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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

I can look at a tool store catalogue right now, and for a 18V 4Ah lithium battery the cheapest brand is half the cost of the most expensive brand. In that case, factors like retail availability are identical - but the price difference persists.

It's pretty well known that power tool buyers have to watch out for battery prices.

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"Lithium batteries" are not just lithium batteries, just as steel is not just steel.

There are many variables that are not visible to the naive observer, even for batteries from the same manufacturing plant.

With power tools you tend to get crap at the lower price levels but most people only use their power tools for like 5 hours so spending lots of money for high quality isn't worth it unless you need it for your job.

I can tell you as someone who sells products to the public that price is one of the primary drivers of sales. If there was a way for the higher quality manufacturers to cut their sell price in half, they would do that. But that they have decided to go into the market with a price that is 2x the cheapest competition tells you that they have very good reason for doing so.

I've also served on company boards which believed "if the product is cheaply available then it will be considered low quality by the end user regardless of how much better it is in comparison to the competitor, so we must not drop the price and keep our margins high, take out more in profits".

They also say, "competing on price is for losers, it's race to bottom and at the end we'll have no margins left"

You can only charge more if your product is actually better in some way. However, a lot of companies are willingly sacrificing their trusted brands for a quick buck by lowering the quality that made the brand attractive in the first place.

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