Why in the past 30 years have many items been sold at hard to understand prices?

Well one reason this has happened in the USA, Canada and Australia is
“wise, long view, anticommunist”
family business wealth planning.

A family owning a manufacturing industry in an iffy country will pick trusted family members and send them to Canada, Australia, and to an extent USA and Europe.
The family members will get overseas citizenship and set up a “wholesale warehouse distribution” type company.
The iffy contry company will ship them product “priced to sell quickly” to create overseas profit.
This is a type of “international money transfer” to get wealth out of a country where “rule of constitutional law” hardly exists.
If this unusual “transfer fee” amounts to 10% to 30% of item manufacturing cost, the family in the unsafe country may still consider it “good investment”.

The overseas family members usually are instructed to invest in real estate, gold - but also to make donations to influential politicians who can help with Visas, etc.

If your family still had vivid memories of
“The Great Leap Forward”
or teenage Red Guards throwing people to their deaths off the tops of building,
or what happened to the Kulaks,
you would understand getting around “Capital Export Control Laws” to create safe havens overseas.

Lose some money on paper,
save lives in the real world.