But then on the other hand philips led bulbs used to be $50 while similar quality IKEA bulbs were $12 at the time.

I really don't have an issue with paying for quality but there's just no reasonable way for me as a consumer to judge quality. I could go by reviews but those are often low quality or astroturfed so it's not really reliable either. Not to mention the cost of spending time to figure all this shit out.

I'm currently looking to buy a printer with no real budget limit, but I'd obviously rather not pay for features I won't use, but if $100 gets me $100 more worth of quality that's not a problem. It has been a horrible waste of time trying to figure out so far. I've already (pretty much) narrowed it down to a single brand. Partially to limit the scope of my quest and partially because I'm using the brand as a proxy for quality. My last printer was the same brand and it had, over a more than 5 year period I think two paper jams and no nozzle clogs or weird malfunctions.

Even given all that it's impossible to narrow it down further. Presumably the $300 printer is better than the $50 one, but there's no real way to figure that out from the information the manufacturer provides. A large factor is cartridge price since over the lifetime of a printer that can easily quadruple the total amount of money spent. Of course figuring out how much ink each type of cartridge holds is basically impossible. The manufacturer provides "pages per cartridge set" stats for each printer, but that info isn't on the page of the cartridges so that requires me to manually cross-reference cartridges to which printers they go with. All of this of course assuming that the page count they provide isn't just a straight up lie. And that's just for one attribute of the printer! what about paper capacity or number of feed trays or color quality for photo prints or wifi connectivity or or or or

I'm basically at the point where writing a web scraper is less effort than doing all this by hand. None of this is worth the time spent if you go by my hourly rate. How is my mother ever supposed to buy a nice printer if an IT professional like me can't even begin to figure it out?

Traditionally the solution to this problem was sales people, but these days it seems salespeople are more inclined to sell you something expensive that you don't need than they are to actually help you find what you DO need. Customer satisfaction doesn't show up on the balance sheet and isn't a key performance indicator either so why bother to optimize for it? If your first sales step is to figure out someones budget and the next step is to try and stretch it I'm distrusting enough to notice immediately. My mother isn't and would come home with a lighter wallet and a very expensive printer she doesn't need with no guarantee it won't be a maintenance nightmare either.

I should be the favorite kind of customer for any store. I don't mind spending more for quality. I make a point of being loyal to stores and brands that treat me well. If you can sell me something I'm happy to own you've got yourself a return customer. But I guess most stores just aren't looking for that.

In any case my next steps will be to contact the manufacturer and visit stores to ask them directly which printer I should get. I fully expect to get fleecing attempts for the most part but who knows, perhaps I'll find a new favorite store.