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[08-22-08 15:43:12] PAGES PGT: OPIN
VOLVO TRUCKS NORTH AMERICA, INC. v. REEDERSIMCO GMC, INC. Stevens, J., dissenting
would readily prevail. There is ample evidence that Volvo charged Reeder higher prices than it charged to competing dealers in the same market over a period of many months. That those higher prices impaired Reeder’s ability to com pete with those dealers is just as obvious as the injury to competition described by the Court in Morton Salt. Volvo nonetheless argues that no competitive injury could have occurred because it never discriminated against Reeder when Reeder and another Volvo dealer were seeking conces sions with regard to the same ultimate customer. In Volvo’s view, each transaction was a separate market, one defined by the customer and those dealers whom it had asked for bids. For each specific customer who has solicited bids, Reeder’s only “competitors” were the other dealers making bids. Accordingly, if none of these other dealers were Volvo dealers, then Reeder suffered no competitive harm (relative to other Volvo dealers) when Volvo gave it a discriminatorily high price. Unlike the Court, I cannot accept Volvo’s vision. Nothing in the statute or in our precedent suggests that “competi tion” is evaluated by a transaction-specific inquiry, and such an approach makes little sense. It requires us to ignore the fact that competition among truck dealers is a continuing war waged over time rather than a series of wholly discrete events. Each time Reeder managed to resell trucks it had purchased at discriminatorily high prices, it was forced either to accept lower profit margins than were available to favored Volvo dealers or to pass on the higher costs to its customers (who then might well go to a different dealer the next time). And we have long indicated that lost profits rel ative to a competitor are a proper basis for permitting the Morton Salt inference. See, e. g., Falls City Industries, 460 U. S., at 435 (noting that to overcome the Morton Salt infer ence, a defendant needs “evidence breaking the causal con nection between a price differential and lost sales or profits” (emphasis added)). By ignoring these commonsense points,
