Of course you could buy potato chips on E-Bay which sorta look like The Donald. But what common item is priced ridiculously enough to annoy you or make the venture capitalists and profiteers salivate?
-
Bottled water.
-
Movie theater popcorn.
If we’re talking common items where I factor in the cost of ingredients vs cost of final product, I think potato chips finally passed soda at the store (movie theater costs for popcorn and soda are still the biggest offender) for stupid costs.
I mean Lay’s Potato chips are 8 oz of potato and salt (plain to reduce variables) for 3.99 US. Plus the plastic bag, but I’m figuring it’s cost isn’t a big deal either. Meanwhile I can buy salt for for .69 per 26 ounce, and potatoes at 2.49 for 5 lbs.
Sure, there’s processing, oil, marketing and everything else. But… FFS.
According to an unattributed quora thread
a 2 oz bag cost roughly .12 to .15 to produce (not counting marketing and the rest), so if we did a 4x (although it’s probably less if anything) that’s a max of .60 cents to produce.
And considering the store brand is 2/3 of that cost . . . well, who knows.
That’s my personal I can’t believe it costs that much for something so common.
Texas Instruments puts maybe $10 worth of parts and electronics into their calculators that sell about $100 or so. They have a pretty tight grip on educators and math courses and testing that makes it hard for other companies like Casio to get a break in the market. It’s crazy how low-tech they are, especially compared to what a cell phone can do.
I think the issue is schools only want students to have access to basic functions in a calculator for classes. Handheld electronics are so powerful now you could easily cheat in a class that required math work. Heck, I cheated on a high-school physics exam in 1984 with a programmable calculator. Funny thing was, in the process of programming the calculator, I learned the math and was actually faster on my own than my limited calculator (I really learned the stuff and did not actually cheat).
It amazes me that schools have not identified 3-4 different calculators that are acceptable though so students have a choice and prices are pushed down.
Of course, this leads to another over-priced item:
- School books (mainly at the college level)
Pet peeve time…
“.12 cents” (from the quora cite but not shown in my quote) means 12 hundredths of one penny. Correctly expressed it’s either “.12 dollars” or “12 cents”.
Carry on.
Either way it’s a ripoff. Though we always know that small packages of anything are stupid expensive. E.g. nail polish is hundreds of dollars per gallon for what’s actually very ordinary enamel paint.
In what universe does the cost of producing an item only include the part costs?
Very recent thread:
Restaurants that can’t get a liquor license quickly go out of business. The profit on booze alone makes the difference between black ink and red ink.
I’d forgotten about that thread. However, I’m going with most overpriced. If the difference is too small the mods will do what they wish.
I wonder how much that’s a matter not of foregone booze income as such, or at least not only foregone booze income, but rather a problem of foregone volume from absent patrons who expect to get a drink with dinner and will simply reject going to any restaurant that doesn’t serve alcohol at all?
Not a rhetorical question, but also not one I know the answer to.
Same thing happened to Danny Dunn!
When I am traveling on business with people who are not constrained by the $35 limit on daily meals that we peons are, they have NEVER (sample size of at least 500 across many companies) been willing to go to a restaurant for dinner that does not serve alcohol. In fact the reputation of the “wine list” might be the number one criterion for selecting a restaurant among expense account business diners.
Software. Marginal cost close enough to zero to be unmeasurable, at least since we stopped shipping media.
And yes, I’ve made my living from a variety of software vendors for over 35 years, so I’m hardly complaining here!
Anecdotal but I have known two professional chefs and they both said that food was break-even. The profit was in the alcohol sales. And they meant more than their restaurants. They saw it as a general rule.
Of course, there are restaurants that sell only food and no booze (not the least fast food restaurants) but alcohol seems an important part to a successful restaurant.
When spending other people’s money it’s actually rather hard for one person to actually eat $500 of food. It’s trivial for them to actually drink $500 worth of wine / booze.
People everywhere seem to love sharing alcohol with others in public, looking for excuses beyond bars to do so.
A letter to the editor in the new Economist that touches on this, from the composer-in-residence of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.
There are many reasons other than music why people attend live concert performances. A shrewd talent buyer for a music venue once told me: “I don’t sell music, I sell beer.”
A friend of mine no longer drinks alcohol (been dry for at least five years…I forget).
When we have a meal out together I do not drink alcohol either (even though she says it is ok if I did).
I swear I can often see the disappointment on the server’s face when we only stick with water or iced tea.
This was the very first thing that came to my mind:
Ink for an ink-jet printer amounts to a couple thousand dollars a gallon. I read somewhere that black ink alone costs more per gallon than human blood.
The ink is probably worth a couple dollars. The accompanying hardware is what you pay for.
I’m going to probably ignite a poo-storm that most people, diabetic or not, will agree with, and say insulin.