How Stuff Gets Cheaper (Classic)

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the world of consumer electronics, it pays to be cheap. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:04.0	Hey, just a quick note.
0:07.8	Today's show is a rerun.
0:09.2	It originally ran in 2014.
0:12.1	There is a very small update at the end.
0:15.6	Very small.
0:16.8	A while back, I got this big flat screen TV for my bedroom.
0:22.4	It was a banner day, took it out of the box, set it up over there in the corner.
0:26.2	You know what it doesn't come with?
0:27.6	It doesn't come with the cables you need to connect it to all your other stuff.
0:31.4	So I go to Best Buy, I'm like, hey, I got this new TV and he's like, yeah, you're going
0:35.1	to need an HDMI cable.
0:38.0	And bad news, they're $45.
0:42.0	$45 for some wires and plastic.
0:45.2	And I paid it.
0:46.2	I paid it because otherwise, my TV was just a big $1000 black painting on the wall.
0:52.2	Robert, today you can go online and buy that exact cable that you paid whatever.
0:57.2	$35 for today, you can buy it for $3.61.
1:00.5	Yeah, I should have waited.
1:04.2	Now we take it for granted that things get cheaper, that there is competition and technological
1:09.8	items, there's technological advancement.
1:11.2	But we became interested, how does this exactly happen?
	...

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