Oh wait till you find out about how modern cars are mining your data, including facial recognition and reporting of you are having sex in the car! And the best part it’s all unregulated! Govt can simply buy the info for tracking even your Phone would be jealous of!

Where in America do you have gas pumps that don’t have ad TVs or ask you for your zip code?

Because the US is the largest exporter of petroleum products in the world.

There was a Planet Money episode that broke down where the $4/gallon went in 2022:

$2.40 for the price of crude oil when priced at $100/barrel.

$0.65 to the refiner that turns crude oil into gasoline (this was the prevailing spread in 2022, maybe different now).

$0.184 in federal taxes

$0.30 in state taxes

$0.20 to $0.50 for transportation from the refiner to the actual retail station.

Remainder is for the retailer (usually about $0.30 but fluctuates wildly).

That's how it is in the U.S. In other countries, it might be higher taxes, higher cost of refining, higher costs of transportation from the refiner, and higher margins for the retailer.

They stopped making them out of gasoline.

I'm guessing it's all advertising deals and spyware. Oh, and the TV is still shit.

Nearly all tvs are smart tvs that make money with showing ads and selling data. Any loss on the hardware is made up on selling customer data and ad space. The tvs would be amazing if they didn't come with smart features.

They externalize their true cost to the environment and laborers.

TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it's not just the "oh, they have advertising now" thing.

Source: I worked in electronics retail in the late 80s/early 90s, and in one of the world's largest consumer electronics firms when my career proper started.

The TVs in the window of the local electronics chain store (or in Walmart) were sold at practically zero margin, or more often than not at a loss. The retail chains would basically hold a gun to the CE companies heads and tell them if you're not willing to sell at a loss, nothing you make is going in the window display, or worst case we're not selling you at all.

The retail chains didn't care because all their profit was in selling accessories and unnecessary extended warranties. The CE companies hoped that they could make it up by selling you the more expensive model they actually made a profit on once you were in the door, or by selling you a VCR or whatever as well.

This is why the TV companies were always looking for a "next big thing" (flat-screen, ultraflat, widescreen, HD, 3D, 4k, 8k...) to differentiate the "next model up", which is to say the model the store would actually allow them to make a profit on.

This particular race-to-the-bottom mutually assured destruction business model is also the reason there is practically no consumer electronics manufacturing left in the West, of course. And why manufacturers grasp at stuff like advertising.

The fuck? Milk is 2x to 4x cheaper ($0.50-$1.00) than the most common gasoline, Natural 95 ($2.10) here. I thought you'd get something from those crazy "Got milk?" dairy subsidies...

(Multiply by 4.5 to get US units rather than liters)

I filled up a family members Rav4 the other day. It was $96.

Not exactly the best car, but hardly a gas guzzler. Or maybe it is, idk. I normally drive electric.

They're cheap because they use extensive tracking to make up the rest of their money

Compare any tv to a monitor of the same size and feature set