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]