Word for Historically Expensive Products or Services

Question

Is there a word for a product or service that was expensive in the past because of a high production cost, and remains expensive solely because people are accustomed to paying a high price despite the production cost plummeting?

Examples of this are:

• Long-distance phone calls. In days of yore, switchboard operators had to physically plug patch lines into the right port to "patch you through" to a telecom facility closer to the receiver, and so on, until terminating on the other end. Long-distance fees were charged for decades after operators were replaced with automatic switches.
• Glasses. When dinosaurs still roamed the earth, lenses were made from literal glass which had to be ground down to the appropriate prescription, polished, cut to shape, and set into frames, largely by hand. Now most glasses are glorified bits of plastic and wire popped out of factories in China for pennies per pair. In far-off lands like Nicaragua, Japan, and the Internet (all of which I have been to), a pair of glasses costs around $30 USD. A comparable pair runs two or three hundred dollars in an optometrist's office in the US.
• It's still common for mobile phone services to charge for minutes and text messages in many parts of the world (e.g. Latin America from personal experience, though other parts of the early 2000s like frost-tipped hair and Vote for Pedro shirts were conspicuously absent)

Answer 1

Try sticky prices or, if you're confident in using jargon, sticky-down ones.

One way to explain historically expensive products is that the price is particularly sticky. That is another way of saying that the price resists change when production costs and other factors change (see "Nominal rigidity," Wikipedia).

The Oxford English Dictionary also records this meaning (def. 5b in "sticky, adj.2", starting in the early 20th century:

Economics. Of prices, interest rates, wages, etc.: resistant to change, slow to respond to altered conditions.

So you could say all of these services or products have sticky prices or price-stickiness. Specifically, you could even say the prices are sticky downward or sticky-down, that is, resistant to going down:

Sticky-down refers to the tendency of the price of a good to move up easily, although it won’t easily move down. (Investopedia)

One caution: "Sticky price" is pretty intuitive, but "sticky-down" is not likely to be recognized outside of economics.

Answer 2

I do not believe such a word exists. If it was expensive, and still is, then it's simply "expensive". We do know that the production cost of certain products are very low, and companies do charge exorbitant mark up on those, but there has never been a word to describe "expensive, just because".

"Luxury" carries with it the implication that it is justified (either due to rarity, quality, or something else). "Status symbol" is about the social effect, not necessarily cost of production or price