I'm not sure what to say about this other than, no, they won't.

If you're a publicly traded company, your investors want profit margins to go up, not stay the same. Unless you can convince them otherwise because you're growing -- but even then, they still want your profit margins to eventually rise.

If you go into a business thinking "I want to make $X, and I'll lower my prices until I hit that target", then you're approaching your business the wrong way.

Even in cases where companies are trying to cement a monopoly or drive competitors out of business, they still don't make their pricing decisions based on the cost of material/labor, they make their pricing decisions based on what prices will drive competitors out of business. Companies like Uber famously lose money on many of their services because they're trying to cement monopoly statuses for those industries. They get VC money and they price based on what they think they need to price. Their decisions are based on what the market looks like, and they're willing to have negative profits in order to hit the prices that they think are necessary.

In both cases, no competent business owner is thinking "I only want to hit $X profits this year, and anything over that is going to the consumers as a gift so that they'll like me."

> Similarly, increased benefits from collective bargaining will result in higher prices for amazon goods and services

See above, that's not how markets work. You don't charge what a product costs to make, you charge what the market will bear. Literally the first thing you should learn in an economics class. Products cost what people will pay for them.

This is (arguably) the entire cornerstone of free market Capitalism -- the idea that the value of a set of inputs into a business is not necessarily the same as the value of its outputs. One of the big points of Capitalism is that products get priced based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what they cost to produce or based on some kind of predetermined formula. If you have to pay your workers more, tough luck. Under Capitalism, your products are still only worth what the market is offering.

> and more automation

As opposed to right now, where Amazon isn't trying to automate any part of its warehousing or delivery process?

And in any case, automation is good. We want to eliminate bad jobs. And even among automation-critics who worry about lost jobs and the cost of retraining, their goal in opposing automation is not to make those jobs periodically worse and worse to try and keep pace with the price of machines.

Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need? If Amazon could hit the shipping volumes it needs to hit with 50% of the current workforce, then it would be hiring ~50% of the current workforce -- if that's not the case, then somebody in the company that's making hiring decisions needs to be fired.

> Price controls don't work to increase net welfare.

A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.

B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare. We can debate the theory, but we can also just look at reality and say, "we've tried this before, and when handled correctly, it works."

> Prices are a collectively generated signal produced from a complex network of interlocking exchanges that are based on a vast array of localized calculations.

I would be on board with your argument if the original comment starting this thread didn't boil down to "costs go up, prices go up". You're not talking about a complex signal at that point, you're talking about basic economic principles, and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.

Even your N95 example shows this point. Why did prices go up for N95 masks? Not primarily because of costs of production, primarily because demand changed. The basic principle economic principle is demand, not costs of production.

If you want to step away from those basic principles and talk about the complicated realities of what people will invest, and how safe they feel, and the size of the payout influencing investment enthusiasm, and so on -- then fine, that's reasonable, but the complicated reality is also that economic experts have looked at minimum wage increases, weighed up all of the complicated inputs that go into final product prices, and regularly concluded in multiple studies that minimum wages don't consistently increase prices or decrease market investment.

> It's entirely possible for price controls to still create losses while the market is not perfectly competitive.

Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.

> but it's nowhere as simple as "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good".

Agreed, but "the economy doesn't conform to a simplistic model therefore a price floor is good" is much closer to reality than saying "the economy does conform to simplistic models, therefore a price floor is always bad." You're arguing that the simplistic model isn't applicable, in a thread that was started with you arguing that the simple model was that price and material/wage costs would always move in the same direction. That's just not true, it's both an oversimplification and just bad economic theory.