Duh! why didn't i get this idea earlier?

Slate talks about getting a better value coffee at starbucks, but tucked away in the article is this note about doing crappy design [on purpose]
{here's the conspiracy theory article in full}: but here's the bit i found really enlightening

"The difficulty is that if some of your products are cheap, you may lose money from customers who would willingly have paid more. So, businesses try to discourage their more lavish customers from trading down by making their cheap products look or sound unattractive, or, in the case of Starbucks, making the cheap product invisible. The British supermarket Tesco has a 'value' line of products with infamously ugly packaging, not because good designers are unavailable but because the supermarket wants to scare away customers who would willingly spend more. 'The bottom end of any market tends to get distorted,' says McManus. 'The more market power firms have, the less attractive they make the cheaper products.'"

i better keep this in mind for other projects, and so had you...