Transcription
Totally weird that my father told me, which is, he bought a vacuum cleaner. I promise I'm not making this up.
Now, bear in mind, in 195 whatever it was. He was then 25. He was actually quite rich in his 20s, 'cause he, his father had died and he'd inherited a load of property from my father. My grandfather was a GP who'd bought a load of houses, and he buys this vacuum cleaner.
When he got home, there was a representative from Hoover, the vacuum cleaner company, asking him if he needed any help sort of, you know, setting up the machine or learning how to use. So, labor was so comparatively cheap and mass-manufactured goods were so comparatively expensive.
Bear in mind, in modern money, the vacuum cleaner had probably cost him 500 quid. It would have been several, several weeks' work, certainly for a working man. You could then provide levels of service which was, which is totally insane. I imagine even if you buy Dyson, right, you don't expect to get home and find a Dyson consultant coming around and pointing out, you know, the different settings for the brush. So you could employ people for relatively little, but manufactured goods were insanely expensive.