Consumer product companies sort of foreshadowed what happened to food (+), is happening to clothes, and will probably eventually happen to everything physical.

Consumer product companies sort of foreshadowed what happened to food (+), is happening to clothes, and will probably eventually happen to everything physical. The fundamental product (soap, razor blades, etc) is done. It works, involves no novel technology, and can be created at infintessimal marginal cost by any player in the industry. (Try to guess what the price of the soap in a bar of soap is. If your answer is expressable in whole cents, you are incorrect.) This suggests that prices would crater except that branding works: there is no discernable difference in any product in the hand soap aisle, so they spend tremendous amounts of money on advertising, over years, because they know that stamping that dove on the bar will dominate your purchasing decision years later. I'm well aware of this, and I'm 30, and I haven't shopped for a bar of soap in America for 10 years. Ruriko and I were at a Walgreens on our honeymoon and needed to buy one. I immediately started looking for Dove and, when asked if I needed help, said "Try to find the white/yellow box with the bird on it -- that is the best one" before conscious thought intervened and said "Well, honestly, every box on these shelves is identical, but the difference in prices between $2.69 and $0.89 is so miniscule for the average shopper that they'll mentally respond to marketing like I just did." + The e.g. tomato or pasta sauce is solved, cheaper than it has ever been, and (seasonal fluctuations nonwithstanding) will only get cheaper over time. It is an observable fact that, for any particular basket of food, we pay less than our parents did. This is discomfiting to people trying to sell us food. Most discussion of food in America is values signaling. (e.g. "Don't eat that, it's not healthy/environmentally sustainable/organic/etc" is, to a first approximation, likely as relevant as the color of your bar of soap.) Clothes are trending in this direction, too. Have you heard "You should buy X, X is quality, X' was probably created in a Chinese sweatshop?" Horsepuckey, everything is created in Chinese factories now, by the same people, from the same materials, using functionally the same designs. The only distinction is the name on the label. (This is why clothing brands are in an epic battle with counterfitters, because if it weren't for criminal penalties for bringing fake Gucci bags into the country fake Guccis would be absolutely indistinguishable from the genuine article. They're like fake diamonds. You know what a fake diamond is, these days? It is a diamond which did not begin life owned by the right people.)