People act like inflation is the invisible hand of the market, this is capitalism, companies will charge whatever they want to maximize profits, and that rarely results in a lower price.
Like, if you made thingamajigs, and if you made as many as you could (10 million) and sold as much as you could to saturate the market and end up making 10 million, that’s less profit than if you charged $5 a piece and only sold 2 million. Same income, much lower overhead.
So you cut staffing and make 1/5th of what you can because that maximizes profit.
Which is fine until your thingamajig is something that people need like food, water, or shelter. If you’re putting profit over production, then people who can’t afford it have to go without.
It’s literally what’s going on with insulin. This is t a hypothetical, this is what’s been happening for a long time.
It’s just with the same few giant corporations making everything, if just one does, the other 2-4 giant corporations crunch the same numbers and come up with the same plan.
Something that used to be called price fixing is suddenly just “internal analytics”