Der wunderplastik razor continues to do its job consistently, comfortably and without fanfare.
I've written in previous posts about remarkable we should find it that manufacturers can meet a human need so inexpensively. We find ourselves so surrounded by these everyday miracles that we usually fail to recognize them. According to my man Bryan Callahan at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 40% of the world lacks access to clean water and sanitation. Yet in many parts of this country, we freak out when we have water that we have to boil before drinking, even though it flows freely from the taps.
Perhaps it's worth looking at consumer products that haven't gotten substantially cheaper, or whose cheap versions aren't any good. It really hit me this weekend: good bicycles cost more than they should.
Wal-Mart and Target sell lots of bikes for under $200. While these prices make them affordable to a wide range of Americans (or a range of wide Americans, if you want to be snide), most bike aficionados believe the bikes don't hold up very well. Generally speaking, more durable, better-made bikes come from bike shops and start around $400. They go up from there. Quite a bit.
Bike prices have lived like this, accounting for inflation, as long as I've ridden bikes. But why do decent bikes cost so much when, say, cheap watches work pretty well? My beloved $13 Casio tells time not just as well as a $6,000 Rolex, but better than it thanks to quartz accuracy. It also has a stopwatch, an alarm and day/date display.
"But wait," says the watch purist. "They're not the same thing." Exactly. Watch manufacturers worked with the direction of "give people something that tells the time reliably" and ended up with two completely different products. The Casio is made mostly of plastic with electronic innards while the Rolex features high-grade stainless-steel construction and mechanical time-telling equipment.
Go over to the bike aisle in Target and you'll see that most of the bikes there are simply cheaper versions of the bikes in bike stores. They use cheaper steel tubes for the frame and have more plastic in the components. If you wanted to, you could unscrew most of the bits from the cheap bike and put it on the good bike and vice-versa. The same swap does not apply for the Casio and the Rolex.
Sure, the Chinese and the Indians make some pretty decent cheap bikes (which sell in their home markets for a lot less than in the US), but they basically just make bikes from the early 20th century with cheap labor. The bikes don't differ radically from what's out there already.
I understand than an Israeli entrepreneur has developed a bike made out of cardboard, which starts to get at the issue I'm discussing. It uses fundamentally different materials, construction techniques and even drivetrain (an automotive fan belt replaces the chain, for instance). The inventor expects them to retail for under $30 based on a materials cost of $12.
I wonder what took someone so long?
Presumably, the economics of a good, cheap bicycle argue against its creation. That is, first-worlders have signaled an interest in $200 bikes even if they aren't very good while the developing world, which could use a good, cheap bike, probably doesn't offer appealing enough profit margins.
No wonder so many Indians grow their beards long. Schick and Gillette probably have little interest in selling a 25¢ razor.
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