Aka this is what Amazon suggests is a standard t-shirt. It's insane.

There is a trend I've seen for a while that is if anything accelerating. As technology helps us make goods for cheaper, and as humanity gains more general affluence and prosperity, the trend gets larger.

You can spend what you want on something. I buy high quality dress shirts for $15. It's cheaper than I can buy t-shirts at most places. I've become tempted to be a dress shirt only guy. That's not who I am. But if it costs exactly the same to wear and looks better why not? I guess because it's not as versatile as a t-shirt. In a t-shirt you can do anything without taking extra time to think about it? But why? If it all costs the same maybe I should work out in a dress shirt. lol.

Then on the other end we have $90 t-shirts. Does it have anything premium about it that a cheap t doesn't. Probably. But probably you could get full coverage of any bonus qualities from to $30 tshirt. The real reason why it costs $90 is because people want to spend $90.

And this is what makes it slightly more interesting. Amazon's "pick" is usually for value items. Pretty much correlates with what Amazon sees has volume. So unless Amazon is making an exception to their algorithm (the outcome we normally see from it), there is an insane volume of people buying $90 t's just because they want to spend $90.

This also applies to tech. I have multiple servers but I've been thinking about migrating some stuff to a few instances of a $10 a year VPS. Meanwhile there are memes about people crying because they left an Amazon EC2 instance running for a day.

Increasingly we live in a world where you choose your price, anyone you want, and you get the same exact thing no matter what. Not 100% true but to the extent that statement is on a spectrum of true and false, it is really pushing rightward toward the true side of the spectrum.

And it's only going to become more and more the case. So everything is becoming cheaper and more expensive at the same time. That's a good thing. It means smart people can work less.