They Are The Same!!!

Last week, my mechanical pencil gave up on me. I had abused it for about 4 years.

I had always wanted to buy a shaker mechanical pencil. Never owned one before. With this opportunity, I went to a book shop and shopped around for one.

I looked around for quite a while, finally settling for one. It was pretty expensive according to my standard. It was about $2.70. My initial budget was about $1.50. Well, since it was my first shaker mechanical pencil, I decided to burst my budget. Happily, I bought my first Pilot shaker mechanical pencil. And it was purple.

Few days ago, my wife told me that she had bought a shaker mechanical pencil. She showed me and coincidentally, it looked exactly like mine. Almost similar except that her pencil was about 0.01mm longer than mine. And it was purple too. I thought my wife and I had telepathy. Ha.

She then asked me to guess the price of the pencil. I guessed around $2.10, thinking my wife usually goes for a bargain. She replied, "80 cents." I was totally shocked. Besides being a Chinese brand, all else was the same as my Pilot mechanical pencil. Why did I then have to pay more than 3 times what my wife paid for? She added that she could have purchased 3 mechanical pencils at the price of $2. I felt disgusted. The 3 pencils would probably last me 12 years. Yet I paid $2.70 for only one. (By forking out another 10 cents, I could easily had gotten 4 Chinese branded mechanical pencils, and that would have lasted me 16 years.)

Disgruntled, I checked the internet for the company that produced my wife’s purchase. It was a manufacturer of mechanical pencils. Maybe Pilot outsourced the manufacturing process to them, marked up the price by many times and sell to fools like myself. While the Chinese company simply sold the extras at a low price. And they could do so probably because the manufacturing cost was very low. Imagine the Chinese company can still make a profit by selling the pencils at 80 cents. I wonder how much profit Pilot made.

I decided to buy the brand "GiLiFa" shaker mechanical pencil next time and not Pilot.