This only works in an environment that's flush with cash. E.g. a decade long bull market with artificially low interest rates, 2018 tax cuts, and stimulus from covid. Was a perfect storm.
It works fine as long as the money you lose from the people you price out amounts to less than the money you gain by overcharging others who can afford it.
You don't need an environment flush with cash for that to happen, you just need enough people who are well off enough to pay, or (as we saw in the pandemic) desperate enough to go into debit in order to get what they want.
There's likely a rather large segment of the population who can be pushed out of certain goods and services entirely while companies make record amounts of profit exploiting a smaller pool of wealthier folks.
It's not as bad when it's limited to luxury goods, but it's shitty when the goods people have always been able to afford are suddenly out of their reach and it's a real problem when increasing segments of the population are priced out of things like healthy foods, PFAS free cookware, healthcare, or housing.
Exactly, and this is why wealth inequality is the biggest social-economic problem we have right now, leading to the rise of the far-right (interestingly, the far left seems quiet compared to the early 20th century - I suppose the 'defeat of communism' is fresher in everyone's minds than the defeat of fascism).
> you just need enough people who are well off enough to pay,
Which is what happens after a decade long bull market, tax cuts, low rates, and stimulus. More people had more money that didn't before and they wanted more things and they wanted them now.
But you still need a critical mass of demand, which means a bigger portion of the population demanding goods. Which means you need a bigger population than the mega rich to explain the problem. There was always rich people - yet we never saw this problem until now.
