Comment by Manuel_D
2 years ago
No doubt markers are imperfect, and they can't respond to changes instantly. But that's way more vague than the "greedflation" narrative. The idea behind greedflation is that companies are systematically overpricing products, and no one is undercutting them because... (insert explanation here).
What that explanation is, nobody really seems to offer a good reason. Collusion is always a possibility, but there's strong disincentives for it. And it'd have to be a huge number of companies that are all colluding. There are much more mundane explanations, such as record spending. Is it really that surprising that record profits are made in a time of record spending?
No one is undercutting them because they are raising prices and taking the profit, too.
It's not "collusion" in the sense of "fat cat execs in a room all explicitly agreeing to do nefarious things." It's just an alignment of incentives, a zeitgeist, and a common recognition of an opportunity to make a shitton of money without any real consequences.
What suddenly changed in 2021? Why didn't they just do this earlier? They just never realized they could be wise prices?
You might have noticed that we had something rather significant going on during that time—a global pandemic? With major associated economic, logistical, and personal disruptions?
For more elaboration on this, see my related comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38569714
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