In conjunction with a recent sports injury, I unearthed an old pair of crutches that we still had in storage from an incident many years ago that required walking assistance. They were in good shape with a small exception – here the hand grips had somewhat disintegrated over the long period of time since the last use. Since I cannot drive and as everybody would probably do nowadays, I went on Amazon to look for it – and sure enough for a little less than $8 they were available and showed up two days later. While one has grown very used to being able to buy “everything” on Amazon, I was truly impressed that even such a mundane and by some assessment specialty item was so readily available. A quick search on google reveals that Amazon has over 350 million items for sale – many sold through or on behalf of other sellers. Pause for a moment – 350 million items! This is a number that is unfathomable for me. Imagine what a logistics – warehousing, packaging, shipping and delivering – is required to manage that. Further what software and database systems need to be working in the background to manage such a flow. With my background in software, albeit in a different field, I can very much appreciate the magnitude of such a system. Two days till arrival meant also that my grips were stocked somewhere nearby and a fulfillment system was set in motion when I hit “enter” on my order. After that was accomplished, I started thinking about the $8 molded rubber grips I just ordered and got a little more curious about this and did more digging and a little contemplating.
From my current vantage point engaging with the Amazon store looked like this: Searching and ordering took less than 10 min, and the item was at our doorstep in two days. The alternative would have looked like this – probably also a 10-20min search for stores that may have this item. In fact, I tried and found some stores in town that carry crutches, but it was not always clear if spare parts were available. So, one would have to call to make sure. Some other general stores like ACE or Walmart have these grips but they also need to be ordered and shipped to the store – so not a faster alternative while still needing to drive to pick it up. A round trip to the store from our location is 40 miles. That would be at a minimum a one-hour effort and approximately $4 in gas money (Not even talking about a true milage cost that would run multiples of that). And in fact, the price for the grips in these stores was similar, perhaps a little more expensive but net more expensive for me.
So how do we get to the $8 price point. Checking for suppliers for molded parts on google I found an example for parts very similar to my grips. The price point for this similarly molded item manufactured in China depends on the volume of the order – $1 per piece for less than 5000 pieces, $0.5 per piece for 5000-10000 pieces and $0.1 for >10000 items. While I do not know how many people need to refurbish their crutches – if we picked the medium size batch, we would get the set of grips for $1. I found the portal for a seller intending to offer their goods through the Amazon franchise. If the sales price was targeted for $8 then all services provided by Amazon – here warehousing, posting, shipping and charging would amount to $5.50 (I am not sure I entered all the numbers correctly though). So roughly $1.50 left for the merchant facilitating the sale of these grips.
As much as chasing for these grips in local stores could have turned into an interesting adventure – considering my circumstances and given the fact that I don’t have a molding setup in my garage – Amazon got me my new grips reliably at a competitive price in a predictable time.