@AlsoSprachOdin
that’s a crock of shit. people pay what they’re told to pay because they’re idiots. The price doesn’t reflect the true value of the thing.
It’s like those ridiculously overpriced pony dolls that people sell at conventions for $1000 or more. You could get something that looks the same and is just as good from a Chinese sweatshop for $30. The fact that some white person in America made it doesn’t make it a hundred times more valuable.
Or the Dalmore Constellation Collection whisky. It’s over $200,000 with the most expensive single bottle over $60,000. It’s not 1,000 times better whisky than a $60 bottle. Real reviewers, people who dedicate their entire lives to whisky, will tell you it tastes like shit and comes in tacky bottles with little plastic emblems hot glued to them. It’s an obviously inferior product that idiots with more money than brains will pay an exorbitant price for.
Or Ferraris. Ferraris don’t use better parts (Ferruccio Lamborghini, who owned a tractor factory, famously started his own luxury car brand when he found tractor parts made in his factory in the Ferrari luxury car he bought), they don’t have better leather, or better stitching, the power seats and windows often stop working and the entire master computer of the car has to be returned to the manufacturer to be rebooted, they break all the time and spend more time in the shop than you spend driving them, but people will tell you “Yeah, but it’s a Ferrari, so deal with it.” It’s very clearly a poorly made piece of shit that idiots pay a whole lot of money for, but that doesn’t mean it’s really worth that much money, people are just idiots.
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Products aren’t worth what people are willing to pay because:
- Markets are often quasi-monopolies (like eyeglasses or semiconductors) so there’s no real competition
- Customers don’t have full information on the cost of materials and labor that goes into a product so they can’t make an informed choice
- Price is in many cases inelastic (again, like eyeglasses or semiconductors or insulin) so companies can put a gun to your head and coerce you to pay whatever they tell you
- Customers are very often gullible and can be suckered into paying more than a thing is worth
- Prices fluctuate throughout the year so “sales” follow months of higher than normal pricing, making the “sale” price equivalent to the baseline price, but the prices change so slowly over the year that only someone who obsesses over following prices will notice
And again, and again, and again.
If people can’t make an informed choice free from coercion or manipulation and the market has no competition then people aren’t really “willing” to pay those prices, people are forced to pay those prices because they have no other choice (or are ignorant of other choices that may exist in niche markets, which is the same as those niche suppliers not existing as far as the customer is concerned).
