RAISING PRICES BY 38%! WHY NOT ?? “MARKET RETAIL-HYSTERICS.”
Likely Barns just coined a new MACRO ECONOMIC TERM: MARKET RETAIL-HYSTERICS. It is his expression of an old fool’s paradigm: “If it can be, it shall be.”
There are more than enough significant and well documented economic reasons for the present economic funk. And, thus, the strong consumer reaction at the retail level engendered by those.
No need to beat on this heard of horses. They are long deceased and on their way to the glue factory: “liar loans” recipients' and their criminal lenders' driven sub-prime crisis, the extraordinary cost of our pathetic and losing global oil and foreign policies, the short term criminal perspective of some businesses, a critically arrogant banking system devoid of regulatory oversight, perilously close to being entirely controlled by Middle Easterners, and so on and on and on.
And a GDP of $14 Trillion. And growing.
But.... Here is one of the significant components of market retail-hysterics.
Barns knows one of the bigger companies in Southern California who has a lot of valet parking lot concessions mostly at restaurants. In the past two months, they have increased their rates by 38%. Why? Well, their operating expenses, including labor, have not gone up. The number of customers they service has gone down a bit. Not 38%. Why raise prices by 38%?
Why not! People expect things to be more expensive, therefore, “the market will bear the increases.” Bingo: a profit making exercise that feeds on .... MARKET RETAIL-HYSTERICS.
What is lost in all this is the self-fulfilling prophecy: the downward vortex in all segments of commerce caused by a psychographic impact on all consumers.
Things should suck. Therefore they [really] do.
What Say You?
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Rogue ( 10 posts / 0 fights ) from Santa Monica , California (United States) on 07/25 at 09:52AM PT
Price gauging as as old as retail. Why not? as you say, charge what the market will bear. Does not matter what the long range effect is. If the biggest companies in the world don't care about the future, why would anybody else who can make a buck now.