No one is arguing to the contrary. A functioning market based economy shouldn't tolerate massive inflation fuelled by greed, as your competitors should undercut you.
The original article is. The whole thing is presented as if it's some moral failure on the part of CEO's. Their only solution is price controls. There isn't one mention of breaking up the huge number of monopolies which dominate nearly every area of commerce.
All of those stimmy checks had to end up somewhere. Classical economics predicted the consequences of the Covid monetary response. It’s been textbook.
And yet we want to blame everything else except the actual causes.
There are no "mom and pop" grocery stores in my area. We have "Metro" or "Express" versions of the mega chains instead. You can stand outside one and see two others and there won't be a single independent until you get into a different area that the chains don't consider sufficiently profitable.
The mature businesses dial up the greed when there is no competition and dial it down to crush threats. Once the threat is extinguished, up the dial goes again.
Along with all your startup costs, you will be competing against entrenched businesses willing to run at a temporary loss to bleed you dry. They can afford to do this because greed will pay after you are dead.
Capitalism does not create efficient competitive markets offering good value to consumers, government intervention does.
Second, it's exactly that kind of differentiation (offering a niche product that the larger, more generic stores don't want to) that makes it easiest to avoid being undercut and run out of business by larger players.
Now, if you said you had several different small local grocery stores thriving without any specific niche, that would be somewhat more surprising.
You’ve just described what is called “competition”. Having to lower prices to keep up with competitors.
Also, if there is a clear winning pattern of a single player takes all market, that’s super attractive to competitor investors because they only need to outlast your warchest.
What you’ve described is a very unstable game theoretic condition and it’s basically a non-issue everywhere in the US except for markets with regulatory capture (i.e. high government regulation).
I challenge you to point out an example of a one grocery-store city where that strategy has worked to keep competitors out.
Suppose a larger company is selling a product that competes with yours at a loss so as to undercut you due to other sources of profit. Do you think that sort of competition is fair? Does that result in the best product winning the most market share?
> I challenge you to point out an example of a one grocery-store city where that strategy has worked to keep competitors out.
Not the GP, but recommend The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman.
That requires convincing investors the business is actually profitable (which is unrelated to the actual profitability of the venture)
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/profit-m...
Actually Publix does very well at 7-8% and it’s the largest employee owned company in the US.
https://www.barrons.com/visual-stories/what-publix-can-teach...