United Brands V. European Commission Case Study

(2) Consumers are entitled to have the product delivered to their homes.
When it comes to the product delivery, the line between online and brick-and-mortar retail channels becomes ever more blurry. For instance, some traditional book and music record stores provide a delivery services to the indicated address. Conversely, some online stores provide the consumers with an option to pick up the products themselves from a physical location. Evidently, to certain extent, the pure electronic and pure physical retail business models tend to converge and, in turn, become a brick-and-click business model. Therefore it is reasonable to say that the difference between online and brick-and-mortar stores are hardly found in terms of product delivery.
European Commission case. In this case, with respect to product market delineation, the ECJ had to decide whether the trade in bananas is a separate relevant market or if this trade is part of a larger relevant market containing all fresh fruits. Consequently, the ECJ went with the narrow definition, arguing that bananas had certain product characteristics, appearance, taste, softness, seedlesness, easy handling and, most importantly, the constant level of production which enables it to satisfy the constant needs of an important section of the population consisting of the young, the old and the sick. However, such court argumentation where later on found as being flawed. That was because the criterion of the demand side substitution does not require that the whole customer group would switch to other fruits in case of an increase in the price of the bananas. In other words it is the marginal consumer and not the average consumer that matters. Hence, by excluding people living in the more isolated areas as well as consumers having difficulties in leaving their homes, the EC committed the same mistake. The mere fact that these types of consumers would prefer to shop online rather than in a brick-and-mortar stores (thus, would not switch from online store to other retail channels in case of a price increase by 5-10% in an online store) does not mean that online stores constitute separate retail
The relatively recent spread of affordable mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and smart watches (in addition to already vastly used personal computers) greatly increased consumers’ ability to access the Internet and, in turn, e-commerce stores. Hence, considering that accessibility will only increase, the EC’s argument seems rather inadequate.

(6) Differences in final