This reminds me of an interesting point I had never really considered. I was watching a streamer doing one of those political quiz type things and the question was something like "does a business have any ethical responsibility beyond making money" and the guy basically argued that no, they have no ethical responsibility except following the law. The state has the responsibility of not letting businesses be lawfully unethical. In essence I fully agree with that, and asking businesses (or people) to act ethically without legal framework is a pipe dream.
I agree with this as well, and in fact I would say that’s one of the greatest benefits to capitalism is that it encourages creativity and competition up to the very brink of what is not explicitly prohibited.
Not gEing here, just curious what is a modern day (as in, the last 5 years or so) example of competition that benefited the consumer? I do believe there probably are some, but every kind of common good/service I can think of off the top of my head all of the companies that should, in theory, be competing for my business all just keep raising their prices/lowering the quality of their product bc as long as they all do it together the consumer doesn’t really have many options
5 years seems like an arbitrary timeframe to pick, but off the top of my head I’d say a lot more places offer free (or near free) grocery delivery or 2 day delivery to compete with Amazon and others. Lots of restaurants offer pretty good deals and easy mobile ordering. Internet and 5G is improving because mobile companies realize it’s a necessity to keep customers. TVs keep getting better while generally getting cheaper. Same with phones overall.
And for things that have gone down in quality, a lot of that is due to consumer demand too. We still have access to higher quality versions of most products, it’s just that the vast majority of Americans prefer the cheaper stuff.
You might need to start a thread on where to find all these discount goods. With the exception of tvs I believe every category you listed there the price increases are outpacing inflation. Literally just this morning on the Today show they were talking about how fast food customers were starting to revolt from McDonald’s bc their pricing is getting ridiculous, I think they said Burger King and Dominoes were getting an uptick in sales bc they haven’t been raising their prices as severely as the competition.
Also, regarding phones, I’m not sure how the concept of planned obsolescence can thrive in a capitalistic society. Intentionally designing your stuff to fail should be the death knell of any company but instead it’s an incredibly successful profit strategy.
Last, I’m putting an * next to your grocery delivery example, since that is part of their business plan to intentionally take a loss for the first few years to eliminate all competition and then once they are the only game (or 1 of a small handful of like-minded games) in town they can jack the prices up with impunity. So like, short term competition with the long term business plan of not having to be competitive at all.
Oh well, at least I can still get event tickets at reasonable prices
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