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captive market

British  

noun

  1. a group of consumers who are obliged through lack of choice to buy a particular product, thus giving the supplier a monopoly

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

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They have a captive market and they don't want to share it.

From BBC ● May 5, 2022

They created a captive market of battery customers.

From New York Times ● Dec. 22, 2021

But its status as the country’s largest residential mortgage servicer gives it ample opportunity to exploit this captive market.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 19, 2021

But the ultimate captive market is the U.S. criminal justice system, where consumers are captive in both an economic and a physical sense.

From Slate ● Jul. 19, 2018

Libraries were a captive market, and journals had improbably installed themselves as the gatekeepers of scientific prestige – meaning that scientists couldn’t simply abandon them if a new method of sharing results came along.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 27, 2017

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