Why are ping-pong balls so expensive?
September 6, 2005We have a dusty old ping-pong table in the basement of the building where I work, and a number of us go down there sometimes to play. We’re not very good but we are very angry and thus we’ve destroyed a fair number of the balls.
So this past weekend I stopped in at the Dicks’ Sporting Goods to buy some replacement balls. They had an amazing selection–I had expected a couple options but there was a whole little kiosk with different color choices, though always in a six-pack. You can’t buy a pack of four or eight, you can only buy the six-pack of ping-pong balls.
The thing is, they started at $2.99 and went up from there. So even at the cheapest price, that’s 50 cents per ping-pong ball. How can a tiny little nodule of plastic cost that much? It seems way out of proportion to the amount of material used in the construction of the ball.
Anyway, I picked up the six-pack of orange balls, deciding those were in keeping with our corporate colors.
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