When thinking about the concept of increasing prices, the company that comes to mind for me is Teenage Engineering, the Stockholm based design company most famous for their OP-1 synth/sampler. For example, both OP-1 and OD-11 (wireless speakers) have more or less been doubled in price over the years, and when they release new products such as their computer case Computer-1 and their portable speaker OB-4, there’s an endless outcry on different social media platforms and forums that the prices are ridiculous. That might be true for many people, but in the end, new products often are sold-out pretty much immediately, so there’s obviously enough people willing to pay these prices at the rate they’re able to produce them.
For me, this is a sign of a healthy price setting culture within a company. If there are people who are willing to pay much more than me, I wouldn’t want the products priced at my level. Let these people part with their money first, making me relatively richer than them and enriching the company who can put the money towards creating even better products that I eventually can scoop up on the second hand market for the same price I’ll be able to resell it for. The alternative is to keep the prices down, effectively creating some kind of lottery with regard to who happen to check their e-mail when a new batch is released.
This might have been a bit of a rambling, but in the end, I just want to say that I, as a consumer, wish that more companies would try to maximize their profits when it comes to pricing and that they should go against the sentiment that it’s somehow greedy to do so.