In message , Lobster
writes
Do you not wonder what kind of exploitation is going on to provide
you with a £3 kettle?

-- Ron

Possibly the same that provides a £20 kettle which has had an
'acceptable / known' transfer stuck on it to give the retailer a
profit. The far eastern factory probably sells them for £1 to
whoever will take them - and will stick a name on to suit.
Possibly more expensive devices do simply represent a bigger
mark-up, with equal exploitation at the actual manufacturing stage.
I don't know.

And how can a far eastern factory produce something like that for £1 ?
Once agin, the question is: what kind of exploitation is going on to
provide you with a kettle at that price?
I have no doubt that a huge amount of exploitation goes on, but
looking at
prices or pay rates can be very misleading without looking at the relative
buying power, cost of living, etc.

Absolutely - it's totally simplistic just to make assumptions.

Example: about 5 years ago I visited Thailand with my family and took
the chance to get off the tourist trail a bit. I remember in
particular visiting a restaurant in a small town where we had a
fantastic slap-up meal for five: total cost (including beers) was 3 GBP.

This wasn't some wooden hut in the middle of a jungle but a very clean
and respectable 'proper' restaurant and clearly we paid the going rate
to make the place viable - we'd have paid 20 or 30 times that much for
an equivalent meal back home.

We were still pretty surprised at how little it cost, and I think we
gave a tip of two quid; which we realised afterwards was actually the
wrong thing to do. The owner was mortified by the 'huge' amount we
left, and with hindsight it probably seemed really patronising: bit
like a wealthy American tourist dropping a bundle of fifties as a tip
in a UK restaurant (though I doubt that would cause much embarrassment
here!)

Yes, a few years ago things were good and cheap. Now the price of petrol
and rice has rocketed. You could eat for 25p and travel by minibus would
be 10s of pence across a city

I bought a 4 bedroom house in a complex in Indonesia for £21,000 the
year before last. Prices are rising fast and outpacing peoples' ability
to afford basics. China is buffered from this a bit, but one of the next
things to fall in our global house of cards economy will be cheap goods
from the far easton which we rely because its the only place left with
any real industry



--
geoff