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Wal-Mart & Pepsi Scammed You for 10 Years


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How are WalMart and Pepsi screwing us all to make grocery prices higher around the world?


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WalMart operates more than 10,800 stores in 19 countries with about half of their locations in the United States. They employ 2.1 million people worldwide and sell products for over 100,000 manufacturers and brands. 


For transparency, that includes my company. We have 24 products on the shelves of WalMart stores worldwide, but we sell our products to them at the same wholesale prices that we sell to any other retailer. 


According to WalMart’s official website, they offer customers “Every day low prices” which are on average, “10 to 25% lower than those of competitors”. But how can WalMart offer their customers with lower prices compared to any other store?


To find the answer, we have to look at 3 key aspects of their business: deceptive pricing, subsidized labor, and illegal market manipulation. In each of these categories, we’re going to look at lawsuits they pled guilty to or settled out of court to end. 


First, let’s look at their pricing. According to their quarterly investor reports, about 60% of their revenue comes from meat sales, including beef, chicken, pork, and seafood, among other items. It’s such a large business for them that in June 2025, WalMart purchased their own beef processing facility so they could own more of the supply chain. 


When it comes to produce, WalMart sells over 1.7 Billion pounds of bananas each year and spends hundreds of millions of dollars buying produce from local farms across the country. 


But if you go online, you’ll find hundreds of videos from people shopping in WalMart stores who notice deceptions in their meat and produce sections. A majority of their meat products are packaged and labeled at their processing facility before arriving at the store, so none of this is the fault of your local store manager or associate. 


But if you take what they claim to be a pound of chicken or ground beef to the scales in the produce section, you’ll likely notice as I did in my local store many times, what their packaging claims to be a pound of meat was actually less than a pound, including the packaging weight. 


Some customers online found their 10-pound rolls of ground beef are actually only 8 pounds. Other times, produce and meat are weighed with the packaging weight so you’re paying a meat price for a piece of styrofoam and plastic. 


And other times, their customers found produce was listed as one price on the shelf but when you get to checkout, it’s being sold at a much higher price per pound. But by then, you’re already checking out and most people don’t pay attention to the screen to notice the higher price until it’s too late. 


But in a large network like WalMart, there might have been errors. Certainly, WalMart would never knowingly do these things to make more profit for their investors, right? Well, in 2024, WalMart agreed to pay $45 million in a class-action settlement which accused them of all of the deceptive pricing tactics we just mentioned. And you don’t pay $45 million if you’re innocent. 


Second, we have to look at their subsidized labor. As we mentioned a moment ago, WalMart employs over 2.1 million people worldwide, 1.6 million of which are in the United States. WalMart wants you to know that across the U.S., they pay a national average of about $18 per hour. But you should also know, that national average would include Doug McMillion, their CEO who works out of their U.S. corporate office in Arkansas, who makes more than $27.4 million per year. 


WalMart likes to advertise how they hired over 400,000 veterans and military spouses since 2013 and they invested over a billion dollars in training their own employees. What they don’t tell you is that they pay their average associates so little that the U.S. government spends more than $6.2 Billion per year providing food stamps, medicaid, and housing to WalMart employees. Essentially, the U.S. government is paying their employees so they can afford food, medical coverage, and a roof over their heads. 



What’s worse is that a major chunk of that money comes right back to WalMart. Overall, the U.S. government spends about $102 billion every year on SNAP benefits, otherwise known as food stamps. But 26% of those food stamp dollars are spent at WalMart stores. 


So, WalMart doesn’t pay their employees a livable wage and the government has to come in and help their employees with everyday expenses. Then, those government subsidies go right back into WalMart’s pocket. 


And you might be saying, ‘but Matt, if someone is not working full-time, you cannot expect WalMart to pay them a livable wage for only working a few hours per week.’ And you’d be right, but according to government reports, a majority of those WalMart employees on food stamps, medicaid, and living in government housing are working for WalMart 40 to 50 hours per week and still not being able to afford food, healthcare, or housing. 


To be fair to WalMart, there is one, single article you might come across titled: “No, Government Isn’t Subsidizing Wal-Mart” by the American Enterprise Institute. Now, that’s a bold claim to make and that bold claim certainly has nothing to do with the $530,300 donation the American Enterprise Institute got from the Walton Family Foundation, which is the charitable arm of Sam and Helen Walton, the founders of WalMart.


Lastly, we have to look at WalMart’s illegal market manipulation. And for that, we have to look at PepsiCo. They sell everything from sodas, to Rockstar energy drinks, Cap’n Crunch cereal, Doritos, Lay’s Potato Chips, Rice-A-Roni, Quaker Oatmeal, and Gatorade, just to name a few. They also sell licensed products like Starbucks coffee. 


Overall, they sell hundreds of products in WalMart stores and you might notice, they are always given better locations such as end-caps or spots closer to the registers, compared to their biggest competitor, Coke. 


You might also notice the price of the same Pepsi product at WalMart is significantly less than any other retailer including Target, Cosco, Food Lion, or any other grocery store. WalMart likes to claim they have such large buying power that they’re able to get discounted prices from manufacturers like Pepsi. And to a certain extent, they’re right. 


Because WalMart buys so much and has so many stores, they can get bulk discounts from manufacturers like Pepsi. But that’s why your local grocery store and even stores like Costco, use a GPO, or Group Purchasing Organization. 


Basically, your local store cannot afford to buy a million of something but if they group together with a hundred other little stores in a region, they can all buy a million products at a discounted rate and just have a warehouse somewhere to store them until they need those products in their individual stores. 


But even with GPO’s, WalMart still gets better prices and these grocery stores have started to notice something glaring. The price their GPO pays at wholesale to buy items from Pepsi is more than what WalMart is charging customers at retail. It left many grocery stores wondering how WalMart can afford to pay wholesale for these products, make a profit, and still charge customers less than what their local grocery store is being charged from Pepsi directly. 


To answer that, you’d have to look at these 2 lawsuits, including one from the Federal Trade Commission. Under President Biden, the FTC conducted an investigation into WalMart and found internal documents shared between Pepsi and WalMart, that show a conspiracy to manipulate the market. 


Pepsi did everything they could to make those internal emails private and to redact them from public view, saying those emails were “confidential negotiations” between Pepsi and WalMart. They even argued in court that those emails hold “strong private interests (that) overcome the…common law presumption of access…”. In other words, rich people have a lot to lose if these emails went public, so the public has no right to know what they say. 


But since Pepsi and WalMart spent millions in court to hide these documents, we need to talk about them. First, let’s look at what WalMart promised Pepsi. 


According to unredacted internal emails, WalMart promised Pepsi better positioning in their stores. This meant you would see Pepsi products on end-caps and closer to registers compared to Coke or their other competitors. This would help Pepsi sell more units overall. 


WalMart also shared private, internal demographic data of their customers and kept track of how much the same products were being sold for at other local grocery stores. 


In return for this, Pepsi would give WalMart large discounts on all of their products. Pepsi would also inflate the cost of their products to every other retailer that competes with WalMart. 


Let’s say you ran a Costco store located within 10 miles of a WalMart. Pepsi would still sell you their products to put on your shelves, but Pepsi would make sure the wholesale price you’re paying was more than the retail price WalMart was charging consumers. This way, there was no way your store could compete with WalMart, even though Costco has a significantly large buying power as well. 


If you ran a local grocery store, you were getting even higher wholesale prices. Pepsi was effectively ensuring your store had to pay double or triple the wholesale price as WalMart was paying. 


[RAW DATA]

STORE

2L PEPSI

12 PACK CANS

DORITOS

1 NATIONAL

$2.99

$9.49

$5.99

2 REGIONAL

$3.51

$10.66

$5.00

3 NATIONAL

$3.00

$10.99

$6.99

4 REGIONAL

$3.99

$10.29

$5.79

5 REGIONAL

$3.79

$11.39

$7.29

6 REGIONAL

$2.89

$9.69

$8.29

7 REGIONAL

$2.25

$8.50

$5.00

8 LOCAL

$4.46

$11.18

$8.16

9 LOCAL

$7.98

$8.49

$7.29

AVERAGE

$3.87

$10.08

$6.64

WALMART 1

$2.78

$6.97

$5.94

WALMART 2

$2.78

$6.97

$5.94

WALMART 3

$2.78

$6.97

$5.94

WALMART 4

$2.78

$8.27

$5.94

WALMART 5

$2.78

$6.97

$5.94

WALMART 6

$2.48

$6.97

$5.94

WALMART 7

$3.18

$7.47

$5.94

WALMART 8

$2.78

$6.97

$5.94

WALMART 9

$2.78

$6.97

$5.94

AVERAGE

$2.79

$7.17

$5.94


I know this is a lot to digest, so let’s give you an example. Let’s say you were buying a 2 Liter bottle of Pepsi, by far their most popular item. We went to 7 large grocery store chains across Pennsylvania, who compete with WalMart on a national scale. We also went to 2 local stores that have only 1 or 2 locations each, but they get their products from a GPO wholesaler. Across these 9 stores, on average, a 2 Liter bottle of Pepsi costs $3.87. 


But we found the closest WalMart to each of those 9 grocery stores and went to each one of them as well. Across those 9 WalMart stores, the same 2 Liter bottle of Pepsi would cost you just $2.79.


Let’s say you were trying to buy Pepsi’s second-most popular item, their 12-pack of large cans. On average, from those 9 competitor stores, you would have to pay $10.08 for a 12-pack. But across those 9 WalMart stores, you’ll pay an average of just $7.17 for the same exact item.


But it’s not just for soda. On a 14.5 ounce bag of Doritos chips in those 9 competitor stores, you’ll pay an average of $6.64. But in every single WalMart we studied for this episode, the same bag of Doritos was just $5.94.


Now, it’s not illegal to charge one customer a better price than another. My store at ProfessorPride.com offers better pricing on our website for our 200 products compared to the prices on those same items on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and even WalMart. But that’s just because we want customers to come directly to us so we can help you personally rather than through a 3rd party. And because those 3rd parties charge fees for going through their stores. 


But Pepsi is not selling their own products on their own website. They require you to go to a local store and buy their products. What Pepsi is doing, is giving one customer insanely lower prices compared to everyone else. 


So yes, it is illegal for Pepsi to take the data from WalMart and use it to manipulate the prices for other retailers. It’s also against the law to conspire with WalMart to control the market on this scale. Essentially, Pepsi conspired to make WalMart a monopoly, and in return, Pepsi was able to make billions for their investors.


Specifically, it goes against the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Sherman Act of 1890, both passed by Congress, and the Standard Oil v. United States decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in May 1911. All of these decisions and laws were put in place to protect consumers. 


In their internal emails, Pepsi even called retailers, other than WalMart, “offenders” with their emails saying Food Lion is the “worst offender” of all. So, even though your grocery store might be a dealer for Pepsi, they called you an “offender” in their internal emails with WalMart because you dared to compete with WalMart prices. 


So, how do you become an “offender”? Well, it’s simple. If your local or national store ran a sale price on Pepsi products that came anywhere near the price WalMart was offering in any of their stores across the country, you became an “offender”. Once you were on this list, the price you paid for everything dramatically went up. Basically, they were ensuring that your sale price would never last too long and WalMart would beat you back down within a month or two. 


In 85.2% of the cases we found, it would actually be cheaper for local and national grocery stores to go buy Pepsi off the shelves of a WalMart store, as if they were any other customer, and then resell it on their own shelves, compared to buying Pepsi products directly from PepsiCo, even though they were a contracted dealer for Pepsi products. 


We know Pepsi and WalMart conspired to seemingly break these laws in order to increase their profits. That’s not really surprising considering corporations do this all the time. But it does beg two questions: why did no one hold Pepsi or WalMart accountable? And why is it still happening?


Well, there’s actually 2 lawsuits against WalMart and Pepsi for this. One is a class action which was filed on behalf of a group of consumers and retailers. In fact, one of the retailers we went to (store 4 on our chart here) has an article on their website detailing how they joined the class action against Pepsi and WalMart. That class action is still ongoing, so there is hope some future financial settlement might claw back some of the profits Pepsi and WalMart made by doing these illegal actions. 


But we’d like to note that we’ve seen this before. In June 2024, WalMart paid $45 million in a settlement for overcharging customers for meat and produce. But my husband and I just went to our local WalMart this past weekend and we observed them still deceptively overchaging for meat products. 



So, even if this class-action lawsuit results in a financial settlement or judgement, WalMart has shown time and again, they’ll just continue to do it anyway because those settlements cost a lot less, compared to the profit they made from doing the illegal action in the first place. 


The only other legal case against WalMart and Pepsi for these illegal actions was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, under the direction of President Biden. 


On December 4th, 2025, United States District Judge Jesse Furman wrote an order for Pepsi to release the unredacted internal emails, which show their conspiracy with WalMart to manipulate the market. But in this decision, Judge Furman wrote “...the change in Administration resulted in a change of the FTC’s position, and the FTC voluntarily dismissed the case. The case was closed without any further review by the Court of the FTC’s redactions.” 


Basically, President Biden was trying to hold Pepsi and WalMart accountable for excessively inflating their prices. And Biden was trying to bring grocery prices down. But the Trump administration not only shut down the investigation, they said the case was closed permanently. So, Pepsi and WalMart could never be tried again for the same actions. 


You probably won’t be shocked to hear that Pepsi gave Trump $36,246 for his presidential campaigns and $257,295 for his inauguration. WalMart gave Trump $266,604 for his presidential campaigns and WalMart sells Trump merchandise on their official website. 


As much as Trump likes to say in his State of the Union address or as much as Republicans like to say that grocery prices have never been lower, the truth is that grocery prices have only increased over the past decade. 


Some people blame those increases on the illegal tariffs Donald Trump imposed in 2025. And you’re correct. Even though the Supreme Court just ruled these tariffs are illegal and Trump imposed an additional 15% tariff on the world because “little Trumpy boy didn’t get his way and he poopied his pants again”, it’s not like companies like WalMart will start charging you less money. 


In fact, while they’ve been passing along those tariff costs to consumers, they’re now suing the Trump Adminstration for a refund, which means they’ll get paid back 2 times what they paid out for those tariffs. Meanwhile, consumers like you and I, who paid those tariffs when we purchased something, are never going to see a refund for it. 


Others blame the market. If everything is going up in price, then everything else needs to go up in price as well. It’s a race to the top before the market comes crashing down. For the record, manufacturers and retailers do not have to increase any prices. We’ve had our website for years now and we have never felt the need to raise our prices on anything. And if we can do it, WalMart can too.


Others blame Covid-19. Essential workers were never paid anything additional for risking their lives on the frontlines. Most other Americans sat at home and were paid thousands of dollars to stay home. As a gig worker at the time, I was one of them. Then, everyone got stimulus checks too. 


WalMart’s cost of buying something never went up. So, why did they start charging consumers more? That was just greed because they knew everyone had more money in their pockets and god forbid Americans be able to save up to buy a home or have a rainy day fund. No, the Walton family, worth $513 billion, needs more money in their bank account. 


But this FTC lawsuit points out a glaring problem with all of those theories. In the court documents, filed in 2025, the FTC accuses Pepsi and WalMart of conspiring to inflate retail prices for the past 10 years. If you do the math, you’ll realize that Pepsi and WalMart were conspiring to manipulate the global economy 5 whole years before Covid-19 and one year before Donald Trump started running for office. 


So, these companies were doing a lot of shady things to squeeze us for every penny they could, long before Covid and long before Trump. Pepsi and WalMart, under this plan, were able to sell $16 billion of product every year for 10 years, meaning they both profited over $160 Billion. 


The only people to investigate them for these illegal actions were Democrats and for the past 10 years, the only ones who called off consumer protection investigations were Republicans. 


And I’ll be the first to admit, Democrats are fucking terrible at messaging. So, you’ve likely never heard about Biden trying to bring your grocery prices down. I’m convinced that no one at the Democratic party knows the first thing about marketing because this was a major accomplishment that was really never talked about. 


But on the Republican side, they keep promising you to bring your grocery prices down. They keep saying an awful lot of words and they’re pretty good at messaging those words to you. But their actions speak louder than words. And because Democrats are worse than shit at messaging, you likely never heard Republicans killed this investigation to keep their donors happy and keep prices going up.


So, the next time you’re getting groceries at your local store, know the reason you’re paying so much more is directly because Trump called off the consumer protection investigation into these companies. The next time you’re in your local WalMart store, try to be nice to their associates because most of them are not being paid a livable wage. 


Take whatever meat you’re buying up to the produce section to verify the weight yourself before buying. And take a picture of whatever you’re buying because prices on the shelves are routinely not the same as the price once you go to check out. 


But most importantly, vote in November for Democratic candidates who promise to hold these companies accountable and open that FTC investigation back up. Vote for candidates promising to impeach the man who is directly responsible for you paying more in the grocery store. Because, without any accountability, these prices will continue to increase at an unsustainable rate. 


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