In rec.aviation.student Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
Usery occurs at all levels, for both rich and poor. We used to joke
about customers shrieking at outrageously exhorbitant prices for a
large hardware company near Boston. Their salesman standard reply
was..."But it comes with mints!"

It's spelled "usury", and this is not it. Usury refers to the specific
practice of charging illegally high interest (orignially, to charging
interest at all) on loans.

It's grating when the functionality is there but disabled because you
haven't paid for activation, but on the other hand if they couldn't get
extra money for the fancier features then they might not develop them at
all. If they did, then they would probably simply charge the full price
for the unit so you'd be out the same amount of money in the end, just
without the option to spend less for fewer capabilities.

I heard frrom a friend who worked a Certain Computer Corporation that
back in the 1980's? they cleverly achieved price stratification for
their new line of mini-computers. They were selling each machine for
about $42,000. They discovered, long after market planning and device
design and just before release that there was an unanticipated market,
customers who wanted the machine at $30,000, but not much more. But
there were already customers willing to pay $42,000, and to make a
seperate product would have taken too long. Instead of redesigning the
machine, they sold the same $42,000 machine, but just before it was
shipped, opened each and filled some of the expansion slots with an
insulating undissolvable glue to prevent expansion-card upgrades by
lower-paying customers. Not very pretty, but it worked.

Now imagine if this option had not been available to them for whatever
reason. What would happen? Would the $30,000 customers still get their
machine? Not likely! Instead they would have simply left that market be,
and the $30,000 customers would have had less choice.

As I said, it's annoying and crappy when it's done to you, but ultimately
it results in more choice. The stuff would be more expensive, not cheaper,
if it weren't done.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon