On 08/28/2016 05:19 PM, Aslan Ramos wrote:
et me say the cheapest USB stick here in Brazil, which is already enough to store a Live persistent system, is 8GB and it's fairly easy to find by R$ 20,00 (something between $5 and $7). That's the price for the final consumer, which includes importation taxes (we don't make it here), public taxes (one of the higher, if not the highest, in the world) and, of course, the profit of the seller, distributor, manufacturer...
I worked my way though university vacations so as to fund the studies, and a most part of that was working in retail stores. I'm sure many here have similar experiences, and further, have extended something similar into their adult life. I did observe that the store had to "pay the rent", as well as my wages and a dividend to the investors. I saw retail mark-up that varied between 100% and 1,000% depending on (a) popularity of the item, a trade-off between "all the market could bear" and "competition"[1] on the one hand and 9B0 how quickly the item moved though the sales pipeline. Despite what the business schools and text-books say, there was a lot of intuition involved. As Aslan point out, there is a pipeline before the item gets to the stores. That too involves storage space, handling equipment, wages of the people involved. Not just the importer's warehouse, but the shipping containers and handling. All in all it means that for the $7 he pays the FOB manufacturer is around $10 or less. Even so, what's the minimum quality needed for marketing material? Remember, I started talking about this from a marketing POV and some of those 2G sticks from 5 years ago are dying. A Kingston or SansDisk is one thing; "yer bog standard bit of junk" for marketing is another. I see 64G sticks advertised on eBay for about C$7. Are they really re-branded 8G devices that a proper scan with F3 -- http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/ -- will uncover? BTDT, yes, but also got some 32G and 64G chips for my phone and camera that were good deals. YMMV. At least eBay offers a guarantee in the face of fly-by-night vendors. All the same, while a reasonable size USB is nice for experimenting with LiveLinux I use the more proven technology of 5G DVDs for my weekly backups. Adequate Quality DVDs for this purpose are around $0.05 each retail. Yes higher quality ones are 10x or 20x that. Again YMMV. So we have classes of usage: marketing, distribution, experimentation, backup. perhaps when QA and familiarity has driven the price of good devices down those boundaries will blur and become irrelevant. [1] I suggest you look up the term "Oligopoly" -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org