The reason publicly traded companies continually raise prices is the pressure from Wall Street to continually make more money than you did last month, last quarter, last year.
Say you sell 1,000,000 hamburgers and make a 20% profit on it.
Unless you make more money next year, selling that same 1,000,000 hamburgers, Wall Street is going to punish you. They don't care that you're profitable.
The stock market IS a ponzi scheme, and the embodiment or everything that's wrong with capitalism. It encourages greed and drives enshittification. It's a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy (like 90% of stock is owned by the richest 10%, and most of that is owned by the top 0.1%). Expectations of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is insane.
Most of the human population would prefer (and benefit from) less greed, less enshitification, cheaper housing, cheaper groceries, cheaper products — than the possibility to own a share of evilcorp.
A while back, Exxon set a record for any company in a quarter and everyone was going "Wooo!" and I was like "Well, gas prices are going up then... Think about next quarter and this quarter next year..."