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The problem is that it's anti free market.
You can make regulation for standards of quality and transparency, and regulation against unfair business practices and monopolies.
These things stimulate fair competition, and help consumers make good choices. Which generally result in fair value for consumers.
But you can't dictate prices, it never works and it has been tried many times in many countries, and every time the result is shortage of the price regulated items.
If the price is set so low there are no profits, the goods simply disappear from the market. Nobody wants to work for free.
If the price is set high enough for companies to still profit, it has little or no effect in a competitive market anyway, and is unnecessary.
It might even keep prices higher, because the industry sees it as a floor they don't need to go under, and it works like a cartel price setting.
We don't have a true free market anyhow. Corn subsidies (among other policies) anyone?
A market can never be truly free, it needs to be regulated to work. Sometimes subsidies are needed to prevent possible shortages from year to year.
Subsidies are not to promote a free market, but to secure production.
And price controls are not to promote a free market but to reign in corporate greed. I could absolutely not spare a moment of concern for whether they are "anti free market."
They have plenty of margin to work with, and the gig has been up about their "supply chain costs" excuse they started pulling during the pandemic for quite some time now.
Puh. They absolutely ARE and HAVE BEEN exploiting their power to inflate prices.
Between grocery prices, fast food shenanigans, and shrinkflation, anyone with little enough disposable income to be at all conscious of prices has known for a long while that these companies have picked the pandemic as their excuse to pull in as much money hand over fist as they possibly can, all while fighting tooth and nail against wage increases to even approach the overall rate of inflation across the same period of time.
From the first link in that para:
From the second link in that para:
Fuck you Wendy's. You've been a favorite since I was 12, and I tried to ignore your decreasing quality in recent years. You are dead to me now. (Yes, I know they rolled the idea back after they heard what the announcement did to the pitchfork futures market.)
From the third link in that para:
Fuck you Frito-Lay, what kind of Orwellian doublethink is this?
Anti-Free market indeed. Free market in this country no longer means anything other than unrestrained corporate greed.