If we assume honest dealing, when you see a $1000 display going for $500, you would think you get a high-end product at a mid-range price. You may then inquire why it's on sale - is it used, is it older generation, does the shop need shelf space? Who knows.
What should not be happening is that a product that has never sold for $1000 is presented as being worth $1000.
If you want free market to work, then deceit needs to be punished really harshly.
It is like arguing that for free speech to work everybody has to write newspaper articles or that you personally need to be a programmer for opensource to be useful. These can be different people and for a free market (/free(dom) speech/free(dom) software) to work you need a sufficient number of qualified people.
So I wouldn't blame the consumers (btw this term always sounds like slur to me as compared to customers) for using price as a proxy. You can't expect them to get loaners, purchase testing equipment etc.. That should be tech journalists' job and then consumers can make an educated decision, which in turn ensures that price indeed is a good proxy.
Hence, blame the sorry state of tech reviews in the American market. What even are the reasonably good sites still left? I know of wirecutter (mixed), rtings, tftcentral and maybe prad.de. What are consumers supposed to base their evaluations on in your opinion?
Agree. I try to avoid using the term "consumer" except maybe when it's talking about actually consuming things (such as food and drink).
Ideally it's like stock pricing where some people put in their knowledge and other people can get a reasonably accurate price most of the time.
Then there are mid-range products sold at a high price, of course, but you almost never see high-end products sold at mid-range prices.
I disagree. Pricing is a very poor signal for that, depending on the sort of good.
Pricing tells you what the target demographic of the store is. It doesn't reliably tell you much about quality.
> but you almost never see high-end products sold at mid-range prices.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "high end", but in my experience, there isn't usually a great deal of difference in quality between high priced and mid priced goods.
The large and consistent difference between the two is in presentation and aesthetic design. If those are important to you, fair enough. But I don't consider either of those to be quality issues.
But as we've seen, in a free market this deceit is rewarded, not punished. And if you try to intervene with government punishment, then it's not a free market. In other words, a truly "free market" doesn't work (in the sense that you meant when you said "work").
Like any business, success and growth changed their motiviations.
The customer service experience at the time was great compared to what you'd typically deal with in the UK. I was the person buying computers for my parents' business, my parents' friends, and some of my friends, all through my parent's business . The reps were probably a little confused because they had repeat orders from the same "customer", but knew they were also dealing with a teenager that had done their research. This yielded some fun conversations and I always felt that they wanted to be competitive with their pricing.
Unfortunately, this all changed towards the end of the 90s as PC manufacturers cut costs, moved to the web, and outsourced.