“Nail in the coffin”: Grocery retailer and current House member criticizes Kamala Harris’ price control plan

A first-term Republican congressman who runs a small chain of grocery stores in Ohio is concerned that Vice President Kamala Harris's proposal to control grocery prices could hurt family-run businesses like his.

“We have a lot to do. The net profit in grocery stores is about one and a half [percent] — if you do really well, a dollar and a half. Simply put, that's about $1.50 for every $100 you put through the till. And what we've seen over the last three to four years has been pretty terrible,” Republican Rep. Michael Rulli of Ohio said in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.

“This will be a nail in the coffin for this industry that no one can imagine.”

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Rulli won a special election in June to succeed retiring Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio).

Previously, he served as a Republican state senator and helped run Rulli Bros., the midsize grocery chain his father founded in 1917.

To explain the impact he believes price controls will have on his business, Rulli held up a bottle of Procter & Gamble's Tide detergent.

““If the Harris administration tells Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble that this Tide that I'm selling here today for $4.99 has to stay at $4.99 for the next four years, Procter & Gamble will simply choose not to make that product anymore,” Rulli said. “And that will happen many times.”

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He referred to the barcode, the so-called Stock Keeping Unit (SKU), which identifies the individual product, and said that in his stores, for example, items with 38,000 different barcodes are stocked, while in larger grocery chains there are significantly more.

“Why should this matter to your viewers? It will matter to your viewers because this is the luxury of life in the United States of America, where the average working person, Joe Joe, would have the opportunity to buy themselves some of the nice things in life,” Rulli said.

Republican Rep. Michael Rulli of Ohio, who won a special election for his House seat in June, owns a small chain of grocery stores in Ohio. (Getty Images)

“What will happen in the four years of a Harris administration is that those 38,000 storage units will shrink to 5,000 storage units and you will be living in Cuba or Venezuela.”

This comes at a time when Harris begins to present her presidential program about three months before the November election.

This includes a commitment to ban food price gouging for the first time. Critics on the right argue that this would hamper economic growth to the same extent as authoritarian regimes in the former Soviet Union and Venezuela did.

Harris' allies have pointed out that major food manufacturers have posted record profits in recent years – Hershey saw net profits rise 62% between 2019 and 2023, while companies like General Mills and Kraft Heinz each saw growth of 48%, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But groups like the National Grocers Association called the plan “a solution in search of a problem.”

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Harris promised to “make it clear that big corporations cannot unfairly exploit consumers.” (Image credit: Fox News Digital)

“Our independent grocers, already operating on extremely tight margins, are suffering from the same inflationary pressures as their customers,” the group said earlier this month.

When Harris introduced the plan in North Carolina, she promised to “make it clear that big corporations cannot unfairly exploit consumers.”

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However, Rulli argued that this would also hurt small and medium-sized grocers.

“A lot of these smaller and independent grocery stores are going to go out of business. It's been happening gradually over the last 20 or 30 years, but I would say within the 80-mile radius where I am right now, five grocery stores have gone out of business in the last two years,” he said.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Harris team for comment.