That's a question that has interested me. I came up with:
We (the 99.9%) are not poor enough. We can still afford it "in some sense" and to some degree". The poorest, say, 30% shield the rest of a society from paying too much.
p.s. If you know this idea has some academic name, please lemme know!
It's not necessarily "the poorest [...] 30%". It's the marginal consumers who's willing to comparison shop and put in the legwork. They keep prices down for everyone else, by threatening to switch to the other store if one store decides to get too greedy. True, being poor might be correlated with putting the legwork into saving money, but wealth isn't the definite factor.
>p.s. If you know this idea has some academic name, please lemme know!
sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus
aka, it's too difficult to price discrinimate common essentials (lord knows they try - look at how much labeling of "organic" and "natural" foods there are!).
This combined with hyper-optimized inventory chains.
Even if there is a competitor, the max they could absorb would be a 10% increase in demand (look at what happened in toilet paper during Covid).
So, even if I comparison shop and buy from a different supplier, only 10% max will benefit and then the new supplier simply can't add anybody else--everybody left has to go to back to the inflated price supplier.
And that's only if some upstream supplier isn't a monopoly supplying the whole sector.