OUT OF THEIR PROFITS!!! Isn't that clear?
McDonald's STILL makes profit in my country, and not a little bit either.
So do hair salons, food delivery services, supermarkets, drugstores, internet providers, insurance companies, movie theaters, gym chains, the train, airlines, private educational courses, etc. They all exist in my country, pay better wages, offer better services, and are either more affordable or have similar prices.

We just don't transfer as much money from the average citizen to the wealthy
like you do in the US.

You are assuming corporations use "cost-plus" pricing (blindly adding a fixed profit markup on top of their expenses). They don't. They use value-based pricing, centered entirely on finding the price optimum.

• The Price Optimum Formula: A corporation continuously tests the market to find the exact intersection where Price × Sales Volume yields the absolute maximum total profit. They always charge the maximum price the local market can tolerate before demand collapses.

• The Demand Ceiling Capping Prices: If a company raises prices beyond this optimum just because their internal costs (like wages or rent) went up, they ruin their own demand. A higher price that causes a massive drop in customers results in lower total revenue. Therefore, prices are structurally capped by consumer purchasing power and local competition, not driven upward by a company's internal bills.

• Costs Impact Profit, Not Price: Internal expenses, whether they are wages, taxes, or real estate, dictate the profit margin, not the price tag. When operational costs rise, a company has a choice: accept a slightly lower profit margin to maintain their sales volume, or raise prices and risk destroying demand.

I would not call this 'basic economics', but it all aligns perfectly with standard neoclassical microeconomic theory. It is fully backed by academic economics because it directly operationalizes the foundational principle that firms are profit maximizers operating under demand constraints.

The Ultimate Proof (Recent US Price Cuts): Look at McDonald's recent behavior in the US. After aggressively raising prices for years, they were forced to introduce value menus and slash prices. They didn't do this out of goodwill, and they certainly didn't do it because their labor or supply costs suddenly dropped. They did it because consumers, strained by economic uncertainty, stopped buying. Demand collapsed, forcing McDonald's to lower their prices back down to find the new market optimum.

Public narrative heavily distorts economics into a moral tale of companies just covering their bills. In reality, economic theory demonstrates that corporations are just cold, optimization algorithms. They charge the absolute maximum the market will bear. They will ONLY lower prices if they can make more profit from it, by increasing demand.