I can go online and order a large area rug with hundreds of color and pattern options and it gets shipped from China to a warehouse then to me and it costs less than breakfast ingredients for the week.
Cheap rugs are great but I think they are making you pay too much for your breakfast ingedients
productive capacity can drastically reduce the socially necessary labor time to produce a given item
true, but also imperialism enforces drastically unequal exchange of socially necessary labor time
It's kind of astounding how much you can get for so little. And not just due to exchange rates or heavy exploitation, but also massive increases in productive forces.
I got a nice cotton washable runner rug for a pet (so that I could machine wash it if needed and so it was pet safe) and it ended up being like $12.
On the other hand I accidentally bought a $30 scratch off ticket today and won nothing
The $5 to $10 dollar zone has kind of fucked my perception of cost. I open online stores and everything is sold for that price. There are complex devices/circuits on Aliexpress being sold for that much. Household products are sold for that much on Amazon. Couple it with frequent discounts, sales, and whatever in physical stores, everything is sold for that much. Basically I'm unable to understand if something should probably cost less than $5 and that I'm overpaying, or on the other end I auto-reject things that cost more than $10.
Links or it didn't happen. (Seriously though last time I bought a rug I got screwed and I need another one soon.)
