Banning loss leaders protects consumers from predatory marketing tactics.  Loss leader strategies exploit consumers by providing partial, misleading information. Giant retailers are not charities; they do not offer heavily discounted goods in order to help the poor. Instead they have calculated that they can attract price-conscious shoppers in with headline deals on a few loss-leading basics, and then persuade them to pay over the odds on a wider range of goods with big profit margins. In this way, loss leaders are a con trick on consumers who are bewildered by deliberately confusing marketing–an onslaught of advertising and ever-changing promotions to the point that they are unable to compare the prices of rival firms and make a rational choice about where to shop. In their paper, “Loss Leading as an Exploitative Practice,” Zhijun Chen and Patrick Rey show how retailers use loss leaders to trick consumers by giving them incomplete information.1 And in the long term, by driving out smaller retailers and reducing competition in the retail sector, the practice can drive up the overall cost of essentials for everyone.  1 Zhijun Chen and Patrick Rey, “Loss Leading as an Exploitative Practice,” Institut d’Economie Industrielle (IDEI Working Paper #658)