maybe one day an even bigger company such as Amazon will eat the asphalt companies lunch then. Their margin is someone bigger's opportunity. Or maybe 15-20% profit is just reasonable and competitive with other industries.
So is the logical end goal of this system to have a single company that makes all economic decisions as they use their excess capital to take over other industries?? That sound's like the end goal is not going to be functionally different from communism other than that the theoretical super company's goal will be to make its shareholders rich and communism government as least pretended like they wanted to help all their citizens
15-20% over the proper amount, above and beyond their normal profit. That's not all that unusual in that space. I worked in a field closely tied to the industry. I'm amazed it functions as well as it does.
That estimate is based on the fact that since the last true independent company in our area was bought out by the big guys, prices for all subsequent jobs rose 15% - 20%. I'm all for business making as much profit as possible. I'm not against profit, I'm against predatory pricing that limits competition.