I recently had the very great pleasure of needing to look at and with the intention of buying…, a pram.
THAT PLEASURE QUICKLY TURNED TO PAIN..!
Just to clarify, a pram is that little device we use to push a baby around in, 4 wheels and a seat, perhaps a sunshade as an extra. I’m not talking about a motorised vehicle, no electronic device or controls, just a bunch of plastic and cloth and weighing in at about 13kg’s. A good old fashioned perambulator.
SO WHAT’S WITH THE ASTRONOMICAL PRICE TAG..?
2000 bucks for about a hundred pieces of plastic, aluminium and cloth, designed by a couple of blokes and mass produced in a third world country with cheap labour. Not a single component requires specialist machinery to make, nor specially trained personnel to assemble, nor hundreds of thousands of hours to develop… but that’s not what the price tag would have you believe..!
Lance Armstrong and other professional cyclists have custom made bicycles, hand made by craftsman with tens of years experience, thousands of components with an equal amount of hours of design for each, materials like titanium, chrome, stainless steel, carbon fibre to mention a few, that are expensive… and thousands of hours of labour in manufacturing and assembling the individual components. These marvels of engineering cost about 2000 bucks..!
You can get a fully roadworthy motor car, with its hundreds of thousands of components and millions of hours of labour and billions of dollars of design and research… for about 2000 bucks..!
WHERE’S THE RIP OFF..?
The prams’ the rip off! It’s like the fabled ‘W’ word we all shy-ed away from using when preparing for a wedding, mention the word ‘wedding’ and suddenly your flowers were 3 times as expensive, photographs became 5 times the price, everything rose in price if it was for the wedding – because all vendors would have to say was…’you do want it to look just right for your wedding day, don’t you..?’ too which there is absolutely no comeback other than ‘Yes’ and the inflated price tag.
Well baby vendors are just the same… ‘you do want the best for your baby, don’t you..?’ – playing the mothers heartstrings… and guaranteed to get the desired ‘Yes’ answer AND a sale of some extortionately priced pram.
Makes me sick to the gills… and I thought having a baby was supposed to be pleasurable…
Tags: pram