UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

With the prices of Plasma and LCD televisions falling so quickly, why are cables so amazingly expensive?

Big-box electronic stories train their sales staff to tell customers that new, expensive TVs will only work correctly with “high-quality” cables. These stores will often only sell very expensive name-brand cables such as “Monster Cable” and will not even offer the consumer a choice of less expensive cables. It is very common to have no place in a medium-size city that offer cables at reasonable prices.

Overpriced brand-name cables are a great way for the stores to increase their bottom line. Because of the intense competition in the television market, television sales usually result in small profits for retailers. However, cables are very high profit items. A cable that costs the retailer ten dollars may be sold for over a hundred. Retailers hope that when low-profit televisions are sold, they can make larger profits by pushing “required” cables on the consumer at hugely inflated prices.

A consumer buying a new television and DVD player will often also need an HDMI cable to connect the devices. Here are some recently observed prices of 4ft to 8ft HDMI cables in several big-box retailers. As a comparison, prices for similar cables at several online vendors are provided.

A fair price for an HDMI cable is $5 to $20 dollars, depending on the quality and brand. Similar cables pushed on consumers who buy tvs range from $79.99 to $219.99. There is absolutely no reason to pay these absurd prices.