3 ms·

But isn’t the purpose of a business to be a cash grab? If consumers are willing to pay more, charge more. I don’t care if Kelloggs raises prices. It will make

But isn’t the purpose of a business to be a cash grab? If consumers are willing to pay more, charge more. I don’t care if Kelloggs raises prices. It will make them more money up until the point people switch over to Post or the store brand (that’s 99% identical), and then they adjust prices. The problem is if there’s collusion and all manufacturers raise prices so they can’t compete on price.

dclowd9901 3y ago
The problem is collusion. Not “the heads of the two companies call each other and cackle while they bathe in pools of money” collusion, but soft collusion where their pricing models aim for profit over sales numbers.
- parpfish 3y ago
  So you’re saying that it’s a problem when multiple companies are trying to make a profit? I know that profit is a foreign concept to most VC backed tech companies, but it’s pretty fundamental to everybody else
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  That’s not collusion that’s just optimizing price for profit. You can have ‘collusion in effect’ with price matching on a market leader where multiple companies can price as if they were a single company monopoly without explicit coordination. There are many situations that are not considered true monopolies that I think should be, such a geographical monopolies that occur when there is a tacit agreement for companies not to enter each other’s areas of operations.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  That is just the "free market" we operate in... There is little to do about that unless we want government to cap prices on everything, including wages. In the end solution is to break up these large conglomerates and stop them ever going over certain size by acquisitions. And exactly same should be done in tech. Big companies should not be allowed to buy start-ups for example.

3 ms·

But isn’t the purpose of a business to be a cash grab? If consumers are willing to pay more, charge more. I don’t care if Kelloggs raises prices. It will make

by parpfish 3y ago

dclowd9901 3y ago
The problem is collusion. Not “the heads of the two companies call each other and cackle while they bathe in pools of money” collusion, but soft collusion where their pricing models aim for profit over sales numbers.
- parpfish 3y ago
  So you’re saying that it’s a problem when multiple companies are trying to make a profit? I know that profit is a foreign concept to most VC backed tech companies, but it’s pretty fundamental to everybody else
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  That’s not collusion that’s just optimizing price for profit. You can have ‘collusion in effect’ with price matching on a market leader where multiple companies can price as if they were a single company monopoly without explicit coordination. There are many situations that are not considered true monopolies that I think should be, such a geographical monopolies that occur when there is a tacit agreement for companies not to enter each other’s areas of operations.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  That is just the "free market" we operate in... There is little to do about that unless we want government to cap prices on everything, including wages. In the end solution is to break up these large conglomerates and stop them ever going over certain size by acquisitions. And exactly same should be done in tech. Big companies should not be allowed to buy start-ups for example.