Khan v. State Oil Co.

• Citation: 93 F.3d 1358
• Decision Date: 29 August 1996
• Docket Number: No. 96-1309,96-1309
• Parties: , 1996-2 Trade Cases P 71,546 Barkat U. KHAN and Khan & Associates, Inc., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. STATE OIL COMPANY, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (7th Circuit)

Page 1358

93 F.3d 1358

65 USLW 2142, 1996-2 Trade Cases P 71,546

Barkat U. KHAN and Khan & Associates, Inc., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. STATE OIL COMPANY, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 96-1309.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued June 7, 1996.

Decided Aug. 29, 1996.

Anthony S. DiVincenzo (argued), Campbell & DiVencenzo, Chicago, IL, David C. Bogan, Davis, Mannix & McGrath, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Paul T. Kalinich, Kalinich & McCluskey, P.C., Glen Ellyn, IL, John Baumgartner (argued), Churchill, Baumgartner & Quinn, Grayslake, IL, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and FLAUM and RIPPLE, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Chief Judge.

The plaintiffs (collectively "Khan") operated a gas station in DuPage County, Illinois under a contract with State Oil Company, a distributor of gasoline and related products. The contract provided for the lease of the station (which State Oil owned), and the supply of gasoline and ancillary products for resale, to Khan. Mr. Khan was the actual signatory of the contract, rather than his corporation, which operated the station, so it does not appear that he is complaining about a merely derivative injury to himself, in which event he would not be a proper party. Hammes v. AAMCO Transmissions, Inc., 33 F.3d 774, 777 (7th Cir.1994).

State Oil terminated the contract because Khan failed to pay the agreed-upon rent for the station. The termination precipitated this suit, which, so far as relevant to the appeal, charges price fixing in violation of section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, and breach of contract under the common law of Illinois. The district judge granted summary judgment for the defendant on both claims. He ruled that the legality under the Sherman Act of the alleged price fixing was to be tested by the rule of reason rather than by the per se rule, that the plaintiff had presented no evidence on essential elements of a rule of reason case (such as market power), that the study conducted by the plaintiffs' economic expert was inadmissible, and that without the study the plaintiffs could not even prove injury.

The contract between State Oil and Khan provided that State Oil would establish a suggested retail price for the gasoline (which was sold under the brand name "Union 76") and would sell the gasoline to Khan for 3.25 cents less than that price. If Khan believed the price was too high he could ask State Oil to lower it and if State Oil complied Khan would be entitled to purchase the gasoline from State Oil at the same margin, that is, at the new price minus 3.25 cents. If State Oil refused to reduce the suggested retail price Khan could still charge a lower price, but his margin would be smaller because he would not be getting a lower price from State Oil. If Khan believed the suggested retail price was too low he could ask State Oil to raise it, thus preserving his margin; but if State Oil refused and Khan went ahead and raised his price anyway, the contract required Khan to rebate the difference between his new price and the suggested price times the number of gallons sold at the new price. The contract thus required Khan to rebate the entire profit from raising his price without his supplier's permission above the retail price suggested by the supplier.

The provision concerning the charging by Khan of a price below the suggested retail price neither is price fixing nor is germane to the price-fixing charge. A supplier is under no obligation to lower his price to his customer just because the customer wants to resell the supplier's product for less than the supplier has suggested without sacrificing any of his profit margin. The contract in this case merely disclaims any such unusual obligation, and since the obligation has no basis in antitrust law the disclaimer has no antitrust significance either.

State Oil also denies that the provision in the contract pertaining to Khan's charging a price above the suggested retail price is a form of price fixing. It points out that Khan was free to charge as high a price as he wishes. This is true in the sense that it would not have been a breach of contract for Khan to raise his price. But the contract made it worthless for him to do so; and, realistically, this was just an alternative sanction to termination, and probably an equally effective one. Generally when a seller raises his price, his volume falls; and if his profit on each unit sold is frozen, the effect of his raising his price will be that he loses revenue: he will sell fewer units, at the same profit per unit. The contract, incidentally, required Khan to buy all his gasoline from State Oil; so he could not merely switch to another brand if he wanted to charge a higher price.

Practices that have the same effect are not always treated the same in law. More precisely, two practices that have one effect in common may differ in their other effects. A merger between competitors and a price-fixing agreement between competitors has the same effect in extinguishing price competition between the parties, but the merger is more likely to produce offsetting cost savings and it is therefore treated more leniently by the antitrust laws. So the fact that State Oil's rebate scheme was as effective in deterring Khan from raising his price as a threat to terminate his lease would have been does not dictate that the two practices be treated identically under the antitrust laws. But State Oil has not identified any other relevant difference between the two methods of preventing a dealer from charging more than the suggested retail price. The purely formal character of the distinction that it urges can be seen by imagining that the contract had forbidden Khan to exceed the suggested retail price and had provided that if he violated the prohibition the sanction would be for him to remit any resulting profit to State Oil. There is no practical difference between that form of words and permitting Khan to sell at a higher price but providing that if he does so the profit belongs to State Oil.

So State Oil engaged in maximum price fixing; the next question is whether this practice is illegal per se, meaning that all the plaintiff need prove to prevail is that the defendant engaged in the practice; investigation of its actual economic effects is pretermitted. E.g., Business Electronics Corp. v. Sharp Electronics Corp., 485 U.S. 717, 723, 108 S.Ct. 1515, 1519, 99 L.Ed.2d 808 (1988); Arizona v. Maricopa County Medical Society, 457 U.S. 332, 342-44, 102 S.Ct. 2466, 2472-73, 73 L.Ed.2d 48 (1982). Challenged practices that do not fall within any of the per se categories are subject to the broader-ranging inquiry into effect and motives that goes by the name of the "rule of reason" and that requires the plaintiff to prove that the defendant's conduct actually (or with a high likelihood) reduced competition. Id. at 343, 102 S.Ct. at 2472; Business Electronics Corp. v. Sharp Electronics Corp., supra, 485 U.S. at 723, 108 S.Ct. at 1519. Price fixing has long been illegal per se. In its usual and most pernicious form, the term refers to an agreement or conspiracy between competing firms to fix a minimum price for their product. By a modest extension it refers also to an agreement between competitors to fix either a minimum or a maximum price for the resale of their product by their dealers. See Arizona v. Maricopa County Medical Society, supra, 457 U.S. at 348, 102 S.Ct. at 2475; Kiefer-Stewart Co. v. Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc., 340 U.S. 211, 71 S.Ct. 259, 95 L.Ed. 219 (1951). Why might competitors fix a minimum resale price? In order to make it more difficult for any of them to engage in undetected violations of their agreement to fix their own (that is, the wholesale) prices; a supplier who observed that he was losing sales because his competitor's dealers were selling the competitor's product at a low price would know that the competitor was failing to enforce the price-fixing agreement. Pauline M. Ippolito & Thomas R. Overstreet, Jr., "Resale Price Maintenance: An Economic Assessment of the Federal Trade Commission's Case Against the Corning Glass Works," 39 J. Law & Econ. 285, 293-94 (1996). Why might competitors fix a maximum resale price? The difference between what a supplier charges his dealer and what the dealer charges the ultimate customer is, functionally, compensation to the dealer for performing the resale service; so by agreeing on the resale prices of their goods competing sellers can reduce their dealers' margin below the competitive price for the dealers' service. This is a form of monopsony pricing, which is analytically the same as monopoly or cartel pricing and so treated by the law. E.g., Mandeville Island Farms, Inc. v. American Crystal Sugar Co., 334 U.S. 219, 68 S.Ct. 996, 92 L.Ed. 1328 (1948).

The questionable next step (logically, not chronologically, next) in the evolution of antitrust law was to affix the per se label to contracts in which a single supplier, not acting in concert with any of its competitors, fixed its dealers' retail prices. Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. John D. Park & Sons Co., 220 U.S. 373, 31 S.Ct. 376, 55 L.Ed. 502 (1911). Here the economic difference between fixing a minimum resale price and fixing a maximum resale price becomes more pronounced, although most economists believe that neither form of price fixing is pernicious when the supplier is neither the cat's paw of colluding distributors nor acting in concert with his competitors. A supplier acting unilaterally might fix a minimum resale price in order to induce his dealers to furnish valuable point-of-sale services (trained salesmen, clean restrooms--whatever) to customers, which they could not afford to do without a guaranteed margin to cover the costs of the services, because the customers would use the services provided by the full-service dealers but then purchase the product from a competing dealer who could sell the product...