What an embarrassingly inaccurate opening. They imply that because the host paid $45 for an HDMI cable at BestBuy, and that now MonoPrice sells them for $3, that prices have gone down. That's not about prices going down, that's about not buying from BestBuy, which still sells HDMI cables for $45 and more:
Yeah, HDMI cables are a really bad example. Even with the monitor example it sounds like a lot of the price difference had to do with reducing the markup. I always assumed that this was monoprice's strategy, find items being sold with huge markups (e.g. HDMI and audio cables), and reduce the markup. I would be interested in hearing/reading more about the other ways they reduce costs which they talked about briefly (re-engineering to reduce production costs).
They also sometimes reduce features. For instance, I use one of their 30" monitors, and while I think it is a good deal and it looks good, it has an inferior stand, only a Dvi input (no displayport or HDMI) and it doesn't support lower resolution inputs like the Dell and HP versions do.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/rocketfish-12-in-wall-hdmi-cable...