[supermatt]

I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make.

My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.

In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.

[decimalenough]

Creating a single basketball shoe from an existing template takes three hours. Coming up with that design and all the associated expenses (marketing etc) plus the tooling needed to produce the shoe consumes much more labor and accounts for the vast majority of the shoe's cost.

Hand-woven rugs, on the other hand, are largely unique in design and created by a single person.

[realo]

Silk hand-woven rugs need no marketing at all in order to fetch absurdly large amounts of coins.

[toast0]

And yet, Steppenwolf was singing their praises in 1968. Bullfrog put out an well know advergame in 1994. Plenty of marketting of the properties of silk rugs through portrayals in popular media.

[deadbabe]

“Silk” is the marketing.

[Groxx]

Plus nearly 2,000 years of accumulated marketing spend via the Silk Road and everything around it.

[IAmBroom]

Even if hand-woven rugs were made on a pattern, they would take hundreds of hours to make.

The innovation in the design is almost icing to the cake, in terms of labor overhead.

[yegle]

Mentioning the man hours would make sense, if the ones producing the product taking the majority cut from the purchase price.

Otherwise, it's more of a strategy to set a higher price tag, and the reseller and all the middleman taking all the extra revenues.

[supermatt]

Not really.

Irrespective of price, the inherent value of the rug is much greater - it still takes over 100x the labour to produce.

That it still costs less than 100x basketball shoes to purchase is more circumstantial, yet further demonstrates the fallacy of the argument.

[cma]

It takes a long time to make small scale reproductions of movie scenes out of popsicle sticks, the time spent doesn't make them valuable on its own.

[supermatt]

Yeah, value was a poor choice of word. I probably meant cost, and where I say cost I probably meant price.

[MathMonkeyMan]

I wonder how many hours it would take to make a rug out of hundreds of disassembled basketball shoes.