I completely agree when it comes to luxury items. In fact, I fully support the luxury version industry.
When this shit applies to the standard version is where we should be drawing our ire; when the $20 bag costs $0.11 to make.
Comment on Now we know how much it costs to make a $2,800 Dior bag
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
It doesn’t matter how much it cost to make, only what people are willing to pay.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
ProvableGecko@lemmy.world 4 months ago
We have to reduce people’s willingness to pay you say hmmm
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Is that a Ferengi rule of acquisition?
Also, I have an Italian friend who sells jewelry and a long time ago he taught me that one of the ways to make something … anything … more valuable is to simply increase its price. If you price something cheap, people naturally think it’s cheap … if you price something as valuable, even if it isn’t, most people will believe it is valuable and will be willing to pay the higher price.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
That typically only works for luxury goods, but yes. A good that inverts the effect of price on demand is called a Veblen Good.
But that strategy probably wouldn’t work for something like rice or shampoo or socks or drywall putty unless people start usong those as status symbols.
Stovetop@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Makes me wonder if those $80 Monster HDMI cables was lucrative. Might be that the rule applies not just to luxury goods, but for any good where the consumer is too ignorant of the market to have any frame of reference to compare to (e.g. the technologically illiterate).
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Imo those worked because they lied about picture quality being better, etc. So the price was just justified by fraud - I also don’t know that demand for those was all that high and am even more skeptical that it’d be driven by price.
Damage@feddit.it 4 months ago
Young ones may not remember this
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Reminds me of an old joke.
A man is standing on Wall Street. He has a sign that says 'Pencils For Sale." A broker walks up and asks how much for one pencil.
“$50,000.00”
“$50 thousand for one pencil? At that price you’re not going to sell many.”
“At that price I only need to sell one.”
spamfajitas@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This and the Send Me to Heaven app (throw your phone as high as you can, higher height means higher score) were two of my favorite early apps clearly designed to mess with people buying expensive devices as status symbols.
bufalo1973@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
But I think it has too go way up. If it goes up but not enough then it’s an expensive thing, not a valuable one.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
I think it works for slightly more expensive things too. Like absent any noticeable difference we would assume that a $5 hotdog was better than a $2 hotdog.
You may be thinking of Veblen goods, which are marked up to such a degree that the high price point is the point of the purchase. It makes the product more exclusive.
bufalo1973@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
But a $5 hotdog is very expensive while a $2 one is just “a normal hotdog in an expensive place”. It’s the jump from the “normal” price. 2x is expensive. 10x is “exclusive”.