I Would Rather a Modern Roman than a Dane

Well I've just bought a new frying pan.  I'm not quite sure why I bothered since I tend to cook my meat to a colour and texture pretty much indistinguishable from the chunks of teflon that have been breaking off the old pan and finding their way into my meals.  However the sight of a disintegrating frying pan is aesthetically displeasing to me so a replacement was in order.

What on earth is it about frying pans that makes them so damned expensive?  The basic design has been with us for several thousand years and with all due respect to horny handed frying pan craftsmen is not particularly complicated.  I will grant that the non stick surface adds a level of complexity that frying pan makers in ancient Rome didn't have to grapple with but frankly that non stick surface would have had to be shat out of a rare Indonesian civet cat to make the price justifiable.

The most expensive pans I saw (ie the ones I didn't buy) were retailing at over two hundred dollars, and that was the discount price.  Perhaps it was the fact that they were made in Denmark which contributed to such an outrageous price tag.  While I was delighted to see that the economy of Denmark is sustained by something other than Lego and tourists who got lost while looking for Germany I must wonder if manufacturing frying pans is quite the right fit for the Danes.  Denmark is a first world country and part of western Europe into the bargain.  This means that they are pretty much required to pay decent wages even to people who work in factories.  Ask any businessman how economically irresponsible that is.

Manufacturing in Europe survives by operating at the high end of the market.  That is by making high quality, high tech equipment which requires a certain level of education and technical skill even on the part of the skut workers on the factory floor.  Thus high prices can be commanded and high wages at least partially offset.  This plus the snob value of having "made in Europe" as opposed to "Banged together by semi slaves in some third world shithole you've never heard of" allows at least some products to be competitive.  Those of you who thought that Liechtenstein's sole contribution to modern civilisation was facilitating tax evasion and the laundering of drug profits may be interested to learn that the best high quality optical equipment in the world is made in that tiny country apparently by the seven or eight people who aren't bankers, tax lawyers or the royal family.

Frying pans however strike me as being rather marginal as far as being a high end piece of technology goes.  No doubt the Danish product is just wonderful but personally I think a perfectly serviceable frying pan is something that can be readily created in any semi civilised economic disaster area.  Which is why I went straight past the two hundred dollar frying pan and bought the fifty dollar one that was made in Italy instead.