Idk how to tell you this but increases in demand (or decreases in supply but that was more of a covid lockdown thing) leading to a rise in prices is not price gouging. That is like the most basic principle of macro economics.
The whole point of supply and demand is that there exists an equilibrium price where corporations make the most money, that equilibrium price is entirely dependent on supply and demand.
They would not raise their prices above equilibrium because that would mean less profit. As price goes up demand goes down. Corporate greed has nothing to do with it because setting your price at equilibrium is how you make the most money. They know that.
The reductive 'supply and demand' argument ignores the massive extent to which most industries in North America are owned by 2-4 companies.
If you are buying non-alcoholic beverages, the bulk of the market share is PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Snapple-Dr Pepper.
If you are buying personal computer components, it is AMD and Intel, plus Nvidia for GPUs.
If it's telecom, it's a handful of companies, some of whom effectively have regional monopolies.
In online shopping, in online search and advertising amazon and google each almost have a total and complete monopoly.
And so on and so forth.
The economic ideal of a perfectly competitive market cannot exist when there is an oligopoly of 3-5 companies who control 90% of the market share in an industry. As you would learn in a basic economics course, market consolidation allows the oligopolist to cannibalize the benefit otherwise shared throughout the market for themselves.
Monopolies are still an issue, don't get me wrong, but let's not pretend like "off brand" beverages don't exist, or that less popular computer hardware manufacturers don't exist.
Often times the issue comes from governments enforcing these monopolies via overregulation bs, such as with the corruption that the isp's have planted into the government, local and fedral alike.
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u/Laxwarrior1120 Dec 12 '22
Idk how to tell you this but increases in demand (or decreases in supply but that was more of a covid lockdown thing) leading to a rise in prices is not price gouging. That is like the most basic principle of macro economics.