Federal Trade Commission v. Beech-Nut Packing Co.

Citations

• 257 U.S. 441
• 42 S. Ct. 150
• 66 L. Ed. 307
• 1922 U.S. LEXIS 2423
• 19 A.L.R. 882

Syllabus

<p>1. A trader does not violate the Sherman Act by simply refusing to sell his goods or by withholding them from those who do not sell them at the resale prices he fixes; but he may not, by contracts or combinations express or implied, unduly hinder or obstruct the free and natural flow of interstate commerce. P. 452.</p> <p>2. The public policy evinced in the Sherman Act is to be considered ' in determining what are “ unfair methods of competition ” within the Federal Trade Commission Act. P. 453.</p> <p>3. A plan of merchandising, in interstate trade, which has a dangerous tendency unduly to hinder competition or to create monopoly, the Federal Trade Commission has authority to order suppressed. P. 454:</p> <p>4. The respondent manufacturer, for the purpose, of maintaining resale prices fixed by itself, declined to sell its products to jobbers, wholesalers or retailers who did not observe them or who sold to other dealers who failed to do so, and, to enforce this policy, ob-tamed, by the cooperation of its customers and through its agents and salesmen, and by marking and tracing the cases of its goods, the names of dealers who cut the prices or who sold to others who did so, and enrolled them as undesirable customers to whom it did not sell until they gave satisfactory assurances of their purpose to conform in the future. By these means it was enabled .to suppress competition in the disposition of its products after it had sold them, by preventing all who did not conform to the resale prices from obtaining more goods, although there was no contract for fixing, maintaining or enforcing the resale prices. Held, that these, or any other equivalent cooperative means, should b.e enjoined, upon an order of the Federal Trade Commission, as an unfair method of competition. P. 454.</p>