Some product categories are nearly monopolies too: - Garage Door Openers. Chamberlain (also Liftmaster). They have like 80% of the market. Its them or Genie. A

Some product categories are nearly monopolies too: - Garage Door Openers. Chamberlain (also Liftmaster). They have like 80% of the market. Its them or Genie. Almost everyone else got out of the market. Decent products with OK prices. Competition would bring prices down some but not by a huge amount. However they are desperate to generate MRR and so despite originally having openers with WiFi and local APIs they've locked everything down to MyQ so they can force everything through the cloud and charge both you and 3rd party integrators money. - Sink Food Disposals - Insinkerator (part of Emerson) has almost the entire US market. Three product lines for the low, middle, upmarket segments. - Luxor. Owns basically all retail eyeglass sales in the US. Charges literal 10x-100x markups on simple plastic frames. Also the easiest slam-dunk for anti-trust action even under the super high bar used by the government today... but no one seems to care. For everything else we have a missing middle situation. You can't buy a "decent" TV, microwave, toaster, etc. There's only bottom-feeder dreck or high-end. Everyone else disappeared or doesn't want to serve that market. A lot of the products are objectively worse than they were 20+ years ago. We have a restored Sunbeam Radiant toaster... besides automatically lowering and raising the toasted items it also makes toast about 2x as fast as anything you can buy at Target/Walmart today regardless of price. Kitchen appliances are similar. Your standard GE/Whirlpool/etc ovens, fridges, washers, and so on are uber cheap, not as repairable as they used to be, and are intended to be used for about 10 years then thrown away. To get a well engineered appliance that has proper service manuals and are designed to last you have to make a huge jump to something like Thermador, SpeedQueen, etc. TVs? The only way to get one not jammed with ads and tracking garbage is via "commercial signage" which is what I ended up doing. I bought a Sony Bravia "commercial signage" display. It runs Android but you can reject Google's license agreement and the TV works as a display anyway. It also has a documented API I can use to control it. Oh and it has a higher brightness rating than equivalent consumer TVs and is rated to be on 24/7. The extra money was worth it to me.