All fees are passed on to the consumer in some way, it is either a line item or hidden
The consumer price depends only on supply and demand. Fees don't influence none of it, only the cost of the selling party and thus his profit.
If local regulatory conditions cause your labor cost to go up, they are absolutely allowed to (and will) raise prices to compensate.
What are you on about? Of course McD will change prices relative to input expenditure. You can even see this across all the countries they serve. If there were to be a significant impact on margin, they can increase prices.
All fees are passed onto customers, that’s how you calculate profit margins.
you are simply wrong
Thinking that labor costs do not impact product costs is grossly ignorant.
Like, lets say that the government adds a 20$ tax/fee on fast food, per burger sold. Clearly McDonalds would no longer be able to sell burgers for 4 dollars.
Thus price would increase. Or supply of burgers would go down (thereby only leaving higher priced burgers in the market).
But that’s just the “efficient market” part of this. A fee like this could very well be an inefficient rent-capture that has managed to make its removal more expensive in the short-term than the short-term cost of allowing it to remain. Said less charitably, it’s a racket.
I would have thought that on HN of all places, where so many folks are attempting “disruption” (ie finding these unnecessary market inefficiencies and stepping around their cultural/legal/systemic barriers in order to reap some of the otherwise captured value), this would be better understood.
Overhead is overhead. Trying to pretty it up with fancy language like "moving wealth around" and "changing captured value" doesn't alter the fundamental economics.
