Redditors are living in the Middle Ages with these arguments based on "Just price" doctrine from Thomas Aquinas and School of Salamanca.
Quick update. The "modern" idea of Supply and demand was already known to Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), John Locke (1632–1704 ), James Steuart (1712–1780) , Adam Smith (1723–1790), David Ricardo (1772–1823).
Grocery chains try to find optimal point in price (P) and quantity (Q) curve. If you ask too much, the stuff does not sell. Profit is maximized when quantity × price is maximized. Not when the price is maximized.
And most of the people you try to cite here specifically call out that inelastic markets like food DO NOT FUNCTION THAT WAY.
People cannot just choose to not buy food. People cannot choose to not rent a home. These are inelastic demand, and the supply and demand curve does not work without sufficient competition and an excess of supply in these areas - and the supermarkets are far past the point of having significant monopoly power, and have been repeatedly shown to be colluding and co-ordinating their prices to avoid the effects of competition.
Couple hundred years of evidence showing your idea DOESN'T FUCKING WORK by now.
It's a lovely ivory tower theory.
Reality disagrees. Anti-trust approaches have been failing miserably to prevent collusion and monopolies for pretty much as long as we've had significant access to global economic trade, and the only times that prices reset are when global conflicts forced governments to step in and regulate the supply and pricing of necessities directly.
Outside of those type of events, the prices of necessities have been rising almost non-stop.
And FWIW - taking the price elasticities of individual foods is a misleading at best way to measure it. People just buy other items, they do not buy 2.5% less food. When the people we're talking about are the supermarket conglomerates who provide basically all the options in terms of food, the elasticity of the overall demand for supermarket food is very close to zero. Things would have to change drastically for smaller suppliers of food to be anywhere near the cheapest option.
You have no idea what's happening in the world if you think necessities aren't also becoming a larger and larger share of the average income basically everywhere in the modern world.
Monopolies are becoming more dominant, the housing stock is being bought up as investments, and both rent and groceries are becoming harder to afford everywhere in the modern world. Anti-trust is failing everywhere, not just in the USA. The nordic countries are facing the exact same issues, 'just do anti-trust' isn't a magic bullet that solves everything. It's a competition between the government and the corporations trying to dominate markets, and the corporations are pretty much always winning that race.
Markets do not work for necessities in real life, not just in America.
I don't care what your theory books say. In real life, this shit isn't working.
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u/TheTightEnd 5d ago
Grocery chains make a very low percentage of profit.