Those scissors apparently have a habit of the handle melting away (see reviews): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SSVNNZC
As one comment pointed out, they could be using nitrocellulose in the handle.
As one comment pointed out, they could be using nitrocellulose in the handle.
They're just scissors, how are we still as a species finding ways to make them shitter and more breakable? They're a solved problem and yet some guy managed to hit on a way make them out of melting plastic?
I don't need them to be laser etched or artisanal or blessed by levitating monks or whatever. Just two bits of metal with a rivet that will still be scissor-shaped when I'm dead and buried. It's not even that much more metal than plastic handled scissors, and the hard bit is in the edges anyway, not the handles. It's probably never been cheaper or easier to make not-shit things and yet there's just so much shit everywhere.
Scissors also don't have to be "consumed", or at least not substantially over the course of a human life. I'd expect them to be durable goods. It's more than possible to make a pair of scissors, for not even that much more that a shit pair, that outlasts the first owner. We just generally choose not to.
> Labor has never been more expensive than now.
Each hour of wages is amortized across dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of scissors. You could double the wages of everyone involved from manufacturing to fulfillment to logistics to sales and it'd translate to maybe multiple pennies' worth of a per-scissor cost increase.
> Raw resources have never been under more competition than now.
As the other commenter pointed out, steel's still plenty cheap and abundant.
> We as a species are more numerous and consume more scissors than ever before.
That's more than offset by our increased ability to make scissors at scale.
> Supply chains have never farther separated end user from producer, as now.
The whole point of that separation is to drive down costs.
----
All in all, the available information points rather squarely to manufacturers being greedy rather than costs somehow forcing their hand.
Products when they are first introduced tend to be overengineered, since the way they will be used is not entirely known. As this knowledge accumulates the products can be optimized to be just good enough (just strong enough, just durable enough). You should expect in equilibrium that products will be optimized for minimum cost at the minimum tolerable level of quality.
On the other hand, we aren't being advised not to run with scissors any more.