> Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.

I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery. It cuts both ways in that, sure, a company can offer a product on the market that no buyer asked for and have it sell well, but then, the media can expose some rather unsavory facts about that same product and subsequently (consequently?) have it not sell.

> Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?

It's worth picking this apart. Prices not mattering is usually expressed in economics-ese as price-inelastic demand, and that's usually not what's happening. Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.

>I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery

I'm not sure what point you are contesting.

>It's worth picking this apart.

They were rhetorical questions.

>price-inelastic demand

With this you could argue that the absolute price does not matter, but the relative price between products that can substitute each other do. In this comment chain it is being argued that this kind of device wins on relative price.

>Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.

It is for increasing demand, but making a higher rate of profit on the item is not the main reason. Things like being able to clear inventory, or to learn about what the current demand curve looks like (to know if prices should be adjusted) are more common purposes.

Revealed preference only makes sense in a world of perfect information. They don't tell you the TV spies on you. In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!

> Revealed preference only makes sense in a world of perfect information.

No??? Revealed preference is dependent on what information is known. The analysis is made easier if the information is perfect, but that is not at all a prerequisite to being able to lean on revealed preference.

> In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!

Exactly! Consider though that, as the information landscape changes, so does the revealed preference. Notably, when things like TVs spying on their buyers comes to light, a preference can be revealed that buyers don't want TVs that spy on them.

Like, it's entirely rational for LG to want to hide this fact about their televisions, provided that they have the inkling that this would be unpopular. Their behavior in trying to suppress this press leads me to believe that they know exactly how unpopular this is, and they're trying to get away with it anyway.