NEARLY every morning of my adult life, I have done something which reminds me of my Dad, a Changi POW survivor who died about 30 years ago.
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I shave with his old stainless steel safety razor, the sort which has an individual razor blade locked into the top.
Apart from the fact that it shaves really well, I love its lack of technology, its association with Dad and not taking part in the disposable everything world.
Over the years, Dad and I must have gone through hundreds, if not thousands of razor blades. They used to be Gillettes, wrapped in bits of wax paper in blue paper-wrapped packs of 10. I think they cost about 50 cents.
Last weekend, I needed some new blades. The first two supermarkets I visited didn’t stock them any more and wanted to sell me all sorts of multi-bladed, high-tech, ergonomic thingos.
The third, Coles, had them... at $14.75 for a pack of 10!
Back home, I tried to weigh one razor blade, but even on the digital kitchen scales, it failed to register any weight, so I tried it with all 10, divided it by 10 and it came to 0.09 of a gram. The entire pack weighed less than a gram.
Years ago, whenever warships reached the end of their working life and were sold for scrap metal, it used to be said they’d been turned into razor blades. There’s a popular story, possibly mythical, that Proctor and Gamble, owners of the Gillette brand, used to buy old ships.
Wouldn’t we love to be in that business now?
Take, for example, the Australian aircraft carrier, HMAS Sydney, which was sold to a South Korean company for scrap in 1975.
It weighed 15,740 tonnes. Now, at $14.75 for a gram (roughly) that one ship could have been turned into razor blades with a street value of $232.165 BILLION.
Gillette, with its minimalist paper wrapping, seems to be no more. The only ones to be found in Bendigo were Wilkinson Sword, a brand considered too posh for our house in Dad’s time.
I think I know where the real cost of these things is hidden – the packaging.
Each razor blade is wrapped in a little rectangle of waxed paper. That’s inside a slightly larger rectangle of ordinary paper, reminding you that you are unwrapping a Wilkinson Sword and that blades are not to be sold separately. That is, in turn, in a tiny cardboard box with a flip top. It also says it’s Wilkinson Sword. That box is inside a plastic bubble, and that plastic bubble is attached to a rectangle of cardboard … reminding you again you have bought a Wilkinson Sword product.
The nice lady on the checkout asked me if I wanted a bag with that.
