And therefore any rise in price above the normal rate of inflation was an abnormality. I thought the prices were determined by the money available to purchase them.

At one time in the late '80s while negotiating a labor agreement I took the figures published by the local HomeBuilders Association and calculated the overhead and profit on new home construction. The numbers came from a booklet designed to help their newer builders, were obtained by surveying their members and was written by a member assisted by the staff of the Association. No one argued with the numbers as I presented them.

Believe it or not, overhead and profit was between 30% and 40% while on-site carpentry labor was 4.8%. (Cabinets built off-site didn't count while the labor to install them did.)

Obviously, screwing down the wages of the residential carpenter was not going to help the builder much, and conversely a raise wasn't going to drive the price through the roof. And those were days when productivity was increasing quite rapidly.

Arf