Usually merchants accepting Bitcoin will need a lot of INBOUND liquidity. That means many of their customers could open a direct channel, private or public and pay them using that channel. That will involve 0 fees.

Merchants usually are encouraging customers to open channels towards their public node but that doesn't mean they should not put high fees on their outbound channels, to avoid drainage for those that are using their node for large swaps or rebalancing.

Keep in mind that their outbound channels are also used to make swaps and "empty" the channels making more space to receive.

And now we have also inbound fees too that you can play with. There are many ways to play around with fees as a merchant node but I do not see them using high fees policies as a way to "earn more sats" but more to control the flow of the liquidity in their advantage.

We will see more merchants using decoy nodes, in front of their real LN nodes, protecting in this way their liquidity, with private channels.