Because to certain people, when a company lowers prices to compete because of an increase in supply, it's the competitive free market doing its things (not generosity), but when they increase prices because of a decrease in supply, it's greed.
It's always greed. Companies will charge as much as they possibly can while maximizing their profits. It doesn't matter if the price of something goes up or down this week, in either case the change only happens because the company thinks they'll make more money by offering the product at that new price.
it doesn't. The largest egg producer in the nation had no infected birds. There was no shortage. The companies just conspired to restrict supply so that they could gouge consumers and stuff their pockets. They were ordered to pay millions in fines because of it (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/egg-suppliers-ordered-to-pay-17...)
They successfully tricked you into thinking that their prices are set by supply and demand. They're probably not the only company fooling you either. For just one other example, literal tons of unsold/unworn, perfectly wearable and desirable clothing gets shipped overseas, burned, or thrown into the ocean or landfills. The excess supply of clothing is so vast that it's now a form of pollution (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile...). If clothing prices were set by supply and demand they'd be paying us to take the clothes off the rack. Supply and demand are a good explanation of economics for grade schoolers, but it doesn't explain the world we live in.
You can just pull this up in FRED and match the spikes to HPAI outbreaks. People aren't making this up. If it's a spurious correlation, it's a really weird and powerful one.
It's not a coincidence. Companies know that if they suddenly raised the cost of their products 100% consumers would protest. At a certain point people will notice that they're being cheated and change their shopping habits accordingly.
Companies use opportunities like bird flu outbreaks to rip off consumers while deflecting blame. When the nation's largest supplier of eggs didn't have a single bird infected they still jacked up their prices and colluded with other farms to keep prices high and supply low because the news was constantly telling consumers about bird flu and setting an expectation that prices would be higher.
When the pandemic came, there were legitimate supply chain issues and many companies took the opportunity to appeal directly to their customers saying "We hate to increase prices at a time when every household is suffering, but we have no choice because of the supply chain! We're all in this together!" and because consumers knew we were in an unprecedented situation, while they still weren't happy about the price increases, they didn't blame the corporations for it.
The corporations however took advantage of the situation and continued increasing prices far higher than they needed to and for much longer than they needed to. Consumers didn't start to catch on until much much later when the news began reporting that all these companies were making record breaking profits the entire time. Meat packers for example had their profit margins increase 300%. Unfortunately by then they'd already been working hard to plant the idea that their high prices were caused by the disaster relief checks that went out to households during lockdowns. Then they blamed the "inflation" their own greed was feeding to justify raising their prices even higher. The more the news talked about inflation the more companies could rip you off because the expectation of higher prices was set.
The truth usually comes out eventually. Mostly when we finally see what the profit margins look like. They can hide some of it with clever investments and hollywood accounting, but it's harder to hide the money they make for shareholders and while they're doing everything they can to trick the public into thinking that we should feel sorry for them and sacrifice more for them, they're also busy telling investors that they're pulling in record profits and their pockets are overflowing with our cash.
Why wouldn't you pick the time when the public would be convinced a price rise is justifiable in order to raise prices (on a fairly inelastic good?) That isn't what you need a conspiracy for; the biggest would just press release that they were doing it, and the rest would follow. You might need a conspiracy to keep smaller producers from defecting from the price the biggest are setting, but the defectors wouldn't actually have the capacity to replace the price fixers, so they'd just be setting money on fire by not following.
I think it's pretty clear that they do explicitly discuss fixing prices with each other, but there's no actual need to do that.
Notice how that's not a story about price-fixing of a commodity but of a (delicious) intermediate industrial product destined for ultra-sophisticated buyers. There's no story about people price-fixing potatoes.
Also notice how the prices don't move up and down with incidents of potato blight or whatever.
Further: for this to be explanatory, you have to show why, after HPAI outbreaks subside... prices come back down.
When companies work together to set prices they can lower them a little sometimes (while still increasing their profits) and ruthlessly gouge the hell of out consumers the rest of the time hopefully without raising too much suspicion.
You've got this great opportunity to outcompete Aritzia and you're not doing it? They have no hold over you. When they conspire, just don't play along, like Zuck rejected Apple. Pick 50% their margin. You'll be a billionaire in a year.
Zuckerberg has no ethics and is just mad that apple's lack of ethics isn't working in his favor. A businessman with ethics has very little chance of dethroning an entrenched cartel within a corrupt industry. The hypothetical ethical business looking to outcompete their rivals may be the only one willing to set fair prices, but they also won't be able/willing to do what their competitors do. They won't exploit slaves/children/workers to make their products. They won't bribe governments to pass laws and regulations to keep out competition. They won't cut corners by using poisons in their products and manufacturing knowing it will harm their workers and consumers. They won't dump their waste into the ocean and pollute the environment. They won't collude to set prices, limit supply, or shut out anyone who doesn't play along.
The idea that you can defeat greedy corporations just by treating customers better is a fiction. There's always more money to be made by screwing over everyone at every opportunity, and there's no shortage of greedy people willing to do exactly that. It's why we need the kinds of laws, regulations, and enforcement that even the playing field and allow ethical companies to thrive.
You can't jump into the middle of a rigged game where the referees have been bought off and expect to win by following all of the rules. You have to stop the cheaters and the cheating first to even have a chance.
I've never owned a t-shirt that wasn't made by an unethical clothing industry which uses child slaves and abuses workers in sweatshops to produce hundreds of tons of clothing filled with plastics and poison every single year most of which will be burned or left to rot in a desert on the other side of the world from the retail shop that overpriced it when they sold it to me.
I have no idea what the fair market price of a t-shirt would be in a world where no one had to compete with the practices of the current industry. I do know that it'd be worth every penny. The price being paid now in environmental harm, inequality, and human suffering is way too high.
It’s not particularly hard to find clothes that are made ethically. I do it for most clothes I own. It’s even easier if (and more expensive) if you wear more traditional clothes (wool suits, coats, dress shoes, etc). You can avoid a lot of the abuses by buying things made in more developed countries (though obviously workers still won’t be paid terribly well, and the garment industry in the United States has some unpleasant corners). This tends to make clothes more expensive, especially as higher quality, more expensive inputs tend to be used too, but you can probably find a tee that isn’t particularly pricey.
I’m kinda surprised you never tried to do this considering how easy it is and how much your comments seem to suggest that you care. Possibly we’re talking past one another and you wouldn’t find any clothing companies that meet your ethical standards.
