I just went to Walgreens where I bought Christmas lights, and it occurred to me- I just bought 100 individual multicolored lights, set in their holders, affixed to 20 or so feet of electrical cord, filled with electricity and neatly folded up in a box with five spare lights, all for only 1.99! Whereas on the same trip I bought a plain brown six foot extension cord with no lights, also for 1.99, and a cheap plastic flashlight with only one light, also for 1.99. Christmas lights are probably sweatshop made and I don’t know the mfg. process on them, but they are obviosuly not something that can roll off an assembly line or just stamped out a mold- there’s definitely a lot of handwork invovled, and even at 10 cents an hour for the labor, 1.99 for a set to me is a mindboggling low price, even for a seasonal item priced to sell.
The US Post Office. 41 cents to pick up a letter at your house, carry it clear across the USA and deliver it to the recipient’s door? Crimeny, it’s the bargain of the century!
You must mean something other than what this sounds like. They don’t fill with electricity till you plug them in.
Anything to do with computers- if I had to pick something it would be a computer CD drive. For as precisely made as those things have to be it’s amazing how little they cost.
Man, I think of this kind of thing all the time. So many things are so cheap, you wonder how they can even be shipped to the store, not to mention manufactured for that price. of course, having said that, I’m having trouble coming up with a great example right now. :smack:
Not a common everyday thing, but well I remember buying a badminton set for something like $12. 4 racquets, shuttlecocks, net, poles in a good-sized box. Boggles my mind to think of the materials, various production steps, logistics…
Slightly different topic, but I often think about how our every day life is premised on certain things being so cheap as to almost be free. Take paper in a large office, for example. Or paper clips or staples.
Paper cups, baggies… pretty much any product that is sold for a fraction of a cent per unit. A penny by itself buys so little, it is hard to think of the infrastructure existing to manufacture such products, turning them out such that they can be sold so cheaply. Certain foodstuffs surprize me as well. Someone had to plany, tend, pick, process, the raw materials, and then combine them into whatever finished product and ship them.
Really forces you to think about the economies of scale.
A gallon of gas. Yeah, I know all about the cost increase but still if you think about the cutting edge technology required to find the increasingly more remote fields and the tremendous amount of potential power produced by a gallon, it’s still one helluva deal.
Water. I pay between $20-30 every 3 months for water. That’s 3 months worth of showers, dishes, cooking, laundry and drinking (and the occasional watering if the plants) for pennies every day.
It’s cheaper, pound-by-pound to send a large human being clear across the USA by air, and letters don’t want scotch and soda in-flight. Actually, on many routes, the post office cleans up.
I remember the one I was thinking about the other day. I admit, it isn’t a common everyday item, but I keep aquaria and was at a Fish Swap buying fish food. I bought a bag of flake for $5 a pound. It is similar to the stuff you buy in pet shops, but in larger sheets. I read the ingredient list, and started thinking about all the steps required to harvest the raw materials, chop them up, mix them, spread them into sheets, dry them, then prepare them for shipping/packaging, and it really boggled my mind.
Common electrical kitchen appliances. Like toasters and waffle makers and stuff. $10-15 is amazing, considering you can buy something like a plate for $5.
Clothes. It’s hard to believe that you can buy clothing so cheaply, much more cheaply than you can sew it at home. Sure, for the most part it’s cheap clothes, but I still get lots of wear out of my 5/$20 T-shirts, for example.
Capacitors and resistors.
Ok, my corner of the world isn’t exactly standard.
The capacitors and resistors that make all your cellphones run?
I buy them for as little as 800/$1. That’s for a part made in Japan, packaged on something that looks like movie reel, shipped across the Pacific Ocean, put on a train and then a truck and delivered to our warehouse.
I’m considering buying resistors by the pound and using them instead of sand, on my driveway.
Garmin sells a GPS receiver that connects to a powered antenna and outputs NMEA navigation messages on a RS232 port, as well as a pulse-per-second timing signal accurate to something like a microsecond. So, there’s a disciplined quartz oscillator in there that helps model a value for time-of-day that is accurate to something like a nanosecond (when it’s estimating position to within a foot, which happens often enough to be interesting) to 10 nanoseconds (which happens much of the time if the view of the satellites is good).
This sells to end users in quantities of 1 for about $55.
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