Having worked at one, we would check the prices of the two others on the same road once every hour. These numbers were reported into HQ, and a price adjustment would be made to be lower.
It’s very competitive and people are willing to drive or wait until a different time of day to get a lower price.
EDIT: Maybe I should have said: that’s at least not the case everywhere.
If a store knows that the other store will raise their price in response, they can collude without an explicit agreement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal#:~:text=A%20price....
Everyone acting in complete independence, simply copying everyone else, cannot lead to stability, let alone the durable, persistent lock-step stability that is seen.
The issue in the telecoms market, at least IMO, is the high entry price (spectrum access sometimes meaning there is no option aside from buying an existing operator), combined with scale of the operators (usually large and national-level) meaning there is little entrepreneurial spirit to drive costs down.
It can cost a large company 100x what it would cost a small company to do the same work, and that becomes a price everyone ends up paying for. But absent knocking down barriers to entry, it's a very hard market for a new entrant to get into, unless you are happy to just sell to the existing incumbents as clients.
Yeah because otherwise you make no money on gas. If I undercut the store across the street by a penny, they will then immediately match me or undercut by a penny. Pretty soon, we are at the break-even point and can't go lower without losing money. That's not tacit collusion, that's just a race to the bottom.
There's a big difference between all major app stores taking 30% every time money changes hands, and a race-to-the-bottom industry like milk or gasoline. Try starting a dairy farm - I think you'll find you won't be able to price your milk lower than your competition, and as a result your milk will be the same price everyone else's has been for the past 50 years - ~$2-3/gallon.
You see something like this with gasoline pricing - major brands will have "competing" stations across the street from each other, but their prices moves in lock step without a race to the bottom.
Memory vendors have explicitly colluded in the past, but they really didn't need to - they just needed to copy their competitors' posted pricing. Presumably that is what they do now.
If there are high barriers to new competitors entering the market, then the situation is unlikely to change.