recently replaced taillight and initially priced out o.e.m. parts..."genuine suzuku part was over $100; knock-off $7.95!...wasn't surprised there was a price gap, but this was ridiculous!

I don't know how it is in America, but in Europe there are a handful of large players buying up all the inventory. The price tags are high due to the created scarcity. As a result, we see the used market here, consisting of motorcycle shops that sell used parts, slowly but surely being thinned out by larger players in the market who buy up motorcycles and scrap them for parts.

In the Netherlands, we have a "marketplace," a sort of "greklist." Everyone sells or buys their used stuff there.

But the big players also place their ads there. The price difference between private individuals and companies is large. As a result, private individuals are offering their parts at increasingly higher prices.

That gives the big players room to offer their parts at higher prices.

It will stabilize somewhere.
But if the big players stop growing, their shares will lose value and they will lose money. They will then squeeze consumers even further to keep the price of ours rising. This happens, for example, by manipulating search results so you no longer find bargains.

Marketplace in Holland has been taken over by Google, and Google determines how effective your search results are.

This principle is evident everywhere in e-commerce.
What also happens is that when you search for a product, the prices are automatically adjusted for you.
So, searching for cheap products for a long time leads to increasingly higher prices.

You see it happening on YouTube too.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to find a video there about, for example, changing your head gasket.
They deliberately make you search long so that you click on more videos and they generate more advertising revenue.

Because they know everything about you, they know exactly how you behave online, and their revenue model is tailored precisely to you.

They make you afraid that you will lose your job because of AI so that you settle for worse working conditions and lower pay.

If you're short on cash, when you search for a job on job sites, you're offered a lower salary because desperate people settle for less.


So if you ever feel like you're being crushed, you're right, because the big companies squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.


Just look at how they buy up all the houses in the country through big real estate agencies. You can make a fortune on houses. So they're ahead of you.
At some point, you'll own nothing, but you'll be happy. That's their slogan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_happy


The Chinese, who want to destroy our economy so they can do the same to us, offer products at prices we can't even afford to buy the materials for.

Many of these products on AliExpress are leftovers from bankrupt factories, or rejected products intended for the Asian market, or from enormous factories that produce millions of units of a single product, sometimes specifically designed to take over a specific sector in a country and thus market them in the West at cost price.

I wish you the best of luck navigating this minefield of runaway capitalism and geopolicing strategies.

Take heart, the pigeon is still alive.