How is it a wild statement? The whole point of a company is to make money. It's like asking why workers care about their salaries.
A perfect market is one where
- alternatives can be created for little to no money so they can easily exist
- consumers have an infinity of time, money and energy to analyze products
- consumers have total agency over their decision
- picking an alternative has no cost, no drawback
- it is possible to buy nothing and still be content
There are 0 markets that fall under those conditions. The measure of how good your product is is not in its sales figures it is in... reviews.
No, it doesn't. We live in a stochastic world, not a deterministic one, and nothing perfectly fits any speculative model. There are always outliers and edge cases, and that's fine -- the world doesn't need to perfectly adhere to any model in order for the model to be more accurate than not in the general case.
And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
But that's my point: the world is so different from that model that it becomes inaccurate. You might be privileged enough to have a good enough approximation of a perfect market, leading you to believe that the model stands, but you are not representative of the population. Not even close to the median.
> And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
I don't know why I'm debating this in the hyper-capitalistic forum that Hacker News is, but no, business profits are not. If they were, no advertising would be necessary, because products would naturally be sold. If they were, every consumer would have access to everything. If they were, no lobbying by any company to soften laws seen as too restrictive would be necessary. If they were, companies would not emit a single gram of CO2.
The whole point of business profit is to profit. Aligning with consumer interests is lucky happenstance, not a necessity. A fringe outlier, as you say. You cannot say "it is true because I see it". It needs to be backed by strong analysis.
Look at something like Dark Patterns. These make a business more money by making a product worse.
Do you mean there are myriads of example of companies who say that they are optimizing for profit, but don't actually follow through in their actions? Humans do, indeed, have a penchant for saying one thing and then doing another. But if they are truly optimized for profit, how could they possibly go bust?
Of course not. The constraints are exactly what you optimizing against. Choosing to operate in a market that is not capable of supporting profitability is not optimizing for profitability, though. One may claim to be optimizing for profitability, but actions speak louder than words.
"Just existing in the world, providing a service to customers and a wage to employees" is a fine and stable way for a company to exist.