bitful

Powercell my (hairy) arse!

I knew it as soon as I gave the pound coin to the guy who was quickly packing away his collapsible cardboard stand outside Tottenham Court Road tube station as he saw the police approaching. One pound for 16 (sixteen!) AA batteries? I thought what the hell, even if they don't last just as long as the leading brand from which they obviously rip off their name, it's no big deal. It's just one pound, roughly one-third of a pint of beer, right?

Yesterday afternoon the sunset was casting some interesting patterns of light in my living room, and I loaded my bulimic camera with four new Powercell batteries. I took 1 (one!) picture, then tried taking another one but the camera did not respond. The batteries had already gone flat (were they full in the first place?), and I hadn't even used the flash light or activated the greedy power-consuming display. I decided to laugh over it, for it obviously wasn't such a big deal for just a pound, but I am quite puzzled: surely it costs just as much to manufacture batteries with or without energy in them? I don't know much about it, but the support, circuits and packaging might even be more expensive than the actual content. Beats me.

As my friend Christophe used to say:

Il n'y a pas de petites économies
(there's no such thing as a small saving).

I'm going to go back to those funky yellow IKEA ones.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 10th, 2002 at 11:38 am and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.