'Nail in the coffin': Grocer turned House lawmaker trashes Kamala Harris' price control plan

A first-term House Republican who runs a small chain of grocery stores in Ohio is worried Vice President Kamala Harris’ grocery price control proposal would hurt family-owned businesses like his.

"We're dealing with a lot. The net profit in grocery stores is about one and a half [percent] — if you're doing really good, one and three quarters. Just in layman's terms, it's about a $1.50 for every $100 that you go through the registers. And what we've seen in the last three to four years has been pretty horrific," Rep. Michael Rulli, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview.

"This will be a nail in the coffin of this industry that no one can imagine."

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Rulli won a special election in June to succeed retired Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio. 

Before that, he was a Republican state senator and helped run Rulli Bros., the mid-sized grocery chain his father started in 1917.

To explain what effect he argues price controls will have on his business, Rulli held up a bottle of Tide laundry detergent made by Procter & Gamble.

"If the Harris administration tells Procter & Gamble, which is based in Cincinnati, that this Tide right here that I'm selling today for $4.99 has to stay $4.99 for the next four years, what will happen is that Procter & Gamble will just simply choose not to make this product," Rulli said. "And so that's going to happen a lot."

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He pointed to the bar code, known as the stock keeping unit (SKU), denoting the individual product and said his stores, for example, carry items with 38,000 different bar codes, whereas larger grocery chains carry more.

"Well, why would that matter to your viewers? It's going to matter to your viewers, because this is the luxury of living in the United States of America, where the average blue-collar worker, Joe Bag of Donuts, would have an opportunity to buy some nice things in life," Rulli said.

"What will happen in four years of a Harris administration is those 38,000 SKUs will go all the way down to 5,000 SKUs, and you will be living in Cuba or Venezuela."

It comes as Harris begins rolling out her presidential platform with roughly three months until the election in November.

Part of that is a pledge to enact the first-ever ban on food "price gouging," which critics on the right have argued would stifle economic growth in the same style as authoritarian governments like the former Soviet Union and Venezuela.

Harris’ allies have pointed out that large food manufacturing companies have made record profits in recent years — Hershey has seen a 62% jump in net profits between 2019 and 2023, while companies like General Mills and Kraft Heinz both saw 48% growth, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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

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"Our independent grocers, already operating on extremely thin margins, are hurting from the same inflationary pressure points as their customers," the group said earlier this month.

When Harris unveiled the plan in North Carolina, she pledged to "make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers."

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But Rulli argued it would hurt small and mid-sized grocers, as well.

"Many of these smaller and independent grocery stores will go out of business. You’ve already seen it happening gradually over the last 20 or 30 years, but I would say just recently within the 80-mile circumference I’m sitting in right now, there’s been five grocery stores that have gone out of business in the last two years," he said.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign for comment.