On Fri, 09 Jun 2017 09:16:52 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote: (...)
A bit more on the cost of a replacement capacitor. A company that I worked for in about 1977 was having a similar issue selling replacement and repair components to its dealers. So, I calculated what it cost the company to sell an empty box. That's a repair component that costs zero dollars to purchase and requires no manufacturing. However, it does carry all the overhead involved in shipping a product, such as incoming inspection, QA inspection, inventory control, warehousing, packing, order taking, boxing, documentation, billing, handling, etc. I estimated $75 cost to shipping (not including postage). My guess(tm) is that it would be about 4 times that (due mostly to increased overhead and inflation) today. That would be $300 to ship an empty box today, which is about what Marconi is charging.
We "solved" the problem by offering the dealers almost any quantity of the smaller parts involved for about the same price. Or, we would throw in a handful of random floor sweepings with a little of everything we thought might be useful. Either way, the minimum price to ship anything remained at $75.