Rising prices come with a trigger warning.
They ignite endless X campaigns showing how one political party or another is doing wrong by the consumer.
And it’s hit my family, too. When prices spiked in the summer of 2022, I watched the signing bonus from my last job evaporate over the summer.
Just from buying groceries.
So with tariff news abounding and the threat of rising prices on everyone’s mind, it would make sense for people to push against anything else pushing up prices even more.
But what if the cure to high prices is high prices? What happens to make prices come back down in a healthy market?
The Van on the Highway
This begs for an example.
Where I live, there is a lot of industry. And a lot of industries need uniforms for their employees.
There are only 2-3 national companies that serve this. Not much differentiates them.
Imagine my surprise when I saw a van for a new company on the way to work one morning. Within months, that’s grown into semi-trailers with the same logo.
How did that happen?
In a high cost environment, those industries want to save money. Vendor choice becomes even more potent when they offer better service at slightly lower rates. And a lean cost structure to support operations.
So if the national companies in an area get too comfortable, charging too much because of “tariffs” or “rising costs”, an upstart can take hold.
That’s the creative destruction afforded in an environment of rising prices. And the extra competition ends up driving down prices while improving service quality.
Spread that across the numerous services an industrial company uses and that starts to become real cost savings.
What Can Up-and-Comers Do?
A high price environment leaves openings for plucky entrepreneurs to take advantage of. And for different results, you need to do things differently.
Find the gap
Just because a company’s a long-standing player doesn’t mean they’re doing the best job.
What do their customers complain about? High prices? Slow service? Wrong orders? Hidden charges?
Those are opportunities for new entrants.
Fill the gap
Figure out if it makes sense to serve that need. Once it does, be willing to work and take feedback.
A smaller business can make faster decisions with lower overhead. Which gives you room to price competitively.
Keep adding more value
You won’t survive doing everything for everyone on your own. You need to build systems to keep bringing on and serving new customers.
Then execute excellently on things no one else will do. Your customers will brag about you. Which brings in more customers.
And when the cycle turns again and there’s too many people who followed you in, those systems are what keep your business running when the others go bankrupt.
There if you want it
It’s easy to complain about high prices. But that environment presents opportunity. And competition from those opportunities bring down prices.
And that dictates what kind of world we live in. If we lean in and create, we get better results more sustainably.
We don’t have a lot of roadblocks right now, either. Every city has a business incubator. And there’s never been better access to informational and monetary resources to get started.
So what good can you make from rising prices?
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