I won the competition, now buy my linen at 10x its value. Btw it costs 1,000 years of the average salary to start up a competing business, good luck lol
Tacit collusion is literally everywhere and completely normalized. A coworker was describing a revenue-sharing agreement but actually described collusion to set prices.
"Competition is good because it leads to cheaper prices for consumers", doesn't really work since it neglects the union of the state and monopolies to artificially charge higher prices for items of the same - even worse quality; while hindering competition that has the potential to change the status quo.
I mean—the US is trying to prevent the world from cooperating with China, Russia and other major economies because they know that they are incapable of competing due to their decades-long crusade of neoliberalism. Another example is the fossil fuel industry stalling for time against the wave of the renewable energy era; or the automobile industry lobbying against efficient public transportation.
The point is that the major neoliberal powers don't want competition to exist; they just want rent-seeking sectors that can earn them a treasure trove of money as fast as possible.
There used to be one streaming service. It had pretty much everything and cost half of what modern streaming services cost. Now there are several streaming services competing with each other that all have smaller libraries at higher prices. Plenty of them require paying users to watch ads. Weird.
Also the classic: "My enterprise is falling apart, please give me public funds so I can continue to rip people off (don't worry, I'll still claim it's all pure market forces at work)"
As with all ideas in theory, capitalism doesn’t sound terrible. But when the competition is done improving and they’ve got their audience/loyalists, it’s a race to the bottom and the only “losers” are the ones who step just a bit too far… and then they try it again in a few years and it works. Just look at micro transactions