"It's in a room like this that virtually every watch, from the humblest $100 automatic to the costliest limited-edition mechanical marvel, starts its life. The components are made by supersophisticated industrial robots--computer-guided automatic milling machines and spark-erosion fabricators. Which brings up a question: If this is so, why do watch prices range from less than the cost of a decent lunch to more than that of a comfortable suburban house?...It's fair to ask why a top-notch timepiece is so expensive. But when you multiply the number of hours it takes to hand-finish just one part--more than half a day in some cases--by the number of components in the movement and then by the number of years it takes to learn how to finish a piece of metal the size of a fly antenna, it's easier to see how the price starts to add up. It's the hundreds of hours of human skill concentrated in a cubic centimeter."
http://www.forbes.com/forbes-life-magazine/2009/1102/big-time-finishing-touches-watches.html ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
