{"id":452,"date":"2003-03-06T01:34:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-06T01:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/2003\/03\/06\/"},"modified":"2003-03-06T01:34:00","modified_gmt":"2003-03-06T01:34:00","slug":"452","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/2003\/03\/06\/452\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><image src=\"money.jpg\" alt=\"Hey! Get your own!\" border=0 height=144 width=180>Something very strange is going on with the prices of things&#8230; can anyone explain to me why I can buy a microwave or a 4-head VCR for $39 out at Target, but I just paid about $4 for a bag of cat litter? Somethin&#8217; ain&#8217;t right.<\/p>\n<p>OK, all right, I understand supply and demand, and cheap sweatshop labor, and economies of scale achievable through mass-production, and all of that. But what I don&#8217;t understand is how you can put together something like a calculator with 20 moving parts and electronic components that have to be screwed and soldered together, that even includes a battery, package it in a blister pack with a 4-color print job that has to be diecut, pack those in a box, send it across the Pacific on a boat, ship it to Auburn, and sell it at The Dollar Tree for <i>one freakin&#8217; dollar<\/i>!<\/p>\n<p>I mean, at some point, it has to be like the old story: we buy these widgets for $1.20 and we can only sell them for $1.00, but we make it up in volume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something very strange is going on with the prices of things&#8230; can anyone explain to me why I can buy a microwave or a 4-head VCR for $39 out at Target, but I just paid about $4 for a bag of cat litter? Somethin&#8217; ain&#8217;t right. OK, all right, I understand supply and demand, and &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/2003\/03\/06\/452\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chrisandjanet.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}