[Closed] Incredibly cheap, incredibly mundane items

"What are your overheads?"

Two words:

sweatshop

Potatoes.

sweatshop

Noel Edmonds darkest episode.....ever.

Two words:
sweatshop

and the second?

and the second?

irony

Loads of things on ebay!

Small electronic stuff like SD card adapters and charger leads for like 99p or a pound for 2.

Phone screen protectors - £15 in the shops. 50p on the bay

I recently bought a couple of Go Pro type mounts off ebay - £1.99 each! People pay upwards of £30 just to have a name brand on them... they are the [i]same thing![/i]

Are these mundane? Not sure.

Old John Peel fave that 😀 See also "I didn't get where I am today by being a right git"

My wife buys earrings on amazon for like £2.50, AND that includes the cost of getting them from the other side of the world to our front door!

I seem to remember that a T-shirt costs 1 pence (it might be 10 pence but I think it was one) to ship around the world by container ship. So deduct that from like £2.50 and you have like £2.49. Advertising/marketing, another 1p off. So you've got like £2.48 to spunk on a bit of wire and glass/plastic. Even with labour at German union rates rather than Chinese sweat shop rates I think that is a profitable business model, given the speed at which these things are shelled out of the machine or production line.

I one ordered an ipod to car radio cable from Amazon, to take on holiday. It was also like £2.49 but it didn't arrive in time so I spent like £13 at the airport for a similar but much better packaged item. The original cable arrived about two weeks after we got back from hols. As you say, it seems impossible but really it tells you what things really cost to make.

We can buy, good quality 2m CAT5e patch leads for about 70p (plus vat and shipping) from our supplier.

Sometimes you can get caught out without one in the car/van, ASDA and Tesco sometimes sell them in-store, they're about £15 each.