The blame does not lie at the door of the businesses. The blame lies squarely at the feet of the lawmakers who created the fertile environment for this situation to exist. The vast majority of businesses exist to provide returns to their shareholders. Most of them have some nice social purpose mantra on top and some actually live up to it. Companies will always exploit every avenue to save costs and increase returns. We as individuals do exactly the same.
If the markets cannot regulate themselves then you do not have a free market. Capitalism is dead. Of course I don't disagree, I think you need to regulate the hell out of business and stop pursuing an unregulated market that governs itself because, as you say, companies are rarely going to return anything they don't have to to anyone they don't have to return it to. Of course there are some exceptions to this.
I had my eyes opened to me when I met Justin King who was at the time CEO of Sainsburys, some very genuine questions were asked about the pay and perks differences between those in supermarkets and those in convenience shops and the increased Christmas opening times. His opinion in a nutshell was that they'd worked out what they could get away with and if we didn't like it we could find another job. He chuckled whilst saying this to the people who busted a gut every day to ensure the business was successful so that he could earn his ridiculous salary and not have to work in the same conditions his workers do.
Someone has to meet the cost if you want everyone to be on a higher living wage (which is of course being introduced anyway). You either choose to have Government subsidise it through a system akin to today's, or legislate to further increase the minimum wage in which case you, I and those living wage employees will all meet the cost through higher prices. The latter method will disproportionately affect those on lower wages as they have far less discretionary income at their disposal.
Yes, unfortunately that's the other side of the coin and it's why I think that as government increases minimum wage they should be reducing state funded in work benefits. Because as you say if companies know someone has more money in their pocket then they will charge them more but that doesn't mean that these companies, who make immense profits, shouldn't actually have to pay for their own work force rather than expecting you or I to subsidise them. I think you have a similar problem in this regard with the housing market. Landlords are charging extortionate rents and governments are paying for it with our money but then the government is highly unlikely to put any serious regulations in place because so many of them are landlords and have a conflict of interest.
Capitalism is designed to create wealth. I think what you're really arguing about is the distribution of that wealth. But saying that these companies should fold is a non-sensical solution. Tens of thousands of jobs in the NHS, the UK's largest employer, would be at risk. You wouldn't have a supermarket to buy goods from, and if one was open the shelves would be half empty and devoid of reasonably priced fruit and vegetables because nobody could afford to farm them (which appears to be happening right now!). People would find it more difficult to work reduced hours to help raise children.
Capitalism doesn't create anything. You and I create things. Capitalism exists as a method of exploiting what people create and channeling the benefit of those things in monetary terms to select individuals who have been fortunate enough to be born in to that position. This might be a cynical view to some but as the markets have supposedly become more free so too has social mobility decreased. If you are born poor you are more likely to die poor.
The current system is far from perfect, but the solution isn't as easy as 'close down businesses who don't pay living wage'.
If a business exists to create wealth it shouldn't be in business if it can't without state sponsorship. Surely by your own definition that's true. How can you defend the idea that the government should fund successful enterprise by paying it's workforce for them?!
Since the 1980s people who have joined the workforce have been poorer than those who came before them. All this phoney capitalism isn't really doing much good is it if the trickle down effect isn't trickling and instead the very people poorer than their parents are actually having to trickle money in to the system just to get that poor return.
Of course it does work very well for a handful of people so why change what isn't broken?