> When setting up your first lemonade stand, you learn that you should set prices at the sum of costs for goods, labor, and overhead, plus a profit margin, hoping that the output of your manufacture delivers more value to your customers than that sum.
That's kinda opposite of a lot of (good) HN advice about pricing.
Here, we (mostly) agree that you set your prices to capture as much of the value you're providing to the customer as you can, not some simple markup on your costs. If the customer gets 10k/month value from your startup, of course you don't price it at $1k - even if it only costs you $500 to provide it.
If I had been running a lemonade stand on the island where Fyre Festival was failing to eventual, you can be sure my pricing would have been regarded as predatory and obscene to all the "cost plus a profit margin" folks.
I reckon the big error here - is tradition wholesale and retail chain ignoring the fact that geographic market segmentation is rapidly disappearing for many things. Shimano think they can gatekeep their markets, and sort-of can at retailer level using distributor contracts. But they totally can't stop consumers buying online from wherever it's cheapest, and that includes dark shift and/or knockoffs from AliExpress et al. Shimano will slowly kill their distributor network, who'll go broke or give up stocking Shimano as more and more consumers use them as a showroom and then go buy parts/bikes online. That'll happen more or less slowly depending on Shimano's brand strength, but the smaller and less discounted distributors will go (or skirt the wholesalers) first, and sooner or later the only place to see a Shimano bike will be a few major specialist bicycle retailers or on late night TV watching the Tour De France.