This all makes no sense. You can by a dresser or chest for your bedroom for a few hundred dollars. It's more expensive to ship and is more complicated to manufacture. Kitchen cabinets and doors are so simple a monkey could make them yet the prices are nuts.
I guess it's supply and demand.
Let me tell you what HD did. I forget whether the prices below were the installed prices.
We were in the store and saw a big notice that you could have new kitchen cabinets for $2K*, so we sat down and had them work up an estimate, which came to $18K**.
Before we even hit the ground from shock she said that we were lucky that there was special on, today, and so we could have our cabinets for only $15K***.
I think
* this price is to pull you in
** this price is to disabuse you of the ridiculous notion that you can have cabinets for $2K
***this is to make you grateful that HD will take $3K off the price that they 'should' be charging.
One countermeasure is to ask what percent of their customers pay how many kilobucks for cabinets. E.g., 2% get cabinets for $2K, 2% get cabinets for $30K, half pay $20K.
Usually this question has the effect of making the salesperson bail out.