[saurik]

Again, though, that labor is paid for either way if the installation was already done and it wasn't activated. Essentially, I think the argument being made here is that -- whether this was true or not -- when the heated seats had to be paid for up front to even have them in your car, you could tell yourself that they legitimately cost something (for the parts or the installation or whatever: that doesn't matter) related to how much you were paying for them... but if everyone has them and you are merely paying to turn them on the facade dissolves and you almost have to assume that the feature didn't cost much to put in your car and you are simply being charged as much as they think they can convince you to pay, which is often true but never fun to realize.

[regularfry]

It's not the labour itself, it's the variability in that labour. Complexity has a cost over and above the raw labour costs, and I can well believe that someone's spreadsheet tells them that the additional parts and labour is cheaper in terms of both supply chain management and reliability than retaining that degree of freedom in that particular supplier relationship.