This is so absolutely untrue that this reads like a joke.
> Many people assume that if they're seeing something that's more expensive than they're used to that they're being ripped off for some reason.
Yes, because it's so absurdly common. "High price ripoffs" are so common that it's the default mode of operation for nearly every company in America. "High price ripoffs" are so common, that it's literally taught in school as a fundamental part of all marketing. (Price anchoring, premium pricing, skimming pricing, are all just 'high-price rip-offs' applied practically).
Yes, it still occasionally happens, but the days of "a high price probably means better time/materials/quality" are long gone. 9 times out of 10, the high price product is identical to the cheap price one, and the higher price is explicitly just a ripoff.
A) they are closer to where you live. And B) in smaller unit packs. Maybe you only need one battery, but to get them cheaper (per unit) you need to buy an 8-pack.
If a one pack is $2, but an 8-pack is $0.50/ per battery. If you only need one, you’re still better off paying four times as much ($2 < $4).
It’s all about the convenience...
Did you mean "convenience makes the price higher"? No quarrel there! The issue is how much higher. 8x more expensive (as an example) is in the "ripping me off" territory, if you ask me :)
Wait until you find out the cost of producing most non-alcoholic beverages...
If you've got a monopoly, sure this can lead to price gauging. But in a competitive market it just means you are rewarded for your edge.
Anyway, I've only felt like I was ripped off on price a couple times. And every time it was buying something in a higher end brick & mortar store where I bought a quality item at significant mark up. Brick and mortar stores simply are something that's a luxury that is hard to justify if you're on a shoestring budget.
Or is that fine because a business can't starve (even though its owners might?)
Given how many dropshippers exist for goods straight from China at 10-15x the price (if not more), this is untrue to such a degree that the original sentence almost reads like satire.
I doubt it's an issue with Walmart but you have completely ignored the problem of counterfeit/knock-off goods on Amazon and eBay. From painful experience, although fortunately not with anything too expensive, I can tell you that it's absolutely possible - likely, even, if you buy enough stuff - to get ripped off on Amazon in this way and that your strategy is not a reliable way to avoid being ripped off.
Walmart, Ebay and damn near every other ecommerce platform have things set up in a way that it's clear who's goods wound up on who's doorstep and therefore counterfeit stuff isn't very much of a problem. You can absolutely buy terrible Chinese knockoff products engineered to within an inch of their life (I do it all the time) but it's vanishingly rare (compared to Amazon) to get a genuine "I paid for X and got inferior knockoff Y" situation on any other eCommerce platform.
The high quality products from China are often branded by an American or European company. You can't buy them directly from China unless it is a knockoff and a lot of knockoffs are sold on Ebay locally. I don't even know why anyone would bother to get stuff directly from aliexpress at this point.
But I think our experience differs in that I'm really happy with the quality. Once you start checking Aliexpress for stuff you're about to buy you see just how much stuff in stores is just rebranded bulk orders from Alibaba at a huge markup. I think the most egregious example I found was a tapestry from Urban Outfitters. They were selling it for $50+ and it was on Aliexpress for $3.
The other economist replies "Nonsense, if there was then someone would have already picked it up by now."
Also margins are getting squeezed on drop shipping. Several years ago the difference between price on Amazon and Aliexpress was very significant now it's often negligible and I just buy on Amazon.
Apparently you have no idea of the audiophile market. I have someone swear that music doesn’t sound as nice when converted losslessly from WAV to AIFF/FLAC on whatever $$$$ gear he uses.
There is this audiophile article [0] that takes compares some different consumer level NAS devices. They used the same listening setup to play lossless audio files from different NAS devices. The article's authors perceived a difference in sound quality and characteristics, depending on the NAS and RAID configuration!
The article is a solid example of a placebo effect. The bitstream is identical between the setups.
When it comes down to digital to analog conversion, there's a lot of variables going on. I can definitely hear the difference between my laptop's headphone output and the headphone output of my prosumer-level audio interface. A more expensive audio interface might introduce measurably less cross-talk and noise. Some headphones will sound weak if the headphone amp is not powerful enough.
In other words: some people focus on things that are measurable. Others seem to be deliberately chasing the placebo effect of expensive equipment.
0. http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_t...
This can be probably explained by different mastering between the two. CD releases were subject to loudness war. Spotify and other streaming services normalize volume, so there is no incentive to release louder, less dynamic range tracks.
What entry level turntable and speakers would you buy for listening to vinyl in a standard living room and why?
Of course, the real answer is to find vintage equipment at a local audio place, but that isn't always easy for newbs and is a bit dependent on your local music nerd community.
So that's a crazy thing that the thing that would make your record have the best audio quality, will also just rip into your record so bad it will probably also immediately be the last time you could listen to it at that quality.
He swapped his collection to CD's the second that became a reasonable option.
If you really want to play and use vinyl, you should try to read up on it yourself shopping around and experience it, otherwise you just have something at home because its hip to have it at home.
You might just like the weirder sound from your selection even more.
There are plenty of good youtube channels and videos showing you a varity on options you have to explore.
I also understand that I am not a good evaluator of audio items. I don't know, nor do I care about the lingo. I just want a good turntable, so I can get some of the old vinyl out for my small children. I think Thick as a Brick and Locomotive Breath are two things that absolutely need to be experienced in your youth.
And I can't break up my pot and roll a joint on the back of an mp3 player. (jokes)
That's why I've asked here for advice.
They have a conference in Vegas.
The sound from these setups are amazing.
I started to get into it, but there is always something to do that provides a slightly better experience. Even 40k setups have room for improvement
Just because someone believes a con job doesn't make it less of a con job.
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/01/29/ex...
(links to paper)
Motor function is objectively measurable. "I like the sound of this" is not.
Yes, some stuff seems to be unreasonably cheap or expensive in some context. But it's the market that prices it, and collusion is always bad for everyone (except the conspirators).
The going price/capacity target for prosumer scale (>6TB) is $15/TB.
While i agree that a hard drive cost can bottom out, i don't think we have bottomed out at the right price.
Why would it make sense, at all, to produce a 300gb drive in 2020? It doesn't. Are they using machines which are not able to create better plates in 3,5" sizes? If yes, they probably ride those machines for a long time. Should be paid of by now 10x
There's no excuse.
And it's precisely what's responsible for falling HDD volumes and rising SDD volumes.
Which, in turn, is precisely what's responsible for stagnant HDD and falling SSD prices.
I can get a big-enough 480GB Sandisk SSD for $55 right now, and a 2TB SSD for $190, manufacturer direct. Looking at their WD_BLACK HDD, that's actually a buck cheaper than their 500GB HDD. For 2TB, I'd be looking at $99 instead of $190; at less than 2x the price difference, the SSD is a far better option for most people.
Of course, the HDD goes all the way up to 10TB (at $320), at which point, so it still comes out ahead for bulk storage. SSDs hit a breakpoint at 2TB, where price and complexity go up astronomically. I can either drop a few grand on a specialized product, or around $1000 on several drives and build a RAID. So there's still a market. Just not a particularly big one.
Prices are based on first sensible link on their web page (presumably, most popular product). You can go up or down in price if you click around, go off-brand, but the qualitative picture doesn't change. HDDs require a lot of infrastructure, and the market is evaporating.
I suspect the upper end will disappear soon enough.
I do still want some kind of bulk storage. I want to back up my photos somewhere reliable, but there seems little left. Tape is thousands of dollars for the hardware, while optical is now tiny. Nothing seems to compete with the volumes, economies-of-scale, or R&D budget of integrated circuits.
Eh, I'd say that its because a SSD does 50,000 IOPS+ and HDDs do about 150. Once SSDs came out and started being mass produced that spelled the death of HDD in most devices. Dropping the price of HDDs to near 0 won't stop that.
And fwiw, HDD go up to 18 TB nowadays.
SSDs also go way up in size, but prices spike after you hit a corner.
I see you've never tried to shop online outside of the US.
Let's take an example; my daughter has an Easy Bake Oven - it's a little plastic oven with essentially a 100W heater inside, with a little tiny baking tray about the size of your cell phone. There's an optional "cupcake tray", which is again a tiny metal pan about the size of your phone, only Walmart up here in Canada sells the oven, but doesn't sell the cupcake pan.
Amazon.ca today has a cupcake pan for $52 [0] which a) is lower than I've seen it on Amazon.ca before and b) this isn't even the "real" one from the manufacturer, it's an after-market knock off. There's another one listed for $89. It's actually cheaper for me to buy the cupcake tray from Amazon.com [1] even with the $9 shipping and the currency conversion, and I get the cupcake tray and a second regular tray and a bunch of cupcake liners.
This is not the most egregious example I've seen by a long ways. I assume a lot of this isn't actually malice but instead robots trying to sell products and setting prices that are just clearly insane. I've seen products with 1000% markup over MSRP before, and sometimes it's stuff that's easy to buy locally. There's just a lot fewer sellers on amazon.ca, so it's easier for a robot to climb it's price to infinity with no competition.
(And that's not to say everything is like this in Canada - most common stuff is priced reasonably. But if you want something a little out of the ordinary or sometimes if the "main" seller of something goes out of stock, suddenly it costs you a kidney to get a kid's basketball hoop.)
[0](https://www.amazon.ca/Replacement-Cupcake-Muffin-Easy-Bake-U...) [1](https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Bake-Ultimate-Replacement-Cupcak...)
Now here we are, 17 years later, selling a thousand times the capacity at half the price.
(I also wondered, then and now, where the author sourced their fish and chips. This incongruity is why the phrase stuck in my head.)
These large price differentials are purely due to the insane economies of scale we're able to create. It's not a wonder that there's a 128GB USB stick as expensive as $1675, it's a wonder there's a 128GB USB stick as cheap as $27.
Imagine it took 1 million dollars to develop the tech and implement the manufacturing process of a 128GB stick. Assume they cost $5 to manufacture, and $20 to market and ship. Then when you sell a million you've recuperated your R&D and made a million profit that warrants the 6 million upfront investment you had to do.
Same story but now with the expensive 128GB sticks, of which you're only going to sell 1000. Even though the stick is 1675, you only make 1.650.000, so your effective budget to develop the fancy encryption scheme and make a profit is 650.000.