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The reason publicly traded companies continually raise prices is the pressure from Wall Street to continually make more money than you did last month, last quarter, last year.
Say you sell 1,000,000 hamburgers and make a 20% profit on it.
Unless you make more money next year, selling that same 1,000,000 hamburgers, Wall Street is going to punish you. They don't care that you're profitable.
You either sell more burgers or raise prices.
It is because enough people don’t bother to price shop.
They have to turn inventory or they will quickly go broke.
If you switch to the cheaper option they have to react. If you shrug and pay, they win.
Or lower content, or use cheaper content, or fire people and make the people staying work 10% more for the same salary, ... every year.
Yeah. They treat profit like a necessary business expense or a cost, and balance their budgets around it. Which perverts a fundamental of economics.
I'm starting to think the stock market is just a really awful bank that is sometimes also a ponzi scheme.
The stock market IS a ponzi scheme, and the embodiment or everything that's wrong with capitalism. It encourages greed and drives enshittification. It's a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy (like 90% of stock is owned by the richest 10%, and most of that is owned by the top 0.1%). Expectations of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is insane.
Most of the human population would prefer (and benefit from) less greed, less enshitification, cheaper housing, cheaper groceries, cheaper products — than the possibility to own a share of evilcorp.
Thank Jack Welch and Milton Friedman
A while back, Exxon set a record for any company in a quarter and everyone was going "Wooo!" and I was like "Well, gas prices are going up then... Think about next quarter and this quarter next year..."