Everyone knows about economic inflation; I’ve definitely heard my parents complain that everything’s more expensive now and “Gas used to be a quarter.”
The more people brought into the world, the more there has to be money to support all of these people, and since everyone has more money, that money becomes less valuable, but prices have to maintain a profit for the seller, so they go up to stay with the current economy.
However, rising prices exist to maintain a profit; how much of a profit depends on the seller.
Small businesses have to increase their prices. Say your local bread-maker pays 15 dollars for the ingredients to make that loaf, and you buy that loaf for 20 dollars. That bread-maker had to make some reasonable profit off of that high-quality loaf.
Your chain supermarket, on the other hand, raises prices because they need to maintain corporate profit, and they have an over complicated sales system where they lower random items to previous standards and keep everything bloated simply because they want a profit, not out of necessity; or you could be Market Basket and have so much business that you can keep your prices lower than your competition because you make so much money off of these low prices.
Small businesses are the ones that maintain their prices out of necessity because these prices change for everyone. Corporations make money on such a large scale they have the room to change prices at will, but small businesses fund themselves at a level where they’re not flexible.
People don’t think that through and believe any business with an outrageous price is doing it because they’re greedy, and while that could be the case, most small businesses are doing it for survival.
Corporations can deal with less business because they have assets to liquidate and jobs they can cut, but small businesses only have one or a few employees whose livelihoods depend on foot traffic and word of mouth.
If everyone stops going to shop, then big corporations can focus their efforts elsewhere, whereas small businesses have to shut down or relocate and try and rebuild an entire customer base from scratch.
This doesn’t include United States healthcare services pricing their Medicare at whatever they want since there’s no regulation on those prices.
Next time you see a small business with seemingly overpriced goods, think about WHY they’re priced like that and judge whether they’re doing it out of survival or greed, since it’s important to keep these good small businesses alive.
