As we all know, many countries right now are experiencing out of control inflation, supply shortages and opportunist price-gouging that are all making the cost of living much higher.
But are there things that you’ve been surprised by how cheap they (still) are?
Last week I needed to buy a bed. I was astonished to find a lot of choice for less than $300. In the end I paid $280 for a king size bed including mattress, headboard, two built-in drawers and delivery. It’s not a luxury brand obviously, but it’s perfectly adequate.
Even if I later decide to upgrade, and so put this bed in the guest room, it will still feel like a great deal.
A friend needs the cheapest possible new battery for a 2003 Honda Pilot, because the car will be sold in a few months. $55 (no missing 1) from Walmart, with a 1 year warranty.
Postage. People bitch and moan about that and the postal service in general. But to me it remains amazing that for only 58 cents, I can send a piece of paper from here in Hawaii all the way to Maine if I want to.
(Not sure why the pic isn’t showing.)
It’s cheaply made, and some of the buttons are finicky, but by george, it’s a genuine scientific caculator, for less than some candy bars cost.
Every time people get up in arms over a, literal, one cent increase for a service they use maybe a few times a month, I remind them of the same thing. I can mail something clear across the country, if I get the address wrong, they’ll figure out where it’s supposed to go and if they can’t, they’ll send it all the way back to me, all for less than a dollar.
Try doing that with a private service. UPS would be at least $15-$20 to do the same thing and if they have to correct the address, even as simple as changing Ave to St, you’ll get dinged $18 for that.
$70 for a halfway decent chair that will support my considerable weight at IKEA. Cushion included. I’m loving it. My landlord tore out my old, decrepit couch a few days ago and assembled my new chair, not in that order, and now I’ve got the chair facing the television, instead of the previous status quo, where the TV was to my left.
I have paper subscriptions to several magazines. A few years ago somewhere in transit the cover got torn off my copy of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Despite the fact that it no longer had the mailing label, it showed up in my mailbox with the address handwritten on it.
That’s absolutely stunning, a real scientific calculator for $1.25. Of course I have one I downloaded free. RPN too.
In 1965, there was an ad in Scientific American for an electronic calculator for $1600, or for $2000 if you needed square roots. That would be over $10,000 in today’s money.
I’m not sure if they’re “surprisingly” cheap, but I’m impressed that something as useful as paper matchbooks are so cheap that businesses give them away as a promotion.
If you don’t mind not having envelope seals, you can get some Hallmark greeting cards 2/$1.00 at Dollar Tree. For someone like me who loves giving people cards, and has a limited budget, this is a life saver.
(But for my Christmas cards, I go with fox-themed cards from one of my favorite webcomic creators, the OzFoxes. This also helps support a small business.)
How about a USB drive that holds 10-20X what a hard drive would have held in the 90’s for a few bucks.
In fact, that’s another thing companies stick their logo on and give away.
Holding that much data back then would have cost the average user thousands of dollars and now most people have a pile of them in a cabinet/drawer somewhere.
I know, right? The first time we got a 1 GB hard drive, I wondered how in the hell I would ever possibly use all that space. Now, hell, I have 20 GB of music alone on my phone.
I think I got my first 1 gig drive sometime in college (98-02). Before that it was a big deal when we added a second HD drive to our desktop, increasing it’s storage from 80mb to 280mb. That bought us a few months of not having to uninstall one program to install the one you want to use today, which will get uninstalled a few hours later when you want to play a game. And, doing that meant digging up a rubber banded bundle of 3 or 4 or 12 floppy disks.
Insert Disk 2, Insert Disk 3, Insert Disk 4, Insert Disk 1, Insert Disk 2, Insert Disk 5, Insert Disk 6, Insert Disk 2, Insert Disk 3, NO DISK IN DRIVE INSERT DISK AND TRY AGAIN OK CANCEL , Insert Disk 5. and on and on and on for 15 minutes.
And did those feet in ancient times walk… 