I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of memes suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
I'm not usually a stickler for adhering closely to meme "rules" but this one drives me batty. I never have the courage to correct folks though, so have your lemmy gold!
Ah, I'm not familiar. I couldn't name a single member of most bands that I like, and while I've surely heard them before, I couldn't name a single one of their songs.
Were this capitalism, the competition would simply win by offering lower prices, but Kroger was allowed to grow to monopolistic proportions so that they've either bought up any and all serious competition already, muscled rivals out of business or settled on quasi-gerrymandered spheres of influence with their equally monopolistic competitors, so that nobody undercuts them when they abuse their status to not offer the best deals, but instead price-gouge the people stuck in their sphere of influence.
First, I'd argue this was doing business in bad faith - they took advantage of a crisis to jack up profit on staple foods. That's extremely unethical
Second, they effectively did collude. McKinley is a consultant hired by Kroger (which owns many different regional chains) as well as their largest competitors and suppliers. They coordinated the price gouging - it doesn't matter if an algorithm does it or a third party does it, it's still collusion. Adding a degree of separation doesn't change the nature of the act