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.
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.
