Hm, I think I'd argue that the problem with this is that it results in muddy thinking.
Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds?
To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc.
Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above?
Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?
Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds?
To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc.
Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above?
Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?