News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
This is not how supply and demand works. Businesses can't just arbitrarily raise prices unless consumers are willing to pay them. Do you think they were artificially keeping prices low until now? Obviously not. They are always trying to charge as much as they can, and consumers are always trying to pay as little as they can. The final sale price is whatever both parties think is fair.
Of course there are exceptions such as when businesses engage in price fixing or achieve monopolies, but that's not what's going on here. What's happening is that everything in the economy is connected. Even goods that aren't directly tariffed are still affected by tariffs. If you planned to buy a new washing machine, but now they're too expensive because of a tarrif, then maybe you buy a microwave instead. If a lot of people do this, then the increased demand for microwaves will cause their price to go up.
What? If I need a new washing machine, I'm either buying a new washing machine or doing laundry in the bathtub. I'm not going to decide to buy a second microwave for clothes when the microwave i already have is perfectly functional...for food.
The type of market you're describing, where the buyer and the seller both have a say in determining prices, only happens in small, locally focused markets. The type of market that's being undercut and eventually replaced outright by Wal-Mart and other big box corporate stores (with our tax dollars,by the way!) that absolutely don't give a fuck what the buyer wants to pay, because they have enough people that are complacent, desperate, fatigued, or out-of-touch enough to pay whatever they charge. If they can point to something tangible as an external cause of higher prices, they'll absolutely do it. We saw it happen with COVID, wage increases, tax proposals, and all sorts of other shit.
A "free market" that doesn't include freedom for the consumer isn't a free market at all.
Maybe my example wasn't clear; I don't mean that you would buy a microwave if you already have one, I mean that you will spend your money on something else if you can't afford the washing machine. Some goods are tightly correlated with each other such that if the price of one goes up (e.g. due to tariff), the price of the other will go up as well because it's a partial alternative.
This is not true; supply and demand applies in any open market, with the exception of monopolies and collusion which I already pointed out. Yes, WalMart/Home Depot/etc engage in anti-competitive business practices, but they still can't arbitrarily charge whatever they want, which is what it sounds like the Axios article is saying. If they could, then why did they wait for the looming threat of tariffs to raise their prices? Why haven't they been charging exorbitant prices all along?