I’ve seen red ones and, less often, minis in stores from time to time. I’d like to try the Blue Java, which supposedly taste like vanilla ice cream (though apparently they’re only blue until they ripen).
One of the main issues is that Cavendish are-by banana standards- unusually sturdy, and good for long-distance shipping. They also respond very predictably to the ripening procedures we have. Here in the UK, Cavendish get shipped in in bulk, other varieties are air-freighted.
I’ve certainly heard that’s the main issue if we lose Cavendish as a viable variety- there are plenty of other bananas, many of which taste great, and many of which are grown for local consumption, but there’s none that ship as well or that we can control ripening so well for. Even if they were grown on the same scale, no other variety we know could come close in price.
Plus there’s the lead-in time in growing a new resistant variety; they’re not fast to grow from tissue culture. We could realistically have a decade of bananas being a luxury item outside of areas they’re grown, even if a new variety resistant to this strain of Fusarium fungus that was good for transporting was developed. And what happens to the commercial banana growers in the meantime…
Seconded. You can get 100 hours of entertainment from a $3 game and play it anywhere! Bus, subway, airplane. By contrast, watching cable TV on your couch for 100 hours costs $100 AND you have to sit through horrible commercials constantly and anger-provoking crawls along the bottom of the screen AND you don’t even get the full content because they cut out parts of the shows to add more commercials or censor the language. Why do people complain about the $3 video game?
Linux and open-source software in general.
I can use software which is tested, maintained, and developed by and for businesses around the world, with large amounts of care and quality put into it, and which is, empirically, of a high quality and with a high degree of fit and finish, all for a trivial cost. Back in the 1980s, roughly equivalent software (a Unix clone with a nontrivial userspace) would have cost hundreds of dollars, going by old advertisements for Coherent, and it doesn’t go away. With macOS or Windows, I’d be constantly fighting the system to maintain a workflow that works for me, and I’d lose the fight as UI designs and whole pieces of software get taken away from me with mandatory upgrades. With Linux and open-source software, that doesn’t happen. Stuff keeps working.
Anyone mention toothpaste yet? I get a large tube of Aim, Pepsodent or Ultra Bright for 79 cents or a buck at he Dollar Tree. Considering the problems and expenses it helps prevent that’s quite a bargain.
Which had the purchasing power of ~ $2300 today.
Thanks for looking that up!
Hypodermic syringe. Last one I bought at Walmart was 23c, and you can buy a single one. What other machine-made article with moving parts can you buy with a coin and get change?
And it is guaranteed sterile if the packaging is undamaged.
This 3-cent microcontroller. Actually $0.0315.
What precisely do we have here? The manufacturer started with a disk of atomically perfect crystalline silicon. It went through a process involving dozens or hundreds of steps on equipment that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The design has probably a million or so components and is exact to maybe a few dozen nanometers.
The wafer is cut into thousands of individual dice, which are then packaged. Packaging involves connecting hair-thin gold wires from the external pins to the die, then encasing the whole thing in molded plastic. Externally, the dimensions are accurate to a few micrometers.
The result is a small embedded computer. It’s not powerful (it has only 64 bytes of RAM), though in raw computation it probably competes with the Apollo guidance computer. It enough for any device with a bit of logic to it. Within arm’s reach I have some computer speakers, a flashlight, a cordless drill, some digital calipers, and a few other things. This 3-cent microcontroller would be sufficient for all of them, to handle the buttons, LEDs, and various bits of internal logic. It’s incredible that any individual product could be as cheap as this, let alone something this sophisticated.
It sounds jokey, but the secret to the microcontroller and the syringe is they make it up on the volume.
It is precisely because these things are squirted out by the millions per week that they don’t cost $100 each to be built on simple tooling sorta by hand.
Modern mass mostly-automated production is a massive stimulant to everything in our economy. If we were still making stuff WWII-style w skilled factory hand-work, we’d all be living a lot more poorly.
You’ve hit on the reason why almost everything in the US is cheaper than abroad – Economy of Scale. Even the jar label is cheaper per piece, if you print a million in US instead on ten thousand in Chile…
All true, but by my lights the microcontroller is more amazing. A reasonable approximation of a modern syringe could have been made in medieval times. Sure, it would be made of glass, and perhaps the piston would be a blob of wax or the like. The needle could be made by stretching some steel tube. It might have taken a couple of skilled craftsmen a day to make. So it went from the equivalent of a couple hundred bucks then to 23 cents today.
The microcontroller however could not have been manufactured for any price a century ago. And for a few decades after that, only a much slower approximation. A single instance of this 3-cent product sent back a few centuries would have been world-changing–it could compute log tables, trig tables, eclipse and tide schedules, general planetary/orbital stuff, and so on (it’s fun to imagine how they could have actually used it with Victorian or medieval technology).
Sometimes this comes back to bite. My BP monitor was of decent quality. But because the manufacturer found he could get switches for 2c instead of 3c, my switch broke after a few months, turning a useful $12 device into an $11.99 paperweight.
Firewood. It’s hardwood, cut down, sawn, split, dried, sewn into a handy mesh bag, and displayed by the entrance to our local grocery store, for pennies per log.
And for some reason imported from Estonia.
2 things to mention here. First, if your local grocery store is selling bananas at, let’s call it, 60¢/lb or less, they’re likely breaking even or even losing money. Bananas are a very common loss leader and, for whatever reason, people pay very close attention to the price. Years ago, when we raised our price to 39¢ after probably a decade of them being 29¢, people called us to confirm it when they heard it from friends.
Second, as far as shipping. Bananas are shipped very, very green. If you bought them like that, it would be weeks before they’d ripen. They’re shipped like this both because they’re considerably more resistant to bruising (they’re really hard) and they won’t go bad. Major cities are going to have ripening facilities. The bananas are put into rooms that are pumped with ethylene gas to start the ripening process*. Temperature and humidity controlled storage help maintain everything and, as a grocery store, we can order them pretty much at whatever shade of yellow/green (called stages) that we want.
*This is the science behind putting a tomato or other piece of ripe fruit in a paper bag with a banana to ripen it. The ripe fruit will give off ethylene gas which will ripen the banana faster.
Agreed. I often say something like
All the money and ingenuity on Earth could not have built this {e.g. 64GB MicroSD card} when I was in grad school. Much less when I was a kid.
Whether we’re talking a FitBit, a USB stick given away as trade show swag, a GPS receiver, or the supercomputers we each carry a couple of with us everywhere we go, microelectronics is truly in a class utterly by itself in how far we’ve come in 40-60 years. It’s on par with the original post-Big Bang cosmic inflation in just how much new territory has opened in how short a time.
Nano-tech in general might eventually rise to the same rate of growth/change, but the obstacles are formidable.
Given the genuine physical / quantum obstacles to Moore’s Law continuing too many more cycles, I often wonder what that means for the speed limit of human tech progress and of associated economic growth and financial returns.
More poetically, our tech and our economy, and therefore our society has had JATO/RATO bottles attached for the last 50 years of climb. Once those burn out the trajectory will be very different.
Probably. But even at 70¢/lb, they’re significantly cheaper than apple, oranges, pears, strawberries, cherries, melons and significantly cheaper than grapes (which always surprise me with how much those cost). Glancing at my local grocer’s online page, which might not be in-store pricing but should give a frame of reference, the only thing really close that isn’t a sale price are lemons. I’ll pick a banana on the run over a lemon every time.
See, to me it seems pricey. It’s like $5-$8 per bundle (about 25 pounds) and if I’m just having a campfire outside, I need about a bundle and a half to go for a couple hours.
At least for some of those, I’m guessing a good part of the cost is cheap labor on banana plantations in South/Central America and a year round season vs less cheap labor on domestic labor (ie Washington and New York apples) with a short season that then have to be stored in warehouses during the off season.
ETA, another thing is that bananas are going to be a whole lot less susceptible to losing an entire crop in a matter of hours/days due to a freeze or a flood. Both of those are common with things like oranges, berries, cherries, peppers, lettuce etc.