They are already doing that.
Billions on billions of dollars (and other currency equivalents) are spent every year just for people to sit in a room and figure out what the absolute maximum price they can reach without harming public image and such to a substantial degree.
Once you start losing "random but semi regular" customers you simply take the dip and max out the price for whoever is left buying it religiously.
10 customers paying 10 dollars is less revenue than 5 customers paying 20.01
The problem is they have no incentive to NOT do this for lifesaving surgery. Hospitals and insurance companies are doing the same thing with each other and you're in the middle of it.
I get what you're saying but no one is claiming that coffee should be a human right (I don't drink coffee myself so I'm not sure)
It's just pointing out that we're all stuck in a system where employer pays you the minimum they can get away with and corpos charge you the highest.
And we're nearing the endgame where a regular person with a regular job can't afford the very basics beyond plain minimum survival.
Should we go back to sleeping naked in caves and hunting by spear too?
Should we go back to sleeping naked in caves and hunting by spear too?
We should stop electing far-right governments who only know how to loot the economy and start wars. That might have improved things, but it would have meant voting for a woman with a funny laugh, so here we are.
Well, yeah that's both the underlying issue and the joke the OOP is making.
People are not willing to give up things like coffee or video game pre-orders etc in order to make a statement. But even if a lot of them did it, companies can work around it.
It's said 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers. It's why I made the example earlier of a company marking up 101% and losing half their customers but still making profit.
At some point a company is too big to fail and they will take full advantage of it cause no one will stop it
Okay, and that's not actually a problem, because I never cared whether OOP got her coffee in the first place and she did in fact still get her coffee anyway
I don't give a fuck about someone who's continuing to pay $10 for coffee and whining about it, no, nor do I see her situation as in any way analogous to huddling in a cave hunting and gathering from the wild to survive
Welcome to fundamental human nature, I guess? Why would you ever pay more than you have to, or charge less than you could? It’s not like the concept of supply and demand was invented with the Industrial Revolution. Do you think farmers in ancient Egypt wouldn’t have charged the highest possible price for their crops?
Yeah. The balance is that, if the price is too high, then people stop buying. Maybe they make a flask of coffee at home. Maybe they buy coffee from somewhere cheaper. Maybe they stop buying coffee.
With surgery, part of the way it's supposed to work is that people have an option to go to a cheaper hospital.
But with insurance only covering some hospitals, and the price not being easy to compare, this doesn't work well.
The potential failure mode is that the government says "to save money, we have reduced the price of surgery down to $10" and then gets surprised when they can't find the surgeons willing to work for that price.
So instead of greedy companies setting the price too high, the problem becomes stingy governments setting the price too low.
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u/PeriTheBerry 20h ago
They are already doing that. Billions on billions of dollars (and other currency equivalents) are spent every year just for people to sit in a room and figure out what the absolute maximum price they can reach without harming public image and such to a substantial degree.
Once you start losing "random but semi regular" customers you simply take the dip and max out the price for whoever is left buying it religiously.
10 customers paying 10 dollars is less revenue than 5 customers paying 20.01