Discussion
All our regulators asked was of the price-gougers was that they come up with the thinnest, least-convincing comb-over and in return, these regulators would pretend not to notice the glaring bald-spot shining through.
The one weird trick that these guys have hit upon is to use industry-wide "pricing consultancies" - clearinghouses that pretend to offer individualized price advice to each seller in a market.
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Now if only we could efficiently implement some kind of of "pricing consultancies" for workers and consumers!..
#pricing #chargemore #selfemployment #antiemployment #employment #unions
In reality what these companies do is aggregate all the prices charged by every major seller in the market, then advise *all of them* to raise their prices in sync:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/
When we talk about "greedflation," we don't just mean one seller - a major grocery chain, say - raising prices because they know they've got a regional lock on their market.
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That happens, but far more pernicious is when *all* the sellers get together to raise the price of goods, via a brokerage that lets them pretend (unconvincingly) that they're just getting "price advice."
Take Agri-Stats, a conspiracy in plain sight that gathers in pricing from all the major meat processors and then tells them all to jack up the price of meat:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy
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Then there's Realpage, a conspiracy that gathers rental prices from all the landlords in your town and "advises" them all to jack up prices. Landlords who don't obey this "advice" get kicked out of the conspiracy:
https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating
These "price consultancies" are the reason you can't afford a hamburger or your apartment anymore. During the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission was working towards a nationwide ban on this stuff:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy
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Of course, after Trump took office, his FTC canceled all that work and instead set up a snitch line where FTC employees could report on each other for being "woke." And, you know, *fair*: making sure that no one who works for the federal government has a pronoun is *far* more important than making sure you can afford to eat dinner and sleep indoors.
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