Club Obi Wan

I just found an old ad from the 1930's for a Sears Hercules horsehide half-belt jacket. You could have your choice of black or mahogany. For the uninitiated, these were high quality jackets that, based on my observations, helped to inspire the Aero and Lost World's 1930s half-belt designs of today. The cost? $7.79!!!! I converted that to 2015 US dollars to adjust for inflation it it amounts to about 140 bucks. 140 bucks??? That's the cost of your average mall jacket!! Why are we paying almost ten times that much for the same jackets today, regardless of the leather used??? Maybe what's driving these prices is that more people just have money to burn these days. If Indy were alive today, he might be running around in a nylon windbreaker! Your thoughts?

Higher labor costs due to the universal demand for a higher standard of living with less hours worked.

Increased overhead due to government regulation and increased taxation at multiple levels.

Tougher environmental laws increasing production costs.

Greater focus on bottom line revenues and increased profit margins.

Overall supply/demand issues.

I could probably think of a dozen more.

Mostly it's a completely different economy. Ordinary workers (and I incoude owners and providers of capital) used to support a much smaller number of parasitic "extras" and did not feel they were entitled to own one or two vacation homes, three or four automobiles and to be able to take multiple expensive vacations every year. Now they do, and they have to support hundreds of regulatory compliance and other consultants and professionals (who have similar lifestyle expectations) whose only contribution is to fill out forms and file paperwork whose only purpose is providing someone with a politically created job.

Basically, stuff costs more because the money has to be spread a lot wider and thinner.

Ridgerunner and I were typing at the same time.

I think you have it surrounded. We're used to 'disposable income', and are willing to shell out money for items that folks back in the '30's would just shake their head at and think completely useless/worthless for daily use.

If you don't believe that, go to houses built around the turn of the 20th century and look at the size of those closets compared to the closets of today.

They had very few items of clothing. We have ROOMS to put stuff in, and most of the time they're STILL not big enough. I mean, who needs more than 40 pairs of shoes?

So, a jacket purchase in the 1930's of $140 was considered a lifetime investment to the buyer.....something he'd buy once, and use until it fell completely apart in, say, 40 or 50 years from day of purchase, and even THEN they'd think long and hard about it, as they could just as easily have purchased a canvas coat for less than half that price.

We also equate high price with longevity today. If it costs a lot, it MUST be made tougher, right? Sometimes that's true, but these days that cost is absorbed in the cost of labor rather than material, so there's a lot of grey area in the product pipeline. Vendors also want to earn as much as the market will bear. If folks are willing to pay 10 times the price it takes to actually produce the item, why shouldn't they ask that price? Until the market says 'no', there's nothing to rein that in.

Supply and demand.

Different times, my friend, and completely different thought processes.

Of course, a dollar was worth a dollar back then, not pennies on the dollar as it is today.

JMO

Regards! Michaelson

All great points gents! Thanks for your highly informative answers!

Heck, Ridge and I were just sitting on the front porch drinking our morning coffee.

You caught us at a good time.

Regards! M

(Would you mind passing me the cream and sugar)

You got it, just don't hide the spoon like you did last time.

Whip one up for me . . . I'm headed that way!

I'll put on another pot.

Regards! M

Poor M trips over all those pairs of shoes he has!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Don't you believe it! I'm lucky to have 4 pairs at any given time.

Regards! M

Sears was/is a big company. They were producing and selling a lot of jackets. Companies like Aero, Good Wear, Bill Kelso, Lost Worlds, etc. are small operations. Their jackets are custom made, one at a time. They are made by hand. The cost of operating a business like this is quite high when you consider how much work goes into one jacket, and the investment these folks have put into their equipment and employees.

Think of it this way. You could go to Target and buy dishes for your kitchen. Or you could hire a potter to make each dish for you by hand. It just depends on what is important to you. Hand made versus mass produced.

Now that said, were mass produced goods in the first half of the 20th century better quality than now? I think it depends on the product. Certainly Sears leather jackets were better quality than what you would find at the mall today, or even L.L. Bean now. Ditto for hats. Compare a vintage Stetson to a new one.

If you are going to compare apples to apples. You would need a hand made leather jacket price during that time period to compare. I don't think that I would want to purchase a leather jacket from Sears as opposed to a Wested. Just my thoughts

Big company yes, but they did not manufacture what they sold. They bought their goods from factories and suppliers who made their goods by hand because that's all there was. All they had was sewing machines, workbenches, patterns and scissors and craftsmen who did things much the same way the current custom maker does now. So comparing 1940s retail and 2010s retail is not an apples to apples comparison. Nor is comparing large scale modern mass production to what passed for mass production 80 years ago.

Before the 1990s we did not have CAD-CAM drafting, digital printing, lasers, and robotics like the larger manufacturers do. Yet with all that, the stuff we buy today that is more machine/computer made costs more than the old handmade stuff. Why? Insistence on a greater return on capital, ever higher revenues, and an insatiable demand for a higher standard of living and sense of entitlement.

Good points guys! Back in the day when I was growing up, Sears provided high quality roughwear. I would not turn up my nose at a Hercules jacket or at anything else they provided back then. We mail ordered all our workwear. I don't have experience with Wested, but I think the Sears Hercules jackets would compare favorably with Aero or Lost Worlds today. All these types of jackets are/were sewn with machines, so no big difference there.