Actually macroeconomics 101 fails to fully describe the situation we're in. Market concentration (whether it's a single company having a monopoly or oligopoly, a holding company owning different "competing" firms within the same industry, or incestuous relationships created by someone being a board member for multiple companies) throw the usual you're talking about incentives out the window. The near zero interest rates we had until recently weren't so much a balancing act as much as a charity program. And speaking of the Fed, they in effect cause the "free" market to be more like a planned economy, one where those with capital can maintain access to almost limitless free money, and where they use soft power to suppress wages.

Yes, there are other pizza chains, but Domino's has almost twice the market share of its closest competitors, meaning it can waste money in an irrational way with few consequences, contrary to the rational actor and healthy competition that most models assume: https://medium.com/edison-discovers/dominos-takes-50-of-pizz...

This is a good deep dive into these sorts of dynamics: https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations...

For years, lots of companies gorged themselves by burning money by doing stock buybacks just for the sake of pumping share prices for fleeting short term gains for executives and shareholders, while everything that makes the company actually operate is slowly hollowed out. Many of these same companies will then ask for bailouts after wasting all this money and making bad business decisions, like airlines. This example with Domino's is actually pretty mild in comparison to money wasted with things like stock buybacks and executive bonuses. Macroeconomic models also don't take bailouts into account, which are usually needed because companies make bad, irrational decisions that favor extreme short term thinking.

> "Raising prices and pocketing it"

Precisely, that's what many of these companies are doing. Whine about inflation and raise prices for consumers while simultaneously bragging about record earnings on shareholder calls, the only place in practice where they are obligated to tell the truth. If inflation was really the primary cause of price increases, you'd likely see them slashing earnings projections in line with that, but that's not happening. It's certainly a contributor, but to know if a company is telling the truth you have to look at their earnings when they're saying that.