> Fun fact #1: you rent your cap and gown in the US. You have to return them. And they’re expensive, too! I paid $94 just for the privilege of renting mine, which is insane because they probably cost way less than that to manufacture.
Ah, yes, of course this is how it works in the US.
FWIW I'm in the US and I bought mine. Renting does seem to make more sense here as the gown has no utility outside of this one event.
I'm surprised at the concept, somehow I thought the whole "graduation cap" thing was just in movies. Seems out of place in a country that's otherwise so individualistic.
Colleges are far less “individualistic” than most places in the country.
I was wondering why I saw them for cheap on aliexpress…
And if you order XXXXL it might fit. A little tight, but bearable.
As opposed to what buying the thing and storing it or throwing it away?
It's a $10 gown, renting it for $100 is madness
Throwing it away after single use is madness.
Is it?
My issue with this type of thinking is it assumes "transport cost <<< manufacturing cost" -- a decent assumption for a lot of goods throughout a lot of history, but just... not really true for lots of things in a modern supply chain.
The cost of moving the gown between users -- in the form of the user needing to give back the gown to the service, who must then clean it, inspect it, etc. -- may in fact be far higher than the cost of manufacturing a new gown and only needing your supply lines to be "one way".
trash doesn't disappear, everything has to go somewhere
I think they’re saying it should be much cheaper to rent, and we shouldn’t throw them away.
You generally rent caps and gowns in the UK too. Can you share where you are that you buy them?
You are allowed to turn up in your own though, no one will check. I even had people turn up in the wrong colour gown at my graduation.
Yes, you have to pay a decent wage to the people helping you fit, cleaning, and storing the goods. Manufacture is done in a low cost country with cheap labour, so buying clothing seems cheap.
Do you truly believe most of that goes towards wages?
Well, some will go on corporation tax, some on business rates, some on rent of the land the storage is on (which itself has to pay corporation tax, I suppose).
Yes. Competitive forces would push the cost toward the most expensive input which is likely people. That would be somewhat muted if the supplier was sole source but even then outright purchases would put downward pressure on the rental price.
Given that you’re forced to rent the cap and gown, I think it’s safe to say that competitive forces are entirely absent in this scenario.
What competitive forces? It's not like people have a choice in choosing whether they want a particular cap or gown and the people who contract the rental agreement (i.e. the university admin) are not the ones bearing the cost.
We are by all concievable measures living in the best timeline and under the best economic system. Just look at the graphs. Just consider what an American symbol the graduation cap is. We don’t really know why, but I think a likely reason is that making graduation caps under most economic systems is too labor intensive. Some families might not have even been able to send their children to universities since they couldn’t rent or buy graduation caps—and certainly not make them themselvse—and not doing so would be a complete humiliation for their family or clan or what they have in other countries.
> We don’t really know why
So I asked Claude to simulate possible conversations in other places:
With graduation caps: Praise be, his son looks just like those handsome youth in those domestic film! He has made his whole foreign kin proud.
Without graduation caps: A curse on their kin! This is not at all what those domestic film portray. A disgrace for all his foreign kin and us foreign people.
I’m not an expert, but that looks pretty plausible to me.
Too coherent. You need to work on your simulation.