How are airports (publicly subsidized in many cases) not subject to any kind of monopoly laws/comsumer protections? Fixed prices across board for water/soda/gum ect… One company in many cases has exclusive contracts.
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Monopoly laws apply to an entire *industry*. I’ve never seen something like this myself, but suppose a major airport DID sign a contract with Hudson News that makes them the only place to buy bottled water in that airport. So long as some other company was competing on the *contract*, there wasn’t a monopoly problem. If Hudson News laid out an inefficiently high price in the contract, some other company could have outbid them.
Observing that every price in a particular setting is the same is not actually evidence of price fixing. In a perfectly competitive economy, you would expect every company to charge the exact same price. In particular, the price at which they make no economic profit. If they charged a higher price, nobody would buy from them. If they charged a lower price, the business wouldn’t be worthwhile. Price fixing is if all those companies made an agreement to charge a price higher than the efficient one. The only way to prove it is to show that representatives of those companies met and made such a deal.
Every airport I’ve been to had multiple stores selling water and soda. Hell one in Japan had a vending machine that sold both cheaper than my local grocery store.
The prices are high because all of the stores have to pay the same high rent to be there.
Gum and everything else you can bring from home or any shop between home and the airport.
You’re completely misunderstanding what these laws are. Airports, the stores in them, airlines, and their operations are absolutely completely subject to these laws, in fact extremely few business are exempt from them.
Also exclusively contracts are normal and fine, these some extreme outlier exceptions, but almost always exclusivity is simply a right to buy. This is completely unrelated to airports though. Just normal business
They’re what’s called a “Natural Monopoly” meaning that it’s really only practical to have one. Like power companies. Its not really practical to have several power companies in one area, so you give them some regulation or take pricing power away. That’s the key. Airports don’t make money from their airport stores, not directly. Those stores sell to you at high prices, but the airport just charges them rent. Any airline (generally) is allowed to fly to any airport as long as they have aerial rights in the country, meaning the airport doesnt fix prices.
Airports compete with one another, basically.
If you don’t like the the airport in your city, you can take the train and get to the airport in the next city.
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