sweet tooth

I suppose this posting is for historical amusement only. I got an email from a local retailer (Micro Center, if you must know) offering various capacity USB drives (private label).

Over the years I've often noted that capacity-oriented items (memory, disc, etc.) have a calculable Best Value, a/k/a the product's Sweet Spot. Today, that appears to be the 8 GB thumb drives:

Capacity	Retail Price	Cost Per GB
1 GB (silver)	$6.99	$6.99
2 GB (blue)	$9.99	$4.99
4 GB (black)	$15.99	$3.99
8 GB (green)	$24.99	$3.12 ("sweet spot")
16 GB (red)	$59.99	$3.75

Unlike hard discs, few people seem to care that USB drives vary in access speed. I do like the fact that Micro Center is color-coding their drives (1 GB=silver, etc) making it easier to choose an appropriate one.

Deep Thought: It would've been nicer if they'd used an industry standard color scale (e.g. ROY G. BIV) when assigning a color to a given capacity, but .. nobody asked me.