FERRET-SEARCH@LISTSERV.FERRETMAILINGLIST.ORG
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Date: | Wed, 2 Jul 1997 16:17:52 -0700 |
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To show Marshall Farms that we as a ferret owning community are NOT in
agreement on these issues I've copied them in on the reply.
>From: Pam Grant and STAR* Ferrets <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: MF tracking solution
>The cost? About $7.50 per chip to MF. [...] MF does not want the added
>expense, despite it's low cost,
$7.50 is the cost of "hardware". The cost of inserting the chip, logging
the records, purchassing computer systems to track this information and such
far exceeds $7.50 per ferret. But lets ignore that for a moment. Your low
cost item is three quarters of a million dollars per year. MF allegedly
sells about 100,000 ferrets a year. Their income (NOT profit) is about 7
million. This uses $70 per ferret wholesale which is probably a bit too
high. Even if "way over" it does not affect this argument. 10% of income
is not a small cost item. For comparison imagine adding over $1500 to the
cost of every new car. But lets bring back the cost of inserting the chip
and tracking the data. How about ten minutes added total? A measely ten
minutes. well ten minutes times 100,000 is a MILLION minutes. Thats 16,667
hours. A person works normally less than 2,000 hours a year. 50 weeks
times a forty hour day. Thats with out any vacation or seick time, just
holidays plus a day or two. Its a well established fact that a person's
salary is about half their cost. We'll pay these folks fairly low salaries,
$5 an hour. So their cost is $10 an hour. That 1,667 hours is about 9
employees. We'll let one be the "boss" and have some administrative duties
including verification for half the time but still work barely above minimum
wage. Those nine employees would cost $180,000 dollars. I write software
and run computer systems for a living. The software required could easily
cost $100,000. Programmers costs LOTS of money. Computer hardware required
would cost nearly the same. The systems guy to keep it running would cost
(not pay - cost) more than $100,000 of pay and expenses. Someone good like
me would cost a whole lot more. This would have to be some sort of LAN
setup with data entry PCs and a couple of server class machines. I kept all
the numbers LOW just to avoid nit picking arguments of someone thinking
they'd cost less.
I disagree about low cost.
I'll not comment on the "me first" bit.
bill killian
zen and the art of ferrets
http://www.zenferret.com/
mailto:[log in to unmask]
[Posted in FML issue 1991]
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