A friend of mine was complaining online about the simultaneous problem of a meat pie costing $7 at a football game, while at the same time complaining of said meat pie being a bad quality meat pie. This particular brand is singularly notorious for being overpriced at sporting events and masquerading under the banner of "Gourmet", and also appearing at petrol stations as the "Premium" offering so that the cheaper options like Mrs Mac's and 7-Eleven own brand will sell more.
The reason why vendors can get away with massively inflated prices at sporting events and inside the airport, is that the vendors know that the market is captured and penned and literally can not go anywhere else. They operate as effective monopolies inside their respective enclosed nations because they know that they are price makers and the general public who might eventually succumb to their animal desires are very much price takers who might yet be forced to take whatever price is thrust upon them, however outrageous.
The fun thing about a pie vendor in a football stadium or an airport, is that they know that we know that we don't really believe the descriptions of "Gourmet" or "Premium" but need to play that idiotic game, because of the expectation of economic signalling. In order to charge an obscene price for a bog standard product, one merely needs to add a few superlative descriptors, without actually needing to improve the product. This is also why placing a premium product next to a cheaper one has the effect of inducing demand for the cheaper product.
We can see this with wines as well. The unbelievable truth of the matter is that unless you devote yourself to the proper tasting of wine, there isn't really a lot of discernable quality between a $6 bottle or a $60 bottle. I saw an experiment by Heston Blumenthal on telly once, where he more or less demonstrated that people couldn't actually tell the difference between Blue Nun which had been put into a Soda Stream and Bollinger.
The obvious question then is "why?". Why do people buy more expensive wine if they likely know or suspect that cheaper wine is just as good? Because there the economic signalling is not to the general public but to other people. If you are going to someone's place for dinner or a celebration or something, then you're going to stump up for the more expensive product because of the perception that a special event calls for a special bottle of wine. In actual fact, the truth is that neither you nor your colleagues can likely tell the difference.
A client of ours who is a motor dealer by trade, thinks that the reason why Lexus exists, is actually to induce demand for Toyota. People who know a bit about motor cars, likely know that they are owned by the same company and that the mechanical parts under the badges are exactly the same. People are still prepared to fork out more money and chain themselves to higher repayments for no other reason than to display to the world that they are a better class of person, as evidenced by the car that they drive.
Now as someone who wants a fun small car, that kind specific of promotion doesn't really work on me. I am generally not prepared to pay more for a more 'luxurious' version of a thing because I just do not see any increase in my perceived utility. In fact if anything, electric mirrors, electric windows, leather seats &c. are a nonsense to me because those are just more things which can break and/or fail. However, I might be induced to buy a peppier and more powerful version of the same car if the price was right. This is why badges like GT, GTi, R, and SS exist. Again the truth is that we all know that we're actually unable to use that extra performance if we're stuck in traffic going at 25km/h but at least we can pretend to ourselves.
I am highly price resistant, which means to say had I been at the football match with the $7 meat pie, I simply wouldn't have bought the pie at all. That would have been so outrageous to me that no monies would have been exchanged. It also doesn't help that that particular brand of pie is sufficiently disappointing enough that its very name acts as a warning label to me - do not buy this pie.
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