Fender amps up another $100.00

I might be mistaken, but it seems like a lot of gear has two price rises a year.

www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/HRDlx4--fender-hot-rod-deluxe-iv-40-watt-1x12-inch-tube-combo-amp

Read it and weep - it's across the board, MAP.  Reverb, Fender's site, etc.

I love mine, but I paid $599 NEW and that was pushing it honestly at the time for what it was 'worth' compared to other options.

Its much easier now to buy good guitars for low cost but amps are getting seriously out of line.
Unless something fails , Im probably done buying amps. I have what I need.

It seems speaker cabs cost what amps did just a few years ago.

Call me a cheep... but that's a steep price to pay for a PCB constructed amp

It makes sense. Wood/lumber prices have gone way up, I'm sure those materials have all gone up.

Guitar amps use parts/components not found other places. Tubes are an obvious one, the speakers are a big one, too. The more specialized they get, the more production needs to be maintained for this one niche, the more expensive it gets. On top of that, not a lot of people are buying guitar amps, so they don't have the volume to either offset costs in selling the amps, to get better purchasing power on components, or for the component manufacturers to justify different production practices. Tubes and speakers and transformers used to be fairly generic items that were mass produced for a thousand different uses, now they're all guitar specific.

I wonder how many younger players have always been plugging into something digital and have never had a larger amp opened up in front of them in a room and experienced a really full guitar tone. I see people drooling over guitars all day long when the guitar is basically the same as the five others they own and they'd be better served by exploring other things to plug into. Fewer people own homes and there are more people renting/living with family/whatever, and plugging in just isn't practical... not to mention fewer people having gigs, or even basement jams.

All that said, there was a recent KDH video about an amp head he ordered from China, from a company that typically does OEM stuff but will also sell you their own generic amps and they sound great. Manufacturers may be in a weird middle place where they don't see enough of a market to upgrade manufacturing for higher volume and cheaper prices, and we won't get those leaps. A lot of Fender amps are stuck in a weird middle ground between boo-teek handwired and something that is manufacturer friendly.