Court Opinion

ID: 9445683
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:36:32.552816+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:22.783557
License: Public Domain

ALDRICH, District Judge
(concurring in the result).
I concur in Judge WOODBURY’S opinion on rehearing. However, now that it appears that appellant did raise the matter of partial injunctive relief below, I feel I must face up more squarely to that issue. Upon further consideration my prior concurring opinion is now withdrawn in toto, and the following observations substituted.
I do not quarrel with the view that the parties are “persons in competition with each other.” The McGuire Act does not, contrary to appellant's argument, exempt from permissible fair trade agreements contracts between “producers, wholesalers, brokers, factors, retailers, or other persons in competition with each other,” which might call for the application of the rule of ejusdem generis to limit competition to so-called horizontal levels, but reads “persons,” not “other persons.” Hence it withholds approval of agreements, express or by operation of law, between all competitors. If there were doubt of this interpretation the history and purpose of the Sherman Act, and the fact that McGuire’s intent is to carve limited exceptions thereto, would supply the answer. True, since most competition is on horizontal levels, courts in particular cases may naturally fall into the use of that terminology. But, as appellant suggests as to the Sherman Act, quoting from Times-Picayune Publishing Co. v. United States, 345 U.S. 594, at page 615, 73 S.Ct. 872, at page 884, 97 L.Ed. 1277, “* * * the Act deals with competitive realities, not words.” If bona fide competition exists here, I see no basis for restricting the language of the statute.
Competition has many meanings. In a sense the movie house and the television retailer are in competition with each other for the “amusement dollar.” But here the essential commodity, gasoline, is the same. The servicing, etc., may be only the fringe. If owners of fleets of trucks or taxicabs may be influenced in their choice of purchasing gasoline from appellant or appellee by the question of price, I believe the latter are “persons * * * in competition with each other” within the Act. I can not say that the finding below that they are is plainly wrong. But if the parties are thus persons in competition it is because of appellee’s unusual activities distinguishing it from other retailers whose business is less extensive. If those activities are truly severable, it seems arguable that the bar to appellant’s injunction should be equally so. If appellant manufactured, and fair-traded, both gasoline and toothpaste, and appellee sold both, but the parties were actually in competition only as to the former, I could not say they were persons in competition as to both.
*24However, I suggest appellant’s rights here are lost not because of appellee’s special activities which made them persons in competition, but because its own activities made it a retailer. Agreements between retailers are not protected. The statute supplies no definition of retailer. The dictionary supplies two: one who sells in small quantities, and one who sells to the ultimate consumer. Of these the latter seems the more in keeping with the concept of the Fair Trade acts. It clearly covers appellant's “commercial accounts.”
Either competition or retailing would result in the denial of complete relief to appellant, but the second must be fatal to even partial relief. It would be one thing to say that with respect to separable activities as to which the parties were not competing they were not “persons in competition with each other.” It would be quite another to say that if appellant is to be classed as a retailer it can escape the force of the Act, even in part, by showing it is something additional. Price-fixing agreements between retailers are invalid per se, irrespective of the area of competition. On this basis there could be no possible issue of partial relief.