If you’ve ever wrestled a fitted sheet onto a mattress, you understand the problem Bed Scrunchie set out to solve. Its owners say Amazon added another: pressure to raise prices wherever else they sell online. “If we don’t increase our price elsewhere, that this product will remain [in]visible to buy,” co-owner Jack Nehala explains in a new Business Insider video essay.

For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), this is bigger than bedding: it’s about whether concentrated corporate power leaves independent businesses free to compete. ILSR co-executive director Stacy Mitchell has spent her career on exactly this question. Her 2016 report “Amazon’s Stranglehold” was cited by Congress in its Big Tech investigation and helped inform the FTC’s 2023 antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, according to ILSR.

In the video, Mitchell calls the Bed Scrunchie story likely “just the tip of the iceberg of a huge price-fixing operation.” Online competition can’t lower prices, she argues, if the biggest player can punish sellers for offering better deals elsewhere. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, leading the state’s price-fixing case, agrees: “We have the receipts.” Business Insider reviewed hundreds of pages of that case file.

For small-business owners, the stakes are simple: setting your own prices means little if a dominant marketplace can pressure you to change them. ILSR’s reporting is worth following as two major monopolization trials approach in early 2027 — because supporting independent businesses also means supporting the research that gives them a fair shot in a fair marketplace.