FTC gets Gildan and S&S to drop exclusive-discount clause, second pricing case in 2 weeks

On Oct. 8, 2026, the FTC said T-shirt maker Gildan Activewear and wholesale distributor S&S Holdings amended a contract that had barred Gildan from offering S&S's pricing and discounts to S&S's competitors, and the agency closed its Robinson-Patman Act investigation. The FTC said the matter builds on last week's Robinson-Patman settlement with Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits, the first such case resolved by a federal enforcement agency in over 20 years.

For most trades and service firms, nothing changes this month. The FTC did not order any price cut and did not say what shirts will cost. The signal is that the FTC is again using the Robinson-Patman Act, which generally bars sellers from charging higher prices to smaller buyers who compete with bigger ones for the same goods. Take a 25-person agency that resells branded Gildan shirts to clients through a smaller distributor. Assume it buys 2,000 blanks a year at $4 each, or $8,000. If that distributor can now get the same discounts S&S gets, a 5% cut would save $400 a year. That figure is an assumption, not an FTC number. A 30-person cleaning company buying uniforms is a purchaser, not a reseller, so it is unlikely to see any direct effect. Who should care: firms that resell goods and compete with larger buyers, including promo-merch agencies and contractors who resell parts and fixtures. Everyone else can ignore this.