their workers more. If the price of a product is “what the market will bear” consumers can affect that price by refusing to buy something beyond a certain price. Admittedly, this is easiest to do with products you don’t really need.
When McDonald’s had to start paying a higher minimum wage to their workers, they raised their prices. Lots of people stopped going to McDonald’s as often or completely. McDonald’s realized that their core customer is not rich and that they were pricing their core customer out of buying their product. This is true of other fast food chains too. Now, everytime I turn on the TV, there are commercials from fast food chains advertising special deals like $5 meals, competing to try to get that core consumer back.
Likewise, PepsiCo found out that people were not going to pay $4 for a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi. Lots of us stopped buying it for a while. This week, I paid $1.99 for a 2-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi.
During the time that these companies inflated their prices too much, many of their core customers broke their addiction to their products. It is very easy to find out financial info about big, publicly-traded companies, including their executive salaries (and other perks) and how much revenue and profit the company made each quarter and year. That info is all available to consumers and employees by reading the company’s SEC documents. It’s harder to get that info on privately-owned companies but it can be done. My point is that knowledge is power to both unions and consumer advocacy groups.
None of this is easy. None of this will happen overnight. But just as unions have more power than individuals to negotiate, so does that huge group of people called consumers.
