A version of this article appeared in print on January 25, 2010, on page A16 of the New York Times.
New York Times EditorialBig Food
As huge corporations merge and get even huger, we find ourselves yearning for some old-fashioned competition, and maybe a little diversity.
Banks have gotten so big that they can unleash havoc and bill us for the pleasure. Big Oil is so big that Royal Dutch Shell is the worlds 25th-biggest economy, bigger than Norway. Four -fifths of the chips in the worlds PCs come from Intel. In the United States, AT&T and Verizon account for over half of all cellular phone customers. Big companies are likely to become even bigger. Between 2003 and 2007, the number of big mergers reported to American antitrust regulators doubled to 2,201. Though merger activity fell during the financial crisis, it is expected to rebound sharply. There is already another behemoth lumbering toward consumers: Big Food.
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