Ralph Lauren jeans has plenty of competition and the customer is reasonably well informed:
* Do you want to pay a premium for brand value? Awesome, buy the Ralph Lauren (or Lucky, or whatever).
* Do you want something reasonably durable but cheaper? Buy Levis.
* Do you want something cheap but convenient? Buy something at Target or Walmart.
There are dozens of options and hundreds of styles and the end customer can try them on and decide what works for them.
When you are at the emergency room and are given treatment with no opportunity (and in most cases, ability) to compare the various treatment options, then, yes, you tend to expect the caregiver to not mark something up 10, 25, 100X.
> Ralph Lauren jeans has plenty of competition and the customer is reasonably well informed
This isn't true at all, not even from a standpoint of brand and marketing. Most people cannot tell the quality of a garment by comparing alike items. Most people are not aware of fashion trends outside of what they see for sale at stores in their price point.
Bullshit. As per TFA, all services that might conceivably be involved were explicitly charged as well. It is an accounting device in the sense of "Hollywood accounting", i.e. having the sole purpose of obfuscating actual costs while maximizing profits.
No, that's wrong. Mass-produced clothing is the direct opposite of a commodity.
A commodity would be silk, or cotton - the raw fabric used as base materials. What you then do with those materials to increase their value directly changes them from commodities into products.
Put another way - gold is a commodity, as is silver. Jewelry, however, is not. It can't be a commodity if the material has been changed into a diversified form to increase its value - it has to be raw in order to be a commodity.
No, it's not. Commodities are products with multiple sellers and minimal differentiation. You can only put Ralph Lauren clothes into that bucket by willfully ignoring the concept of differentiation. Meanwhile: there is literally no differentiation between different suppliers of IV saline; it's a standardized product.
When a brand label is reduced to "this is what we put on products our buyer/sourcer has obtained at the lowest cost", you no longer have a design element at work. Increasingly, brands don't designate manufacturer, but middleman (yes, there are exceptions, but they're increasingly, well, exceptional).
Some very high-end custom-designer fashions might be excluded, but if you're buying off-the-rack (or mail-order/online) clothing manufactured in mass, you're buying a commodity, in the sense of a largely undifferentiated item. The label is the _only_ item of distinction (and not even that when you're getting grey-market goods).
Incidentally, look up "commodity" in your dictionary, it doesn't mean what you think it does.
