Thread: Prices of early 1800s razors when made

Originally Posted by ggfinn

My suspicion is that an early serious razor, for example a Greaves, cost
a weeks wages at least for a typical factory worker. Anybody out there
know or have pointers to sources?

THX

Interesting thread, Mechi's catalogue of cutlery shows razor prices around 7 Shilling for a pair or 3.6 for one. Some research shows the average worker in that catalogue time period made close to 25 D per day.You need 12 d to make a Shilling. That said you would have to work one day and a half to get their razor. Also note that this is more around 1820-1830.

Just what was needed. I argued from finding woodworking tool prices that circa 1815
a standard razor would cost roughly 2s. Your quote of 3s6d from circa 1825 is in line
with that, adjusting for a decade or so of inflation.

Also of interest, your quote shows that a fine-grade razor would cost less than 2s more.
Fancy Dan would have spent 5s.

Looks like a typical razor cost one to two days wages circa 1815-1830.

And here I am feeling guilty spending 3 hours wage... You know, I don't think I've ever spent that much, even.

Yes and here we sit using computers that require roughly 100 billion gates operating
at least billion times per second correctly for us to exchange emails, and that does not
count all the routers between you and I that are equally, if not more, complex.

Yet we are both impressed with straight razors that cost $125 or so.
Seems our wheel bearings may be a bit out of round, eh?

Cheers

I have a set of Joseph Elliot razors which was a traveling salesman's sample/display collection. The razors have numbers below each one that seem to be a catalog number and a price (wholesale? retail?) in shillings/pence. There are three cases with twenty razors each so scroll through the photos to see them all.

Here is a direct link to the first set of 20 razors and you can just read the numbers along the bottom. And here is the image with a description of each razor. I did my best to convert the shillings/pence price to modern day prices using a couple of websites I found with online calculators. One website was some British university economics dept that adjusted pounds/shilling/pence from any given decade (assumed to be 1850) to 2013 British pounds. I ignored inflation for the two year period and just converted GBP to USD and listed the price for each razor.

The most expensive is the razor with solid/carved mother-of-pearl scales which I calculated to $1,760.66 and the least expensive were two near wedges at $38.75.

Edit - I went into my post history and found where I more fully explained the price conversions.

http://straightrazorpalace.com/show-...ml#post1451921

Incredible collection! It's amazing that this collection has been kept this pristine for all these years...