a practice the ASPCA described as “faux-ganic.” That’s a term I wish I didn’t have to type, but there it is. Labeling eggs as organic when the hens never see sunlight or a blade of grass is, at minimum, misleading.
And then there’s Trillium, one of Walmart’s major egg producers. PETA conducted undercover investigations at the facility, which housed about 2.4 million chickens. The footage was rough. Workers were accused of killing hens, throwing live birds into garbage, and denying medical treatment. In 2022, an avian flu outbreak at the same facility was estimated to kill around 2.6 million birds. The whole egg supply chain behind Walmart’s shelves has layers (sorry) of problems that most shoppers never think about while grabbing a carton on their way through the store.
Overcharging by the pound
That brings up another thing worth knowing about. You know those weighted grocery items — the ones that get priced based on how much they weigh? Produce, deli meats, that kind of stuff. In 2022, a class action lawsuit accused Walmart of systematically mislabeling weights and overcharging customers for those products. The suit also claimed they were overcharging on weighted clearance items, which is almost funny if it weren’t someone’s real grocery budget being drained.
Walmart denied the allegations. They settled anyway. For $45 million. A spokesperson told NPR that they believed a settlement was “in the best interest of both parties,” which is corporate-speak for wanting the whole thing to go away. Customers who’d purchased weighted grocery items between October 2018 and January 2024 were eligible to file claims through a dedicated website, with individual payouts up to $500.
Now, $500 might not sound like much. But multiply that by the millions of customers who shop at Walmart every single week, and you start to understand the scale of what was being alleged. Small overcharges — pennies here, a few cents there — add up fast when you’re the biggest grocery seller in the country. Most people wouldn’t notice a slight discrepancy on a package of chicken thighs. That’s kind of the point.
Where the food goes
Along the same lines, there’s the question of what happens to food that doesn’t sell. Food waste is a massive issue in this country, and Walmart has not exactly led the charge in fixing it. A 2016 investigation by the CBC found Walmart employees throwing out food that hadn’t reached its expiration date and was still cold — perfectly sellable stuff. Ali-Zain Mevawala, a former produce and bakery department manager, said he tossed about a shopping cart’s worth of food per day. Imperfect fruits and vegetables that were fine to eat got pitched just because they didn’t look pretty enough.
Mevawala said he once asked his manager why they couldn’t just give the food to people who needed it. The response? “If you just give it away to people, then why are they going to buy it from us?” That quote has stuck with me since I first read it. It’s a brutally honest look at how some corporate thinking works. Walmart says it donates to food banks, and I’m sure some locations do. But the overall numbers tell a different story.
By 2022, reports indicated Walmart was responsible for roughly 383 kilotons of food waste per year. Videos from employees keep surfacing on social media showing dumpsters full of food — bread, produce, dairy — all headed for the landfill. There’s something deeply wrong about a company that controls a quarter of the country’s grocery spending generating that much waste while millions of Americans struggle to afford groceries at all.
A brewery that didn’t exist
Which actually connects to something else entirely — trust. Or more specifically, whether you can trust what Walmart tells you about the products on its shelves. In 2017, shoppers started asking questions about a craft beer brand called Trouble Brewing that Walmart was selling. The packaging had that artisanal small-batch vibe. It claimed to be from Rochester, New York. A reporter at The Washington Post went looking for the brewery. It didn’t exist.
Turns out the beer was actually being made by Genesee Brewing — the company behind Genny and Genny Cream Ale, which, depending on who you ask, are either cheap nostalgia or something you drink only when there’s no other option. Walmart’s senior buyer Teresa Budd said the company wasn’t trying to deceive anyone and pointed out that lots of products don’t identify their manufacturer. That’s technically true. But slapping a fake craft brewery name on what is essentially a mass-produced beer, complete with a hip-looking label, lands differently than just not listing a manufacturer. It feels like a trick. Because it kind of was one.
This is the pattern that keeps showing up with Walmart’s grocery department. It’s not always one dramatic scandal. It’s a collection of smaller decisions — inflated weights, misleading labels, broken promises about animal welfare, food tossed instead of donated, communities left without choices — that together paint a picture of a company whose grocery dominance comes with real costs. Most of us will keep shopping there, because for a lot of Americans, there’s simply nowhere else to go. And honestly, that might be the most troubling part of all.
