On 11/9/2014 6:00 PM, dpb wrote:
On 11/09/2014 5:34 PM, SMS wrote:
...

It is not free. It is included. But the price would not go down if it
was not included. That is the key thing to understand. Companies set
prices based on the market, not how much it costs them to manufacture a
product or provide a service. U.S. automakers would all be gone if they
tried to price their vehicles based on the cost of parts and labor and
then marking it up the same percentage as Toyota or Honda.
...

Nonsense on the latter; whether they would reduce pricing on the removal
of the amenity/service is a totally different question--more than likely
they'd just take the marginally higher return.

Certainly if the price structure is not reflective of the cost of
producing the product or service they won't last long...

But they do last. The only reason the big 3 were producing small cars
was because of government requirements that their fleet MPG be at a
certain level. They would much rather have produced only high margin,
high profit, low MPG models. They set their small car prices at market
prices, and lost money on them in order to increase the fleet mpg.