You can often tell which products are actually worth the premium and which have inflated prices for brand reasons. Anything with stitching can have extremely different longevities depending on how much care was put into it, but there is of course a ceiling on how much labour can reasonably be put into one garment (thanks, Marx!) and thus there is a ceiling to what can be considered a reasonable price for a product.

But my favourite example of something that has absolutely no reason to be as expensive as it is is the humble Croc. A name-brand EVA clog sells for $50 — ten times the price of an identical product with no brand recognition shipped direct from the factory in China. Why? There is no skilled labour involved in the creation. There is no difference in the materials. These are machine-injected EVA.