1. An example from my State: https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/406-million-way-lo... It's not always super high-profile, but lawsuits against anti-competitive practices happen all the time.
1. An example from my State: https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/406-million-way-lo... It's not always super high-profile, but lawsuits against anti-competitive practices happen all the time.
This hits the nail on the head. There is no secret cabal of colluding business owners, but for any company that is public, they are necessarily “colluding” to keep share prices high. Since they are all optimizing for the same thing, it makes sense that they would take similar approaches.
The assumption of defecting against a cartel by lowering prices also requires that the defector have more supply, but supply was restricted during COVID, so it stands to reason that defecting wasn't possible in the short run.
We saw that especially badly with the auto industry, which used the chip shortage to push people to buy more expensive models. Lots of people figured they didn’t have a choice so they bought what the dealer had available, especially before interest rates made it easier to not think about the difference. In 2019, fewer buyers would’ve put up with that because they’d assume the model they wanted would be available soon.
If the experts in academia who spend their lives studying this stuff are so off the mark, how is it that you have more knowledge of how things "really" work?
Where did you learn the things that drive these strong opinions?
Do you believe that economics theories ignore the market forces that you're discussing?
That fundamentals like supply, demand and consumer behavior are less relevant than "cartel behavior"?
I guess I'd just like to understand what you're basing all this on.
because that's what academia does and they know it. Academics talk about how to impact the 'next generations' of leaders all the time
economics are no different. e.g. today somebody studies economics and learn some theory about how stuff "really works", in 5-10 years they're a congressperson or some other high-ranking executive deciding what to do based on the theories they learned
so academics being off the mark means this plan as I very roughly outlined failed. reality asserts itself in spite of the wishes of a few corporate overlords
I mean christ, if that was all there was to it what the hell are those experts doing spending their whole lives studying this stuff?
What that explanation is, nobody really seems to offer a good reason. Collusion is always a possibility, but there's strong disincentives for it. And it'd have to be a huge number of companies that are all colluding. There are much more mundane explanations, such as record spending. Is it really that surprising that record profits are made in a time of record spending?
It's not "collusion" in the sense of "fat cat execs in a room all explicitly agreeing to do nefarious things." It's just an alignment of incentives, a zeitgeist, and a common recognition of an opportunity to make a shitton of money without any real consequences.
For more elaboration on this, see my related comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38569714
...Alongside the other, more gradual changes, which (as I explained in the linked post) weren't fully noticed or appreciated until the shocks of the pandemic.
Really, I explained the full sequence of events very clearly in the linked post, and simply repeating "it was just the supply chain issues, no greed involved" does nothing whatsoever to refute what I said there.
Of course there are reasons why: the supply shocks during the pandemic are largely resolved, but there's still pent up demand. That, and a massive influx of cash that enabled consumers to pay those high prices. But this isn't "greedflation" this is a completely expected outcome of interrupted production and a large increase in money supply: more money to spend, but fewer things to buy, leading to high prices.
Drop your prices and maybe you capture more of the market. Works best if your product is a perfect substitute and consumers will both (a) immediately know about the drop and (b) be able to switch immediately. And then you can capture some of the lost per-unit profit in volume... but just how much market share would you have to capture to come out ahead of just cruising along with higher per-unit pricing and being more profitable as-is thanks to your costs dropping again? How much would you need to spend on advertising to get the message out, and how does that effect how much you need to capture?
And if it doesn't work, and you lost your margin without gaining enough to make it worth it, do you want to have been the guy in marketing who was pushing for the price cut? At this point yo-yo'ing the prices back up is gonna piss off the customers you do have once again, so you might be a bit stuck for a while.
Add in things like customer loyalty, stickiness, and habits, and "let's try to send the trend in the opposite direction" only looks riskier and riskier. For instance, if Walmart dropped their prices 10% how many Target shoppers do they convert who wouldn't already be going to the usually-cheaper Walmart?
There doesn't have to be anything nefarious going on to explain how markets can result in the consumer losing out, especially after shocks to the system. Let's say everyone was worried that customers wouldn't stand for 10-20% price hikes, but now that they've learned that they can, in fact, get away with it, they independently think it's easier to stay where they are then to try to get into a race to the bottom. No collusion, no "evil" cartoony-levels of greed, but no effective market pressure to fix it immediately either.
this pressure comes from the consumers. If the consumers keep opening their wallets, then there would be no pressure.
So for prices to drop, all that is required is for consumers to stop purchasing. Unfortunately, people, esp. in the US (but basically all over the west too) are quite rich, and they rather spend even if prices are high.
If anyone is making a just-so argument, it's those claiming "greedflation". The idea that record profits must equate to something nefarious happening is in my view a simplistic just-so statement. At least in America, people built up record savings during the pandemic, and then spent those savings in record numbers once the lockdowns ended. Record profits during a period of record spending seems rather unsurprising, doesn't it?
Real world example.
Heinz Baked Beans, UK. There are tons of other baked beans brands, but almost every store has Heinz. It dominates the shelf space by a huge margin.
Heinz is specifically called out in the article. They've made massive hikes in price, everyone's complaining about it, but often it's the only product on the shelf for a common, quick meal ingredient in UK meals.
There is no choice. It's not a simple economic choice. Most people can't choose the cheaper brand as often there's no choice.
Heinz Tomato Ketchup is/was in an even more dominant position. Many mid-sized grocery stores literally only stocked Heinz. (the co-op one is a pretty good substitute btw).
While theoretically there is consumer choice in the market, the reality is that it's wasn't true unless you want to go round a bunch of different shops.
In the long run Heinz has done some serious damage to their brand, but short/mid term are making juicy profits as the market is so slow to correct due to the way supermarkets work. How shelf space is allocated. By how the industry has become a small amount of ridiculously large companies hiding behind a patchwork of acquired brands.
Do you all not have private label brands? I’ve never been in a UK grocery store but it is hard for me to fathom that you would only have one brand of baked beans, given it is a food regularly consumed in the UK (or so I’m led to understand by the abomination that is beans and toast).
We have a few supermarket brands that have taken over every town and village local store.
As space is constrained in those stores (long story to do with Sunday trading laws), they stock one, two or three brand of lots of different items. Like there's one choice of poppadoms. Or one brand of english mustard. And one brand of Dijon mustard. Etc.
So the stores have a wide selection of goods, but a shallow selection of each individual good.
In the case of baked beans, you will always have Heinz. You might have one other choice, depending on the supermarket brand. Often the other choice is cheap, and nowhere near as tasty.
Bigger stores have more choice.
One noticeable change is that co-op didn't used to bother stocking their own brand ketchup in smaller stores. It sold so poorly Vs Heinz it wasn't worth the shelf space. That has changed, and I'm sure other super markets are making similar changes. For context Heinz has decided on a ridiculous £4.50 a bottle, while the Co-op own brand is £1.90. Heinz used to be about £2.50-£2.90ish I think before the greedflation.
>Bigger stores have more choice.
So why isn't there a brand that's cheap and tasty? Does Heinz have some sort of proprietary bean tech that others can't replicate? Is there a fundamental trade-off between tastiness and price?
In particular, with most of the cheapest mainstream brands, they've spent years finding the cheapest they can produce the product for that customers will still accept.
Basically, if the beans could be made tastier, while still being that cheap, Heinz would have done that already, leaving no room for a competitor to do so.
A data point to support the original comment is that there are arbitrageurs all over the place. If you are trying to raise your margin, lots of people without any technical or product knowledge will simply buy it cheaper else where and drop it into your margin and eat your lunch. See the whole drop ship economy phenomenon.
And how about the fact that at least in the US, we don't have a free market system?
The factor that the greedflation proponents seem to ignore is that people were spending in record numbers after the lockdowns ended, and people spent the money that was saved in record numbers. This is reflected in GDP figures. There was a huge drop in 2020, followed by a massive spike in 2021.
There are indeed significant issues with the greeflation narrative: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/06/greedflation-is...
You assume "slight undercut" => "gobbled up market share" but this is hard to substantiate.
Any grocery store in the US will show you examples of name-brand products next to slight-undercut store-brand alternatives where many people continue to buy the name-brand one, despite the price difference being super obvious every time the purchase is made. Real markets aren't econ 101.
Prices go up much more easily than they go down. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/priceratchet.asp In many markets consumers aren't perfectly evaluating the options from scratch on every single purchase with price the only factor, and a company doesn't want to have to accept a drop in price any more than an employee wants to have to accept a salary cut. So prices go up much more easily than they go down, since they can get forced up but require someone to take a gamble to get them to start moving down.
Prices tend to go up because inflation is much more common than deflation. That I don't doubt. But the narrative behind "greedflation" is that something other than market conditions are causing inflation.
* let's not raise our prices and try to gain market share
* let's do the same and see if we can all just bring in more top-line revenue
Two possible actions when your costs go down compared to your current prices, but nobody has lowered prices:
* let's stay where we are, no need to be the first to make a move, we have nice fat margins right now
* let's get aggressive and lower prices
These are all rational actions. A "greed" aspect of inflation only requires most players in the market to take the actions that keep their prices higher.
The high-school-econ level common belief is that companies will predominantly choose the "let's go for more competition!" price move. But ... why? Competition is stressful and higher-effort than coasting and maintaining the status quo, especially when your profit margins for the status quo are now healthier than they were 4 years ago. Especially since it isn't guaranteed to work out financially better for you.
The "invisible hand" is limited in terms of forcing players into the price-cutting competition unless people are so broke that they can't keep going. But if it's the difference between saving 5% and saving 6% of your income, or the difference between putting an extra $100 on your credit card debt every month or an extra $110... there's no overarching benevolent force here that should make you think companies won't be as greedy as possible.
The "anti-greedflation" argument you're making is basically just "they would lower prices if they could" and that's patently false for the vast majority of products in the vast majority of transactions. They will avoid lowering prices until there's no alternative.
Mercedes being more expensive than Honda is not an example of "greedflation" - it's an example of consumers making decisions on other things than the instantaneous lowest price". And in a world where you agree that consumers aren't always motivated by price, you should see how that extends to "price wars won't always result in the instigator being guaranteed to win significant market share" and* sellers not always being motivated to favor market-share over all other metrics.
presumably those people are acting irrationally. Or the name-brand ones do provide more value for them.
But hearsay from various news sources have mentioned more and more of the generic/store-brand goods sales are up. So i don't believe that people actually will continue to buy name-brand stuff that is of the same quality as the store-brand.
WE LITERALLY WATCHED IT IN REAL TIME. Covid caused supply chain issues, unaffected supply chains independently raised prices because people were willing to pay it. Trump was dumping $8T into the economy, business leaders also knew that. The supply chains started to clear up, but demand wasn't waning despite high prices. Throughout the entire thing anyone sitting on investor calls was hearing "highest profits in company history" over and over again.
Almost as if all that sociology about people behaving coherently without direct communication might have been on to something.
But that's not "greedflation". That's literally a normally functioning market. If Company A and Company B produce a largely interchangeable product, and 50% of Company A's output is lost due to shortages both companies are going to sell their products at a higher price point. The fact that Company B's output was unaffected doesn't change the fact that their product is now in more demand due to Company A's production shortfall.
After the supply chain issues eased, people had loads of savings from the lockdowns. This is a big reason why companies were seeing record profits in the post pandemic period: because people were spending in record numbers. Is it surprising to see record profits in a period of record spending?
It's simplistic, but take this analogy. A factory builds 1,000 doodads per year. COVID shut it down for a year. Then after COVID it starts producing 1,100 doodads per year. It's going to take 10 years to satisfy the pent up demand. Of course the real world is more complicated, but the fact that prices remain high after the supply chain issues are resolved isn't at all indicative of nefarious or anti competitive behavior.
Trump also slashed corporate taxes and taxes for the ultra-wealthy, which certainly didn't help.
Short-termism beats long again.
Congress writes the bills that set tax rates. Congress also writes the spending bills.
I thought Biden told us to blame US price increases on Putin.
"families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike."
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/597675-biden-bla...
How does cutting taxes raise prices?
> illegal and governments do take action against price-fixing
You mean like how egg producers engaged in collusion in 2000's and the were founds guilty in year 2023, 20 years later? You do realise that it's too little, too late.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-jury-awards-177-...
Best thing we can do is start worker coops to serve our basic needs, and somehow vote law into place that makes worker coops more tax friendly than private limiteds (and related forms of business ownership).
I feel like the answer here is probably along the same lines as the ‘because we have a good excuse’ line of thinking that caused the massive wave of layoffs a few months ago.
I don’t think those large mammoths would go for something uncertain like ‘potentially capturing more market share’ if they have the option of ‘guaranteed increase in profits’.