Markup!

[MichaelVW]

I'm the sort of guy who keeps t-shirts even if they have a little hole or two, and drives cars until they try to kill me. So when I have to order stuff for the lab, even though I'm not spending my own money, sometimes I really have to grit my teeth.

What have you had to buy that had the most obscene markup? What piece of equipment or service was just inexplicably expensive?

My latest is a 10-position cyanide distillation apparatus that I may need to replace. It's a block of metal with holes in it that get hot, and it costs $10,000.

[KM-USA]

Leaning off topic, but do you drive an old VW, or are those just initials?

Because I drive a 1988 Mazda B2200 truck and a 1971 VW Convertible...yes, with cassette players.

Now, on topic: it seems that EVERYTHING for laboratories is quite expensive. What is really amazing is the discount, especially on stuff like HPLC solvents, that we get with our global discount contract. Sometimes (when I was doing that purchasing), prices would be like 25% of the regular price.

[CE Instruments]

My latest is a 10-position cyanide distillation apparatus that I may need to replace. It's a block of metal with holes in it that get hot, and it costs $10,000.

If they could sell as many of these as VW Beetles then the price would be substantially lower You are paying for all the support staff etc. not just the block of metal that gets hot.

[DR]

My favorite is the "proprietary" computer that goes with any chromatography data system or other instrument. It is quite common to see ~$600USD worth of PC components shoe-horned into a little box and marked up 15x.

[CE Instruments]

Yep as a rep it was always tough trying to justify why the PC we supplied cost 3 times more than the same one directly from the supplier Normally I lost it in the overall package, gave it as part of the discount etc. Why did we do it ? Well in the early days all PCs were not equal. It costs a fortune when we let a company buy their own and some idiot in IT knew better and bought a PC without an essential card or that had something that clashed with the software
It can all go wrong anyway. Back in the early days of Windows 95 we at Fisons VG were using Digital PCs. We had just launched a new version of Masslab and started getting blue screen of death failures around the world. New PCs were shipped off , often with engineers but the failures kept occurring. Once the screen came up it rarely ran again for more than an hour. Systems seemed to be OK at the factory so we switched back to the old software, still issues !! Eventually longer tests found that even in the factory this occurred. One sensible engineer got a PC out of the box and left it running for a couple of days without loading our software. Sure enough it crashed with the same error Digital were supplying us with PCs that were not compatible with Windows Following the court cases they were bought by HP