Time flies like an arrow...

[ffutures]

...fruit flies like a banana.

Which leads me to one of my periodic rants on laboratory supply prices.

I wanted some fruit flies for work - nothing fancy, just the ordinary wild type.

Lab catalogue says £7.55, which I thought was a bit steep considering they're... well, they're flies... but everyone else seemed to be charging about the same, so I added it to an order I was placing yesterday, which was mostly glassware etc.

Today the supplier got back to me - since they're living organisms, they come from another company, with a surcharge of (wait for it....) £7.50. So the flies now cost £15.05.

So I told them to cancel it, and went looking for alternates. And ended up buying a pack for £4.50 inc P&P on Ebay UK, sold to feed lizards.

And the moral here - if you want something that is used for a narrow specialisation, look outside the box. You may be pleasantly surprised...

This isn't an isolated case, incidentally.

Vacuum pumps sold via school science suppliers cost about £250-£300. Vacuum pumps sold via air conditioning companies (used to get the air out of pipes) cost less than half that, for apparently identical pumps.

When I wanted some bottled gas and couldn't justify renting full-sized cylinders, the scientific suppliers wanted £60 a cylinder for the disposable type. We ended up getting them from a welding supplier who offered some of the gases we needed at £14 for TWO slightly smaller cylinders...

And one of the lab supply companies is selling laser light boxes (basically, laser levels) at £75 for 5. They appear to be identical to the ones I got in a pound shop last year...

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

This is an odd association, but in one of the early issues of Saucy Li'l Tart, the last inside page was devoted to the theme of bondage gear you could acquire much cheaper as a feed and hardware store than at a sex toy shop. I particularly remember the past-the-elbow rubber gloves. . . .