PROTECTING COMPETITORS IS NOT PROTECTING COMPETITION. A Wisconsin retailer avoids offering shoppers a price break on gasoline.

Woodman's Food Markets, which operates 11 stores in Wisconsin and northern Illinois, next week will end its program of shaving the price of gasoline by 3 cents a gallon for those who show a Woodman's grocery receipt when they buy gas. Instead, drivers will get $1 off when they buy $30 of gas and show a $50 receipt for groceries.

Woodman's President Phil Woodman said the company made the change because the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection would not give it a clear answer on whether its policy adhered to the minimum markup statute. That Depression-era law was designed to keep large gas retailers from squeezing out small ones.

Politicians are acting like, well, politicians.

The law requires that gas at the pump be at least 9.18% above the price at the terminal. Retailers can go below that markup to meet a competitor's price, however.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the state Senate defeated a measure in May that would have ended the minimum markup law. Woodman's lobbied for the bill; Kwik Trip lobbied against it.

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle supports the repeal of that law. A spokesman for Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Green of Green Bay, who is running against Doyle, said Green would support changing the markup law if doing so would lower gas prices.

(Via The American Mind.)

Chicago aldermen are also supporting their constituents' right to pay higher prices at independent retailers. John Kass quotes a dissenter.

Chicago aldermen blew out all the pretty candles in a 35-14 veto-proof vote, passing the big-box ordinance that will lead to a $10-per-hour starting salary for unskilled workers at select Chicago stores.

The measure was backed by the city's labor unions and opposed by Daley, who had never lost a vote to a council that he has, until Wednesday, appointed, intimidated and dominated.

As public policy, the big-box ordinance is certainly unconstitutional. It is an insidious attempt by Chicago politicians to squeeze businesses that hoped to open new markets--particularly underserved minority neighborhoods--while providing tax revenue and thousands of desperately needed jobs to unskilled workers, many of them black and Latino.

"I've got these white liberals telling me what's good for my community. But this big-box thing will cost black people jobs," Ald. Ike Carothers (29th) told me during Wednesday's pontifications.

The mayor recognizes the incentives.

At his news conference afterward, Daley said Chicago is in dire need of sales tax revenue that flees to the suburbs as big boxes open up on the city's borders.

"I have to keep sales tax here somewhere," the mayor said. "It can't be all on Michigan Avenue."

Your law. My bargain. We shall see which is stronger.