They keep raising prices, stating that it’s due to inflation, but then they keep having record profits.
Meanwhile, the average American can barely afford rent or food nowadays.
What are we to do? Vote? I have been but that doesn’t seem to do much since I’m just voting for a representative that makes the actual decisions.
Seek out the competitors to near monopolies? I heard somewhere that all glasses are built and sold by one company (that then sells them to a bunch of different companies so it looks like there is competition), and they can charge incredible markups. There probably are very small companies that make and sell glasses that don’t have the economies of scale or ad budgets to get the word out. If enough people bought from them, the monopoly would have to lower prices to their “kill competitors” level to steal back the market-share (or just buyout the little guy). Once dead or absorbed, they can go back to incredible mark-ups, which means we can start the cycle over again and find a new little guy to support.
That or support the maker movements so that anything we need we can just make ourselves (3D printing, bio-hacking, hydroponics and seed banks, general lathe and mill loner libraries, open source software, etc…)
EssilorLuxottica is the current name of that company. Fuck those guys.
the “vote with your wallet” stuff is bullshit, and it always was. there are very real limitations on what some small company can do in a near monopoly, that’s why we had antitrust in the first place.
I guarantee if everyone switched purchase orders from a major company to a small company overnight, that company would not be a small company.
Vote with your wallet isn’t bullshit, it just takes enough people actually doing it and it takes work to find the small businesses you want to buy from. It’s much easier to just rollover, buy the product you know sitting on the shelf, and then go complain on the Internet.
nothing happens overnight, and even if everyone switched the smaller company does not have the capital to realize such a jump in demand, nor would it have the capital to protect its self from hostile market strategies the larger company can and generally will entail.
now please do try and vote with your wallet if 90+% of everything is owned and sold by some small group of companies
You’re taking it literally, they are taking it realistically. Literally yes everyone switching would do that; realistically that won’t happen, nowhere close. So it won’t work.