I was going to say that this looks like a case of a third party marketplace seller selling something at a ridiculous markup (you see odd things like this from time to time, particularly with discontinued or hard to find items)… And you can get this from other sellers for $199 as opposed to $265. But it does appear to just be a ridiculously expensive stapler, based on eBay.
Ah, but with this model, the staples are really really stapled!
“Heavy is good. Heavy is reliable. If it does not work you can always hit him with it.”
Also, in a reverse example to the story, Singer - the sewing machine company - made 1911 pistols in WWII.
But if I went to a machinist with diagrams and hired them to make the parts, it would still almost certainly cost me more than $265.
Certainly. But you can also get plier staplers from other manufacturers for FAR cheaper on Amazon. This one, this one and this one all seem like they would do the same job, at 1/10 the price.
Those appear to be assembled from stamped metal, rather than having been machined. There is a superficial resemblance, but the reliability would not be comparable.
Which is why you buy two. If the first one fails, you failover to the second one, and buy another backup. You’re still a couple hundred dollars ahead.
I like tools I can trust - 100 % guarantee is impossible but redundancy because I know the stuff I use is of mediocre quality sucks. (in the case of staplers I agree with you: more reliability is not worth 10 times the price of a normal one)
Oh yeah. For other tools? It’s definitely worth shelling out extra cash for higher quality goods. But a stapler? Nope.
$265? It’s not even red.
This I think would be irresponsible consumerism. If the product were to fail, then they would not have deserved double the business.
This makes it out to be a personal, rather than an engineering problem. “Ahead” connotes using money as a contest, rather than a neutral system of measurement. The question is not “How much money should I have?”, it is “How do I value this?”
You can upgrade it for like $10.
You’re arguing the ideal versus the practical.
For most of us the ideal isn’t always or even often the most viable solution.
And engineers understand there is a limit to how much you need to overbuild something for a job. The average staple user does not need something so durable.
I disagree. The actual mechanics and build of tools are the practical, whereas representing a real tangible tool with a made-up symbol such as money is clearly the ideal. What it demonstrably is, versus what we think it should be worth.
Sure.
I don’t disagree. But I think that these tradeoffs are much better made by evaluating real-world goals and resources, instead of depending upon some merchants deciding that it’s more crucial to make such decisions predicated upon hoarding a symbolic token (aka “profit margins”).
I was pretty sure this was another 87%-off item in the Boing Boing store. And it would still be overpriced.
Well, I initially scoffed at the fancy, expensive pencils and pens I’ve seen here, too…
At that price, shouldn’t it include the word “tactical” somewhere in the description?
I used to have a stapler but it kept scratching my monitor.
