Profit margins - these margins vary between the type of goods and from manufacturers to retailers. Clothing sold at retail can have several hundred percent mark up. Clothing is cheap to make - cheap labor, cheap equipment, etc... However, hard goods such as ignition covers, gaskets, blah, blah, blah, require tooling, more expensive equipment, more expensive engineering.
I can go to a foundry and have an aluminum ignition cover caste. It would probably cost big bucks- machining even more expensive. So to recoupe that cost you have to sell quite a few units. The profit margin is going to be less because the overhead is going to be more. But money is made or the company wouldn't be in business - for long.
Clothing is very lucrative. And to be more lucrative the big boys with their ties hanging down to their knees have closed alot of textile industries here in the USA and moved them over seas and south of the border for the $0.25/hour wage.
Think of new cars. I have recently watched a few car dealers here in Alabama spend several million dollars in site prep for each site to build car lots. We are talking months of drilling, blasting, rock removal, tons and tons, and huge equipment. Now, we all know that those dealers have to re-coupe that cost somewhere.
Oh - back in the 70's and early 80's I was considered a trouble maker and hoodlum for riding a motorcycle. So, who gives a rat's #### what they sell in the mall, those same idiots still think I am a hoodlum. I'm sure 90 percent of the people that wear cowboy boots have never stepped in manure.
So, if you think your identity is all wrapped up in an FMF or FOX logo and some mindless, fashionless, mallites are wantonly desecrating the altar of your ego then you have truly suffered the rapture-of-the-deep, and are irreversibly shattered. You have my condolences - would you like some cheeze with that whine?:p :p :p