Because business is not a single monolith, and because it is greedy, it kills the naive idea that "businesses raise prices because they can".

Any gouging price increase is a gaping hole for a competitor (businesses are greedy and therefore will take money from other businesses) to come in and steal business. This is something that is obvious to people who have been on the business side and mostly opaque to people who have only ever been on the consumer side.

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sjsdaiuasgdia 6 days ago | parent [-]

I'll hold my breath for the fast food chain that lowers its prices to better compete with the chains that raised theirs.

We have plenty of examples, with documentation and receipts, of businesses participating in price fixing, collusion, and other cooperative behaviors that result in higher prices for consumers and reduced competition between businesses.

You are naively assuming that all businesses express greed in the same way. Some of them realize they can make quite a lot of money with a lot less work by working together to raise prices. Not all markets are easy for a newcomer to break into, competition is far from guaranteed if the established players are cooperating.

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Workaccount2 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

>We have plenty of examples

The issue isn't that we have plenty of examples (which is actually a handful, people always go to the same 2 or 3 cases, but I digress), it's that we have orders of magnitude more counter-examples that are ignored.

It's important to not build your world view on headlines, because headlines are headlines because they are outliers. It's not news when companies competitively adjust prices, it happens thousands of times a day all over the economy. If there was an "undercut on price" button in business meetings, you wouldn't even be able to read the text on it it would be so worn out.

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sjsdaiuasgdia 6 days ago | parent [-]

There's more than 2 or 3 here for you to review: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_price_fixing_cases

Your worldview is incredibly naive if it doesn't include substantial collusion and cooperation among the capital class.

	▲	Workaccount2 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know how you can call a list of ~50 cases over the last 30 years "substantial" when there are millions of active competitive markets.

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amanaplanacanal 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Fast food chains are giant corporations. Where you would see the difference is in the mom and pop shop, who can now undercut the big chain and probably has better quality food.

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sjsdaiuasgdia 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Mom & Pop shops aren't present at most highway exits like the big chains, and would need to become unbelievably, impossibly successful locally to generate enough capital to expand widely. They can't effectively compete with major chains. It's not a meaningful expression of the other poster's point.

	▲	craftkiller 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Are you a trucker? Maybe 0.3% of my meals come from highway exits. Most of my meals are from near my home. > They can't effectively compete with major chains I don't think they were suggesting a couple Mom & Pop shops become national chains. I think they were suggesting that collectively Mom & Pop shops could compete against the chains. If everyone replaced 50% of their chain fast food meals with mom & pop shops then each mom & pop shop might only see a small bump in orders but that would be devastating to the chains.

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6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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