What do you base this on?

Actual cost? The amount of money that leaves the hand for a handplane...?

Some of the other plane makers bought the tooling and amortized it 50 years
ago. Lee Valley is a relative newcomer and has a lot of tooling and
engineering costs to recoup. Planes don't sell in the volumes of
screwdrivers at Home Depot or Canadian Tire. LV is very competitive with
L-N from what I can see.
Ed

I don't think LV is supremely competetive from what I can see of price and product,
and availability. They just do what they do, and have what they have. Both brands are
very different designs.

The 112's for example, the LN is $81 more than the Veritas, both made of ductile
iron. The Veritas is a great deal considering the quality and color of the Kunz 112 @
$89 (they need tuning from what I have read, and look goofy as hell). The St. James
Bay 112 is $250 finished. So, Veritas is there with the right price and top quality on
that.

But I'm not going to pay $175 for a LV #4, because I have paid $32 for a
Stanley #4 type 19 in mint-minus condition, cost worth the tuning. $7.99 for another
exact same plane as quite well used, still perfectly good after tuning it. I want to see
Veritas #4 planes in borg and tool stores for a nominal $79 off the shelf, as an extreme
contrast to my previous statement about online, LV-only prices.

My real point is common availability, regular prices that are easy to consider, and a
wide distributership to stores and borgs @ that fine Veritas level of quality and
prescision. Currently, of all things, OSH now stocks Footprint tools! Planes, chisels,
and other tools. Footprint got an awesome break, that's because they made the right
business descision. They are attempting to amortize at a much smaller size than LV-
Veritas. The #5 costs $49.95, reasonable for the tuning work.

If the Lee Valley corp. decides to go bigger with plane production, make some socket
chisels (wink) and "amortize" the entire function, they and all woodworkers would
be better off. Lie-Nielson is coming close because of their actual* distributorship, but
keeping costs pretty much the same, get rich time! Lee Valley is on the perfect verge /
edge of being able to replace Stanley as amortized production for distribution. They
can do it. So sorry to sound like such a block-head, I got me a cranium full of ADHD to
fight through here... no offence intended.

Alex