I think that argument only holds when the customer is informed about those specific tradeoffs. The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.
Buyers want cheap bulbs, they don't want crap bulbs. If that means $1.25/unit is impossible, so be it.
> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality.
This can't be understated. You never know with a bigger price tag if you are actually paying for a better build or just for branding + tidy profit. So you see two light bulbs with similar specs and the pictures on the box look indistinguishable.. unless you have specific experience or knowledge you are often doing yourself a favor to buy the cheaper one. Sometimes things are priced because they are actually better, but too often it is purely branding that justifies the price tag.
Not specific to lightbulbs, but I've also noticed a trend where a more expensive product with a big name and obviously more of an ad/branding budget actually is better for a few years... and then at some random date the bottom drops out and the product becomes almost indistinguishable from cheaper options while the price tag remains the same. Or even increases if they have enough market share and brand recognition.
And sometimes the better quality isn't worth the price. I bought a "Coochear" brushcutter on Amazon for a whopping $125 when my more expensive Husqvarna died due to a spun main bearing. At $125, I didn't care if it lasted longer than the time it would take me to remove the saplings that I needed to. The thing goes through 2" trees like they weren't even there. Yeah, it vibrates a lot more than it should and runs really rich, but it works a lot better than I expected for that price.
I know that I could have gotten another Husq that would work great but I really don't want to spend $600 for something that only gets used a couple times a year.
Or alternatively, the customer simply DGAF about the quality of their $1.25 purchase.
I have $1.25 bulbs in my home. I use them in unimportant locations with infrequent use. They are perfectly serviceable for this use.
> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.
This is a big problem for all consumer products. The root of the problem is that most consumers are wholly unqualified to be a judge of engineering quality themselves, few even know how to effectively obtain trustworthy information about quality, and those who do often value their time more than the effort required to do so. For larger purchases, some people who care to be informed will do some research, but I don't really think there's a solution for products <$500.
It is so much more difficult than it used to be to get trustworthy information about the quality of products. Seems like you have to already know of a hobbyist turned youtuber/blogger who has ideally done deep dives into a class of products or at least some relevant product reviews (or has a large subscriber base with active discussion threads).
Even trying to find such a content creator on the fly can be dicey since so many of them are doing paid reviews or at the very least are sent free products + incentives. That, or get lucky googling site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] [product] to find a thread that isn't too recent, isn't overrun by shills and isn't woefully out of date and full of deleted/overwritten content.
The availability of that information is probably worse than ~10 years ago, but still better than any time in the past before that.
Another problem is that there are just too many products these days. 40 years ago someone might have 5 options for a vacuum cleaner, period. Someone on the internet today might have 500 options. It's just information overload. Someone who really cares to, might go through the 236 options that Consumer Reports has tested [0]
But most people aren't the type of people who would spend a half-hour arguing about consumer product quality on the internet. Most people aren't willing to spend any time to evaluate their options for relatively small purchases beyond the immediate moment of purchase.
Buyers want cheap bulbs, they don't want crap bulbs. If that means $1.25/unit is impossible, so be it.