They balance it between ... raise prices high enough to make profit ... keep it low enough to not cause the pee-ons to riot.
The problem is not completely their fault ... part of the problem is that we are all just willing to keep bending over to allow them screw us as much as they want.
I'm not saying we should start a revolution ... but we should be out in the streets or calling our political reps and basically just causing enough of a protest to affect our country's leadership and corporate heads to do something about all this.
Not sure if it's just me, but I feel like companies have had it so good for so long that they're starting to push the limits just to see at what point society breaks down.
Especially during/after the pandemic, some of the things corporations have been doing just seem so incredibly brazen in their greed. From Loblaws et al, to the various social media companies, it's like the mask is off at this point.
Not to say these corporations weren't squeezing us before, just that it feels like they used to try harder to hide it.
That was the perfect time to do a test run, prices could be raised and the blame put on 'supply chain.' Now they know that there are minimal social/economic repercussions to gouging, businesses can fine tune prices to the absolute limit of human tolerance.
The same with wages, the majority of people are on such shakey ground that they will accept terrible wages because the alternative is homelessness.
Why though? This will only end up with cops beating people up and the government getting more money from the quasi monopolies in Canada anyway in exchange for putting their people in charge of consumer protection agencies like the CRTC and shit.
The goal of capitalism is to own all the wealth. Anything less is failure in the eyes of the bean-counters. Canada's monopolies will fight tooth and nail to make sure that you own nothing and that you pay them for the privilege.