guitarchitect said:
I don't think there's enough appreciation, by customers in general, about the implications of high quality control.
There isn't much appreciation by the bulk of people what it takes to make anything. People just think the stuff is magically made some place and tend to only think of raw material cost (maybe) and not much more. It's often very hard for folks to understand that to make something low price, you have to spend a vast amount of money designing it, the manufacturing methods, machines, etc to get there. This is why Value Engineering exist and why someone can justify spending an entire year to save 1 cent from the cost of a product. It may be only 1 cent, but if the manufacture uses 2 million of them a year, that person just paid for their existence that year. People tend to think cars are expensive but don't understand that the manufacture prices the parts down to the 1/100th of a cent. .0001 Dollars sounds insane, but again if you use say 4 of something in a car, and you make 4 models of car that sell 250,000 units a year, that is 4 million parts, x 6 year run of production so thats 24,000,000 units. Or 2,400 dollars. That sort of thing adds up, that 1/100th of a cent might have just been a tiny amount of metal or plastic trimmed off. Few products can justify that sort of development money, thus they cost more on the production side. Festool isn't that big of a company. They can't have someone spend 1 year working to save a few bucks on something, it will never pay for that effort. So things are going to be much more expensive than they could be on a much higher volume company.
If people say what goes in to making most products, more importantly on the engineering/manufacturing engineering side people would never think things are expensive. You get into seeing the real world of developing cars you would think a basic econobox would cost a million bucks to buy.
When I design stuff, the reality is if I spend even a few more hours on something, I can make it a bit cheaper. But that time cost money, and well, time. You can only optimize stuff so far or you never get the cost back. Volumes matter to, I make stuff that will almost all be machined. It's the cheapest method for what I make due to volume, there is no tooling, and bend/weld will cost a ton in labor (plus be a bad part). The block of metal sounds expensive, and the machine that carves it is expensive, and they person who programs it isn't cheap. But once ready, the price keeps going down with everyone made. Same for any company. They have to assume how many they will make, factor it into their plans and hope it works.
The other factor people forget is the price of any product isn't representing the price to make that particular product. It's a company as a whole paying the bills. Every product they loose money on has to be paid for by one that makes money. Back to car industry. They loose money on everyone sold on the low end cars. The high end stuff has to pay for the losses on the low end ones. But bigger picture different things get spread across everything. A cheap econobox offsets CAFE for the big expensive car.
Running an extrusion, cutting it, silkscreen and sticking some stuff on a rail isn't costing them much at all. The biggest rails probably cost them a couple dollars, maybe 20 bucks to make. But it's steady money to be had. It's an essential part of the system, you aren't going to sell them with a low margin. Those rails need to cover prices of other parts of Festool that don't pour in money.
Unless people stop buying, they will carry on as is. They are not a community owned non-profit co-op.
