Opinion ID: 3009958
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: e. the only competitor left, in the eight

Text: county Philadelphia market when rates would become 'upwardly adjustable.' Appellant's Br. at 24. The phrases ultimate benefit and onestop buy do occur in the same sentence in the plan, app. at 738, and correctly portray PNI's overall objective. The phrase upwardly adjustable, however, comes eight paragraphs later, app. at 739, as the discussion progresses from an overview of the plan to the nuts and bolts of various hypothetical business scenarios. PNI used the phrase upwardly adjustable in a scenario in which it assumed that prices are deemed to be very competitively set . . . . This is a far cry from an admission that it was charging predatory prices to start with, or that it planned to charge monopolistic prices in the future. Advo officials themselves have used aggressive-sounding language. Its CEO, Robert Kamerschen, once directed his managers to seize the OPPORTUNITY inherent in the stumbling PROBLEMS of the newspaper industry, and quoted McDonald's founder Ray Kroc for the advice that [w]hen [you] see the competition drowning, . . . stick a water hose down their throats. App. at 459. The antitrust statutes do not condemn, without more, such colorful, vigorous hyperbole; there is nothing to gain by using the law to mandate commercially correct speech within corporate memoranda and business plans. Isolated and unrelated snippets of such language provide no help in deciding whether a defendant has crossed the elusive line separating aggressive competition from unfair competition. Morgan v. Ponder, 892 F.2d 1355, 1359 (8th Cir. 1989). We thus conclude that nothing quoted from PNI's internal documents displays PNI's specific intent to monopolize the market for distribution of circular advertising. Advo's claim that PNI's targeting of its key accounts demonstrates such specific intent is similarly unavailing. As we discussed supra § I.A.1, circular advertising distributors need base players, that advertise frequently and on a large scale, to cover their high fixed costs. Inasmuch as there are relatively few base players in the Philadelphia market, any firm competing in the market for distribution of circular advertising necessarily would try, as a first step, to wrest one or more of these large accounts away from Advo. PNI's proposals to Advo's largest customers are exactly what we would expect from a legitimate competitor. That such behavior also might be consistent with predation does not mean that Advo can survive PNI's motion for summary judgment. If [seemingly predatory] conduct is consistent with other, equally plausible explanations, the conduct does not give rise to an inference of conspiracy. Matsushita, 475 U.S. at 596-97, 106 S.Ct. at 1361.