Why Are Anchors so Expensive ?

[rtbates]

Because a boat on the rocks is much more so? Expensive that is!

[Mi2ndWind]

Originally Posted by DaveC

The prices are inflated.

The reason why they cost so much is simple: Enough people are buying them at the current prices.

If people stopped buying them then the price would drop until enough people did start buying them. But there are alot of people with expensive yachts who don't think twice of spending $whatever to have the name brand thing, so the rest of us are doomed.

Here's a beer for ya...

Nail on head there DaveC! Economics 101= set pricing for whatever the intended market will bear, not necessarily for what's fair. Most often reductions in cost are only partly transferred to the final price, creating the illusion of savings for the purchaser and increasing the profit margin for the manufacturer. It's this way for everything, not just anchors..........

[craigsmith]

Only if you have a monopoly.

[barnakiel]

???

Mine was not. (100 USD for a 22 pond knock-off Bruce).

The newer-better / mass production ??? Well, how many Rocnas / Mansons have you seen around? Mass production laws do not quite apply. Whatever is made specifically for Yatin' is not ruled by 'mass-production' anymore.

BTW Original Bruce or CQR were not cheap either! And now that one can buy Bruce Made in Brasil ... it is still darn expensive. Rocna, so they say, in China ...

Then again, I will not have the slightest remorse to splash out for a top-spec, oversized new-gen thing and a long piece of G-4 chain when re-fitting. How much will that be? 1% of my boat's value? 5%? Well, that is a pretty cheap insurance policy, isn't it.

(For comparison - a ONE year insurance coverage for my boat (total loss) is roughly the price of a top-notch new anchor-rode set ...).

barnie

[tager]

What is price fixing?

[Boomp]

Metal is heavy [foundaries,trucks, jets, shipping, galvanizing is costly, factories pay the workers, etc, and most will agree [and I hate this] but you do get what you pay for. I caved for a Rocna two years ago after a long night of my CQR slipping in muck. The Rocna has never pulled! Well worth the cost and I do have a picture of a simulated manson [it is a rocna knockoff guys] that is bent and covered with rust.

[idpnd]

Originally Posted by craigsmith

Only if you have a monopoly.

The whole point of having "patented" designs and whining about cheap copies is to have a virtual monopoly. Economics semester 1

How do you know? In both cases I beg to differ.

Why don't you publish your figures then?

As far as I can see, and as I shall hold to be true until new info comes to light, someone dreams up an anchor design, there is not much in the way of empirical analysis of performance by the manufacturers, and the marketing consists mostly in speaking badly of other people's designs, even if they inspired one's own.

the manufacturers don't even provide much in the way of statistical data on performance etc. -- What would be the point?

That could go some way towards convincing me that there's any sort of science/R&D going into the anchors. Any sort of content beyond the marketing babble.

For instance the rocna has been around for years, the design has never changed in any way, and the website consists of reviews of competitors' products with the obvious conclusion that they're all rubbish and the rocna is the holy grail of anchor design. Since the anchor is perfect already, what do you want to do R&D for?

[Liam Wald]

I cannot speak about the difference between the Chinese Rocna and the Canadian Rocna but I have a Canadian Rocna that I bought about three years ago.
In the past I have owned CQR, Bruce, Fortress, Delta, and Danforth anchors.
Currently, in addition to my Rocna primary anchor I have a Delta and a Fortress onboard.
The Rocna is by far the best anchor I have ever owned or used.
Do I think that it was unusually expensine? Not really... it cost less than the 200 feet of HT chain I have onboard. It cost far less than the liferaft that I will likely (hopefully) never use!
In my opinion, anyone who designs, creates, and brings to market a great product deserves to make a good living from their effort.
Thanks Rocna!

[stevensc]

Anyone who thinks it is so profitable and easy should jump in and start building them.
Let us know how it goes. I'm thinking we won't be hearing from many.
Good Luck!
Steve

[klem]

I think that stevensc has a good idea.

Something that a lot of people overlook is that the cost to the end consumer must pay for all steps in the process, not simply making their specific anchor. This means that design and testing need to be paid for as well as tooling and production ramp up, overhead, etc.

I am not defending the prices but I suspect that the companies are not getting terribly rich off these as well. The anchors that you can buy cheaply have often skipped certain steps like design and testing since they are copies and are made as cheaply as possible.

[noreault]

The price of a product is always what the market will bear. Of course, the full cost sets the floor on the price. Now as to the full cost: materials, production, marketing, shipping, and of course the markup for the retail outlet. One of the significant costs for anchors will be shipping. It both represents a significant volume and more importantly weight. It will not be cheap to get to the retail location.

But I expect what we are paying for is brand. As we all known, anchor failures can be significant. Not simply annoying as with some products. The other attribute with anchors is that the quality is somewhat difficult for us to determine. It is difficult to evaluate the materials and production methods from inspection. So we tend to buy a brand we trust. The manufacturer who over time build and support superior products, builds the brand and gets to charge for it.

So someone could build the same quality cheaper, but how would be know. I think the few hundred extra is worth the slightly higher probability that my boat stays on the water, not the shore.

[motion30]

I believe the rocna is a very good anchor, that said I try to avoid products made in china when I can Yes it is difficult but one can try

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by idpnd

The whole point of having "patented" designs and whining about cheap copies is to have a virtual monopoly. Economics semester 1



Why don't you publish your figures then?

As far as I can see, and as I shall hold to be true until new info comes to light, someone dreams up an anchor design, there is not much in the way of empirical analysis of performance by the manufacturers, and the marketing consists mostly in speaking badly of other people's designs, even if they inspired one's own.



That could go some way towards convincing me that there's any sort of science/R&D going into the anchors. Any sort of content beyond the marketing babble.

For instance the rocna has been around for years, the design has never changed in any way, and the website consists of reviews of competitors' products with the obvious conclusion that they're all rubbish and the rocna is the holy grail of anchor design. Since the anchor is perfect already, what do you want to do R&D for?

Yep. That's hitting the proverbial nail on its proverbial head.

That's business. Create something that more or less works, or works more or less better than what more or less worked in the past, then patent it, then create as much hype as possible, then run down the competition, keep up the propaganda war, then sell as much as you can on the biggest margins you can.

It's completely normal human nature to want to get the most profit from the least effort; why would anyone do the opposite. So we can hardly blame you, Craig Smith, but jeez, man, you could be a little less blatant about it. It puts off a lot of people.

Really serious R&D on something like a boat anchor would probably not be worth the expense and effort. Too bad for us. Somebody really needs to round up some underemployed former Soviet military-industrial complex engineers, give them a few tons of steel plate, some good computers, access to welding, forming, pressing, bending, cutting etc. equipment, a well-instrumented boat for testing, and let them go at it for a few years. Applying physics and soil mechanics to the task in a serious, systematic, scientific way. Now there's a way to get a real breakthrough for the benefit of all of us. Only it would cost some millions of dollars which would likely never be justified commercially.

Until someone does something like this, I guess we will have to be satisfied with incremental, trial & error progress in anchor design by small-time entrepreneurs, and we will have to listen to their tiresome propaganda wars with each other.

[Liam Wald]

So Dockhead,
At the risk of being offensine I must ask... what's stopping you? If it's that easy to make sonething "maginally better" and then reap giant profit why don't you just create an anchor design that is "marinally better" than the Rocna and leapfrog ahead of them in the big world of consumer trickery?
If you did that would you structure the pricing so that it worked out that you made minimum wage for your time and effort? Or maybe you could make more and just pay eveyone who worked for you minimum wage??

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Liam Wald

So Dockhead,
At the risk of being offensine I must ask... what's stopping you? If it's that easy to make sonething "maginally better" and then reap giant profit why don't you just create an anchor design that is "marinally better" than the Rocna and leapfrog ahead of them in the big world of consumer trickery?
If you did that would you structure the pricing so that it worked out that you made minimum wage for your time and effort? Or maybe you could make more and just pay eveyone who worked for you minimum wage??

A completely fair question, and not offensive at all.

But you did miss a few nuances of my argument. You're probably not in business; I am. I don't think Craig is reaping "giant profits" and I'm not blaming him (I said that). He's just feeding his family and I'm sure he works his a*s off to do it; that's the nature of entrepreneurship and I never said it's "so easy". A little bit of experimentation and a lot of hype -- that's a normal way to develop a product which is not sold in large enough numbers to develop in a scientifically serious way. It's not "trickery"; it's business. Hype is one of the most important ways, perhaps THE most important way to keep your product from becoming a commodity, which spells the collapse of your margins. That's why it's such a life and death thing for entrepreneurs like Craig to create and maintain a myth that their product is unique in some way. The free market may be ugly at times, but to paraphrase Churchill it's a h*ll of a lot better than all of the other systems.

To really make a great leap forward in anchor design I reckon one would have to spend $10 -- $15 million at a minimum, and that would be doing it on a shoestring. I spend that much in my business for design work on one building, where you're not even developing any kind of new technology, just applying what already exists. To recoup even $10 million of R&D expense (which probably wouldn't be enough) at $50 per anchor, you would have to sell 20,000 of them with no return on capital invested, so really 40,000 of them to generate some kind of return on your investment in R&D. I don't know the size of the leisure boat anchor market, but I reckon it's not big enough to make those kinds of numbers easy to achieve. Patent rights don't last forever and that strictly limits the upside which could be generated on that investment. I guess that's why no one has done it -- it's just not a compelling investment proposition. And that's why we have to be content with this kind of slow, incremental improvement of anchors, and why we have to listen to all this bullsh*t all the time from the makers.