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Because "Free Market" is a myth.
Yeah, I always wondered this, why would competition lower prices? If something is selling at $100, why would I make it and sell it way below that?
Sure, I might give a small discount at first to lure customers, but once I have enough market share, wouldn’t I rather sell it for $100?
Competition lowers prices because ideally no one has a lot of "market share". Think about a small farm community where 10 people have chickens, 10 people have pigs, 10 people grow wheat, 10 people grow carrots, etc. Maybe everyone grows potatoes or something, so those aren't sold at the market. They're just eaten.
This is a situation where no one person can control the price of things, but they still fluctuate based on supply and demand. Say it's Christmas and everyone wants to make egg nog. The cost of eggs and cream will rise because farmers can't just increase the amount of eggs and milk produced. Say there's a crop sickness and half of the wheat dies. The price of wheat will rise, since farmers can't make enough to satisfy the demand for bread.
After both of these problems have passed, the prices will come back down because no one person controls more than 10% of the price for their goods. If one person charged $6 per dozen eggs after Christmas was over (everyone else charges $5, as normal), they would not sell very many eggs. The average price is not increasable by one person. And any one person could quickly sell all their eggs just by charging slightly less. (This assumes that goods are interchangeable in quality.)
Your assuming the sellers are not cooperating with each other.
Sure, at first it could be like that, but as time goes on, those 10 people would either form a group, merge into a few or just one, or even just at one point suggest to each other to keep a certain price.
My point is, there is no guarantee that the sellers would play by the “ideal rules” when they just have one goal.
I mean it's technically illegal, but then so are a lot of things.
Another thing that they could do that I just realized is following bad examples.
Once there are established players and one of them is big enough, it would just do a anti consumer practice for the sake of better profits, once competition notices sales didn’t drop significantly, competitors follow suite.
A great real world example is the headphone jack, replaceable phone batteries and the screen notch.