When I was a kid the manufacturer figured how much the raw materials for a quality product cost him.
He then added overhead, employee costs, advertising, shipping and etc.
He then added a fair profit.


Nowadays, Marketing experts and computers design and redesign the product until it is on the edge of unusable and will wear out with minor use or simply degrade in 6 months to the point it becomes unusable.
It is placed on the market priced well above its consumer value to determine what the market will bear.
Many ploys are used to get the product into the hands of consumers. Rebates, discounts, bundling, leases, inflated shipping/handling are but a few of the scams employed.
Once a value, them maximum price the market will allow, has been established, the marketeers go back to work devising ways to make the product even cheaper to increase the profit margin.
They must lay awake at night thinking up new scams to beat the consumer out of yet another dollar. They seem to get some perverse thrill out of scamming the consumer rather than giving them a quality product at a fair price.


It seems to me that at some point the whole scheme will come tumbling down.

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A real sucker for the J-frames