One of my favorite things about teaching economics is how approachable it is.

Never understood why most states wait until senior year to broach a system that most five-year-olds can figure out. You have a finite amount of money (or resources) and, as a result, you gotta choose what to use it for. How hard is that?

We’ve all experienced economics our whole life. For instance, most people are willing to pay more for things with utility, or usefulness, and convenience. Products that are less useful or convenient must be sold at a lower price or else consumers will substitute in the better…

I’m sorry, how much does that record player cost?

That’s, like, just a regular record player, right? The kind we were all too eager to move on from in the 1980s when snazzy new cassette technology came out?

It must be able to skip songs like CDs. Or flip the record over by itself? Oh, I’m sure it’s one of those faux items, made to look like it plays vinyl while in reality, you plug in a flash drive with MP3s.

No? it just plays vinyl records?

Sorry, where was I? Oh right, how intuitive economics is.

When most people hear “social science,” they think history, but when you actually think about the wording, it’s the study (“science”) of human interaction (“social”). And there is no more basic human interaction than “You make a product I want. This is how much I’m willing to pay for it.”

Like, for instance, you produce a record player. If this were 1970.

You see, the law of demand says that people want to pay as little as possible for a product. Unless it’s got the hipster badge of honor, evidently. And the law of supply says… well, I guess the law of supply is in full force here, because if dumbasses are willing to pay more for decades-old technology that’s been replaced by at least three generations of improved products, then sure, I’ll make as many of those damn things as you want.

Actually, there is one economic concept that helps explain the price of record players, which is a decrease in supply. As most companies move on to produce newer, better technology, there are only a few record players being produced. The small number of customers remaining are willing to pay more for the few remaining relics of the past. Maybe there are some warmed over hippies who want to play the vinyl collecting dust on the shelf for the entirety of this millennium. 

I can commiserate. I’ve got a crap-ton of VHS tapes that I’ll never get to watch again. Sure, I’ve repurchased the movies, but dammit, Daughter needs to understand that it wasn’t Hayden fucking Christensen under Darth Vader’s fucking helmet. In fact, when I showed her Star Wars the few scenes she tuned out to were the digital scenes added in the 1990s re-releases, which look so phony now. 

Star Wars aside, most of my VHS tapes are recordings of community theater shows and a couple high school projects I made with Rian Johnson that I could probably sell for a premium. Actually, scratch that, they’re terrible. The only person willing to pay me for them would be hush money from Rian himself. 

Pretty sure I own “WarGames” in at least three formats. Even though I swap most of the movies I show in class in and out of the rotation every few years when I get tired of watching them, “WarGames” has never fallen by the wayside. It’s still, in my mind, the definitive Cold War movie that is still approachable to students today. If anything, it’s become even more relevantthe last couple years with the debates over AI. As such, I know I at least have it on VHS and DVD, and probably BluRay (which I always seem to forget is different than DVD). I’ve also purchased it digitally on Amazon one year when my DVD player wasn’t working, because now that DVD players only cost $20, the planned obsolescence on them is about two weeks. 

Yes, I understand the irony of discussing planned obsolescence in the same post as $300 record players.

A decade or so ago, I hoped the, with digital, we could get beyond repurchasing the same title multiple times, but now we’re getting into the “must purchase on different platforms.” I thought I was being proactive when I burned all the good songs off my CDs back in the mid 2000s. Except I burned them via iTunes and now have an android. And now my laptop doesn’t have a CD drive to reburn them.

To say nothing of streaming companies pulling content they already own off their own platforms. At first, I was annoyed I’d bought all those early MCU titles on DVD when they were all now available on Disney+. But at some point, they’ll pull a Mysterious Benedict Society on the MCU and I’ll be happy I have those DVDs.

Assuming I can find a DVD player when that happens.

So yeah, I get the idea of producing a few bits of obsolete technology for those still stuck in yesteryear. 

But vinyl records are still being produced. By new bands. And they cost TWICE AS MUCH as a goddamn CD. 

I discovered all this after Daughter discovered Taylor Swift. She’s ten years old, which is the proper age for a Swifite. Unfortunately, there seem to be a handful of people over the age of twelve who are ruining the situation for the rest of us, meaning Taylor Swift concert tickets are a wee bit more expensive than Kidz Bop.

Following Taylor Swift is the ultimate form of purchasing the same item in multiple formats. In addition to the CDs and, yes, the vinyl, you have to buy the Taylor’s version of all the albums she’s redone, even if you bought the original album before she re-recorded them. And you’re expected to buy the albums she hasn’t re-recorded yet, preferably in multiple formats, with the knowledge that you will be buying them again when she re-records her own versions in another year or two. But only if she stays with Travis Kelce, because if they break up, she’ll write new music and not need to release another “Taylor’s version.”

Oh, and send some Spotify fees her way, too. 

So Daughter saved up her allowance for a few months to purchase a record player. Then she wanted to buy some vinyl. 

I was sorta game, because, call me old, but sometimes I miss listening to albums as they were intended. I get tired of telling Alexa or Pandora to play some Beatles only to find they don’t know that the second half of Abbey Road is supposed to be played continuously. Nothing’s more jarring than “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” being in between “Please, Please Me” and “Here, There, and Everywhere.”

Daughter started with three Taylor Swift albums and I threw a couple Lake Street Dive albums because the whole family likes them, even though we mostly listen to them on Alexa. Haven’t been able to find Abbey Road yet, which is probably a good thing. It’s one thing to buy an album you already have on newer, better technology. It’s quite another to intentionally retrograde your version. 

The pricing of these records was where my belief in supply and demand totally shit the fan. There is no earthly reason they should cost twice, even three times, as much as CDs. At Barnes & Noble, the CD version of Taylor Swift’s Red was $18 or $19 and the vinyl was $45! And that’s Taylor’s version, where she’s getting 100% of the proceeds.

Back in the early 1990s, when they were brand new, CDs cost $15-20, while cassettes ran about $10 and vinyl was maybe a little less, because nobody was buying them. 

I remember being at a concert where the artist said CDs and cassettes cost the same amount to produce. The audience gasped. That artist, and others, were hoping to bring the price of CDs down. Instead, the industry responded by increasing the price of cassettes. That pretty much killed off cassettes, because, back before social media, people weren’t willing to pay more for worse technology.

They should’ve quadrupled the price. Then called cassettes “niche.”

Or waited a decade and used the term “vintage.”

Somehow CDs still cost about $15. Evidently they’ve never heard of inflation. Neither have video games. When I was buying piece-of-shit 8-bit games for my Intellivision or original NES, they set me back about $50. With a few exceptions, video games for a PS4 or PS5 stay mostly in that $40-50 range. The difference is that I only made $3.35 an hour back in the NES days, so I’d have to pretty much work a whole week to afford a video game. Now it’ll take me an hour. The same hour I just spent writing this blog while my students watched WarGames.

By that rationale, I could get four or five CDs an hour. But I don’t. I think I’ve purchased maybe ten CDs in the last ten years. Because even when I buy them, I just listen to their contents online, which doesn’t necessitate having the physical CD in my possession, not to mention finding something to play it on. My new car doesn’t even have a CD player anymore. 

As a result there are fewer CD shops. And fewer CD player shops. Seriously, how the hell is Best Buy still in business?

That’s called a decrease in demand. Fewer people purchase a product, fewer of the product are produced, and the price drops. Or, in this case, the price stays the same despite thirty years of inflation. 

That memo that hasn’t hit vinyl. Oh, the quantity available has certainly dropped, which makes it annoying to look for anything other than Taylor Swift, a couple of country stars, and maybe Led Zeppelin. Seriously, the Barnes and Noble had about ten copies of various Zeppelin records. Of all the questions I have about today’s vinyl customers, I really, really, really want to know who is just now, in 2024, desiring to purchase Zeppelin IV on vinyl.

For $30.

I know, I know. I sound like a broken record here.  

But hey, at least Millennials and Gen Zs will finally know what it means to sound like a broken record. My students always thought it was a good thing, referring to broken records in sports. But it’s a Michael Jackson reference, not a Michael Jordan reference. Not that they know who either of those people are. Sorry, I sound like a Taylor Swift broken record, not a Travis Kelce broken record.

Since we purchased the record player and records, wanna know Daughter’s preferred way to listen to Taylor Swift? On Alexa. Or YouTube. They’re so much more convenient.

And what is the record player doing? Sitting there on the shelf gathering dust, just like it was 1986 up in this bitch.

So sure, people, convince yourself that those cracks and hisses are “essential to the music” and pay a premium for it. 

Then go listen to it digitally.

Because you know what I’ve never heard anybody say when leaving a concert?

Damn! Why no crackles?