[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.