[enoursa2]

Author here. Thanks for the comment. You are absolutely right about the Coke example relating strongly to marketing. Marketing is about ideas and the powerful idea with Coke is that a homeless person on the side of the street and the president of the USA purchase and consume the same product. What is even more powerful is that the president can't buy a better Coke. What if more products were like that? What if more products were that equitable?

[lsc]

>What is even more powerful is that the president can't buy a better Coke. What if more products were like that? What if more products were that equitable?

Coke does sell drinks that are dramatically more expensive than, ah, coke.

http://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands/all/

I mean, even the top-end energy and health drinks, while retailing for several times what you'd pay for Coke, are still within the reach of most people, but my point is that they do engage in price discrimination, like most rational profit-maximizing entities.

The difference in price between coke classic and monster, for example, is greater, I think, than the difference between a Honda civic and a accura ILX. The only reason you might think that coke is an "everyone" brand is that you make enough money that the cost of a coke is functionally zero.

[watwut]

There are plenty of product like that. Once you have enough money to afford the thing, most products are the same for anybody. President buys the same skittles as anybody else, same kinder egg as anybody else, same Pepsy, same Game of Thrones book, same Mad Men dvd, etc.

The difference between poor and rich is that President can buy also more expensive drinks (say fresh fruit) juice whenever he feels like and poor can not. Plus, both president and poor usually can buy also water which is in most cases both healthier and cheaper then coke. I do not mean it as criticism of coke, it is tasty for most people. However, it does not solve any problem I'm aware of. It is just that company manufacturing it was more successful in marketing wars.

[dredmorbius]

Not only are many products uniform, but where varying levels of a product are offered, very often this serves largely to provide for price discrimination. That is: there's little actual quality difference between a bargain, mid-market, and top-market item. There are distinguishing differentiations, often, but these serve largely a status or signaling role. In which case, what's being bought or sold isn't intrinsic product quality as measured by performance, but some level of social signaling.

See Thorstein Veblen and the concept of "Veblen Goods".

This isn't always the case, and there are perverse examples as well. E.g., railroad carriage class distinctions in the 19th and early 20th century were often enforced by creating intentionally worse experiences for third-class (least cost) service, to the point that if you could possibly afford to avoid the option, you would pay more to do so. That is: extra effort was made to create a worse experience, because it increase higher-value ticket sales.

And there are goods in which there is an intrinsically superior experience to be had by paying more. In my experience, for most consumer goods, this rarely extends far into the higher pricing realms of a product -- beyond a point, it's pretty much all status signalling. Even worse is when even formerly sufficient low-cost product become contaminated by "high-status" signaling -- with the inevitable effect of reducing what little quality was actually present to start with. Bling and similar ornamentation, the market for bikes, and such.

Competitive marketplaces need not provide high value product.

[analog31]

Coke and bottled drinks in general, if consumed at the rate they are produced, is toxic.

[enoursa2]

Absolutely true. Almost everything in an extreme fashion is toxic.