Not necessarily. A lot of factors might give one company an exclusive position. Another coal mine can't just open up. There might be a large barrier to entry into the market or it might just take time for a competitor to surface.
And if the other company is a newcomer looking to gain market share by undercutting, they'll likely find themselves strongarmed or bought out of the market.
Because that's how newcomers gain market share.
> And if the other company is a newcomer looking to gain market share by undercutting, they'll likely find themselves strongarmed or bought out of the market.
But then the high margins are still there, so the dynamic that attracts new entrants is still there.
The markets that maintain high margins are the ones with barriers to entry. Which, of course, we try to avoid as a matter of policy, so any policy that relies on their existence is quite problematic.
Services like Straight Talk and others that sublease towers and bandwidth from companies like AT&T or Verizon have massively cheaper costs due to the lack of contract phones (lower risk), lower support costs, lower advertising costs, etc. These lower costs are then passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices to the point that Verizon or AT&T prepay services have changed in an attempt to compete and even their main contract service prices have lowered somewhat.
As an aside, AT&T or Verizon actually rent most of their towers from other companies like American Tower or Crown Castle. They market how they're upgrading their towers, but that's not entirely true (they're basically bidding against each other on priority for tower upgrades).
Sometimes even in the real world things do flip, and there is a demand for low skilled labor that isn't being met. I overheard a few restaurant owners talking about the pandemic and their business while I was in line outside the grocery store a month or two ago. They bemoaned how no one wanted to come back to work at the restaurant since they were making more on unemployment. Neither brought up the idea of paying more if they failed to find labor at that price point in the market. Instead, they quipped back and forth about how lazy their staff are behaving after these owners themselves laid them off not too long ago and put them on unemployment in the first place. This anecdote is American capitalism in a nutshell, imo, just pure cognitive dissonance between the realities of the working class and the perceptions from the capital class.