Originally Posted by
mparker762
This may devolve into an argument about definitions, but that doesn't match any usage for "flavor of the month" that I'm familiar with. Price != popularity - price is dependent on both demand and supply. Oil didn't become a "flavor of the month" just because barrel prices spiked. OTOH the hybrids and Smart cars could be considered FOTMs because their popularity spiked during that period, and collapsed once gas prices came back down.
I believe your focus on price as a proxy for demand has led you to mischaracterise the nature of the shift in demand. The price for the barber's razors is a function of both supply and demand, and the supply seems fairly steady while demand has grown rapidly. But this demand seems to me to be caused by the increase in the number of straight razor shavers, not by some recent fascination with Barber's razors in particular. Their prices are rising along with the prices for every other vintage razor on ebay. That their prices seem to be rising faster may simply be a perception issue (these razors have always been the most expensive of the sheffields, so a fairly across-the-board 3x price increase would send these into the stratosphere), and it may also be a matter of the way the supply and demand curve worked out - if these are a very supply-constrained razor (which they already were 4 yrs ago) and demand is fairly inelastic, then you can get some wild price increases that will dwarf those of the other razors, even if the popularity within the straight razor community remains constant.
They do not seem to me to be any more popular today than they were years ago, relatively speaking. As a percentage of the discussions, there seems to be about the same level of chatter about them, and about the same level of "look-what-I-got" posts for these razors as there was back then. In absolute numbers there are more people interested in those razors now, but that's because there are more straight razor shavers around now. Since the number of W&B barber's razors on ebay any given time has been a fairly steady number, one would therefore expect the price to increase - possibly dramatically, depending on how elastic the demand is, even if say only 10% of straight razor shavers both then and now actually wanted one.
Wonderedges were hitting the $300 mark and higher four years ago, though I haven't really kept up with their prices recently, and while it is true that you could pick up a ratted-out W&B Barber's use for <$50 back then, you couldn't get a really nice one for that price - nice restored ones would run you $150 or so, and even back then guys whined about how expensive they were and whether they were really worth it.