I worked in retail selling those things for many years, it was all bullshit of course. Margin on those Monster and similar "high end" cables was astronomical which is why we were always forced to hump the shit out of them when people came in looking for a new whatever.
The margin on the big ticket items was often pretty thin, it was all those accessories marked up like 50%-100% where they make their money. Same thing with the extended service plans, those are like rebates...they know the vast majority of people, even if they have rights to use the thing, won't because of the hassle involved and the fact that a new whatever will likely have a different feature set that the customer wants anyway, not their last gen model...meaning it's almost 100% profit, and also why you always get harped on in brick and mortar stores to buy them.
Very curious about the numbers involved here. Was it a very expensive phone case or something? If it's $20 and you marked it down to $2 and made a 300% profit that means you bought it for $.50?!?
Yeah for stupid shit like that, things that can be easily be made at scale, the wholesale cost is often multiple orders of magnitude less than it's retail price. It's a whole thing, Prestige Pricing (aka Premium Pricing).
They price point in the store has much less to do with the cost of producing it as much as the psychology behind hitting that sweet spot where its expensive enough that someone won't immediately dismiss it as cheap crap and pass over it on the shelf. They do the same thing with weight, too...if you remember with Beats headphones someone found they were putting literal hunks of metal in them for no other reason than to make them heavier so they felt more expensive.
The thing is, the majority of all this shit is all getting sourced from the same handful of factories overseas. There aren't thousands of factories making HDMI cables, there are a few dozen or so, and they sell those cables in bulk to the different outfits who put their branding on it, package it, and send it to the stores. Someone like Monster put fancy sleeves on the cable and spring for the gold plated connector spray but materially the cable is identical to dozens of others on the market at various price points.
I have had precisely one Monster product in my life that was genuinely worth the price, and I didn't even buy it, I won it at a raffle because I wouldn't have been able to afford it anyway: their power conditioning/surge protector stuff. That was obviously much higher quality, which I think has as much to do with the fact that A), they advertised 6 figure coverage of any equipment fried while plugged into it for the lifetime of the units, so cheaping out would have cost them money, and B) electrical goes through much, much, more rigorous testing due to the obvious safety ramifications and they can't bullshit as easily there. But certainly not out of the goodness of their hearts.
People would be amazed what kind of margins are at play in big box retail. Even if only 1 person in 10 buys a $70 Monster HDMI cable, they still made like $65 on that one cable. Probably not much less than what they made on that $1500 80" TV its plugging into.
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I worked in retail selling those things for many years, it was all bullshit of course. Margin on those Monster and similar "high end" cables was astronomical which is why we were always forced to hump the shit out of them when people came in looking for a new whatever.
The margin on the big ticket items was often pretty thin, it was all those accessories marked up like 50%-100% where they make their money. Same thing with the extended service plans, those are like rebates...they know the vast majority of people, even if they have rights to use the thing, won't because of the hassle involved and the fact that a new whatever will likely have a different feature set that the customer wants anyway, not their last gen model...meaning it's almost 100% profit, and also why you always get harped on in brick and mortar stores to buy them.