Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
An item is worth the value someone is willing to pay for it. A 100 yen box of Pocky is worth 4 dollars to a kid in Kansas. Do you want to make a 300% profit, or do you want to allow someone else to make it?
There is nothing immoral about selling something for a profit as long as the purchaser knows what they are buying. The immorality is when you deceive the buyer.
No one is forcing you to buy Japanese Kit-Kats, but if you are the person that wants to buy them, then $13.50 is not a bad price.
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I know what you're saying, but I feel that the deception in this scenario lies within the actual value of the product, not the point at which someone will pay for it. The people pay for it because they don't have a choice if they really want the product. You can argue that there's a certain point that the value of the product will decrease when someone is not willing to pay for it, but I tend to feel this is inflated because JList has a pretty strong monopolization of the JP import goodies market, so people's limits on what value they'll place on the bag of Kit Kats will be higher.
Whereas an example I have is of those green and yellow JDM signs beginning drivers put on cars. It's kind of a trend for import car enthusiasts to put them on their cars back in the states. I personally bought one for my car and paid something like 9 dollars for it. Of course I wanted the product, but I didn't have any kind of source to find the real value of it either. So I took it at face value and bought it, because I didn't know the true value and couldn't look into it. Low and behold there's a stack of them at my local 100 yen shop.
Knowing what I know now I would never pay that much for such a thing again, but it's value was worth more to me then because I didn't know what it was really worth.