You're right about the existence of an inflection point--the "sweet spot"--but I'd say it's actually neutral. As a consumer, my best value is at that inflection point. If I purchased a $70 toaster that still only lasted ten years, I'd be out of the sweet spot and pay more for the same utility function of browning bread. In my slightly tongue-in-cheek essay on notional toasters, the poor are pushed away from the high-value sweet spot because they have no choice.

You're right too about how far modern business has moved away from the simplistic notion that a free market minimizes prices and maximizes value...which is to say, when you think about it, it should minimize profit for the seller. That's how boosters of laissez-faire free-market capitalism try to sell it to us rubes. It's astounding that people rarely ask how the sellers might feel about that. Is it conceivable that they'd stand idly by while the operation of a true free market reduces their profits? Of course not. And the stock market and shareholders would punish any businessperson so foolishly noble. That truth about business is that it's the fundamental mission of everyone engaged in selling to defeat the operation of the free market to maximize profit.

Your original post and many of the replies chronicle the many ways that sellers have developed to maximize profit by evading the pressure of a true free market. Shifting of responsibility to subcontractors is one such technique. When a business can just shrug and tell you to go talk to a subcontractor who's flown the coop, they reduce their expense of making good on warranties. When they can nickel-and-dime people with a number of small unauthorized charges to credit cards, they increase profit. When cell phone services round up the charges to the nearest minute, and then rig their voicemail systems to cause you to waste time going through convoluted menu trees, profit goes up (I've noticed the uncanny phenomenon that every time I retrieve my voicemail, somehow the timer always reads something like 1:10, and the cellphone company charges me for two minutes). When almost all businesses fire their human customer service staffs and install voicemail, they shift the cost of customer service on to the customers---it's your time they waste, and they don't have to pay for it. Imagine how much better customer service would be if companies had to reimburse you for the time you spend on hold. Funny how business are entitled to recoup their costs in order to make a profit, but we the consumer have no similar symmetrical right.

Not that shifting costs away from the seller is a completely newfangled idea. It's been around for a long time as the "tragedy of the commons". If a company adopts a cheaper packaging material that chokes landfills by decomposing more slowly, it's a win for the company, but a loss to society as a whole. The whole topic of environmental pollution is a tale of shifting costs away from the individual companies that incur them on to the backs of society as a whole.

And then there's "scientific marketing techniques" and "advertising control of markets", one of my favorite topics. I've gone round and round with our TB on the subject of advertising and the subtle, psychologically invasive and coercive techniques advertisers have developed over the last half-century based on the pioneering work of Joseph Goebbels. Subliminal advertising is crude by modern standards--there are no flashes of hot buttered popcorn and the like. Today they know how to go deeper, with sexual imagery, fast cuts designed to confuse our cognitive filters, audio tracks scientifically designed to evoke primitive neurological responses, and a whole panoply of reliable techniques to bypass people's rational mental functions and go directly for the emotional jugular. And Tom claims that it's all hogwash, that he's immune to advertising, and nobody can coerce him into buying something he doesn't want, no sirree. Betcha Tom's house is crammed to rafters with junk he can't really remember why he bought. People who don't believe that advertising works are the juiciest targets because they're not on guard. That kind of psychological rape ought to be a crime, but it'll never happen because it would cut into profits.

I don't see any natural end to this post ;-), so I think I'll just stop here and save the rest of the rant for later.