Get your wallets out

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Posted By: ramram 

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2783125247&category=31719

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Posted By: Julie

..did you hear about the shipload of rubber duckies that got spilled when the ship cracked open on something in the Pacific Ocean, and people tracked them for 2 years, learning about the tides?

They were very durable rubber duckies.

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Posted By: Hankron

I notice that the seller has two auctions for the same item, one for $100 and one for $800. The sage collector, it should go without saying, will bid on the $100 one and let the fool waste his money on the $800 one.

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Posted By: ramram

..it's the most expensive photocopies I've ever had the pleasure to see.

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Posted By: Hankron

The difference in pricing reminds me of the story about a wealthy man who lived in the neighborhood where I grew up. Years before I knew who he was he invented a computurized weather communcations/graphics system. When he first came out the with the system, he went to various trade shows and television stations trying to sell his system. His asking price was something like two to three thousand dollars. There were no takers. He hired a marketing expert, asking him why he couldn't sell his system, which he knew was a fine system. The marketing expert said that, quite simply, his sell price was way too low. He said that an executive at a television station would wonder about the reliability of a system that was so cheap. On the advise of the marketer, he raised the price to about $20,000 and sold his system many times over. The system was widely used by local television stations to present weather graphics on television, and the inventor became rich.

The moral of the story: people are stupid.

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Posted By: brian p

The real message of that story is, in baseball card collecting terms, to get your cards graded, because there are fools out there willing to pay two to five times what the card is normally worth if it has that plastic coating and stamp of approval from some slipshod grading company.

Brian

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Posted By: Marc S.

There are many technological arenas where this is quite prevalent. A famous example that I've studied is the printer industry. The manufacturer -- seeking to expand market share into the "value" segmentation, produced the very same printer, with an extra device (e.g. more cost than the original) that essentially slowed the printer down by 50%. They were then able to sell the printer for 1/2 of what they sold the original printer for, thus exapnding their overall market. Obviously they made less margin on the second printer -- but they still made a profit. Seems kind of silly -- but it worked very well for them, and numerous others.....

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Posted By: Dave

I've worked for an electonics company for over 30 years. (Not in printers). It is common practice to bring out a low end product at a lower price, often a slowed down version of the original, due to all the wait statements in the control software . Of course, not only is the speed lower, but the feature set is limited. The lower purchase price opens the door for our salesmen, but most customers will buy the original product at full cost, because it really meets their needs better. So, a low cost offering raises sales of the higher priced unit. Sounds strange? No - Marketing 101