If you buy products that normal Americans do not wish to buy, they will of course be expensive. I think your definition of "quality" is something like "as sold in Europe" or possibly "organic".
Stores seek to offer both affordable products and aspirational products. If there is no legitimate way to offer a better product than the standard one, some nonsense will be created. You'll get a fancy wrapper, arbitrary restrictions on how the product is made, and so on.
For this reason, you can get specially marked non-GMO salt. It's salt. Of course it doesn't contain genetically modified organisms! You are still welcome to pay extra for it.
