Recently, I started to wonder why some of the items bought in the past years and month got so expensive.
Here are some examples. All prices are from Cultpens, just because that’s where these items were bought. I didn’t pick Cultpens because their prices increased more or less compared to other shops – other shops had similar prices at the same time and have similar prices now. Example: The price Niche Pens charged for the M400 was nearly the same at the time and is nearly the same now. Let’s have a look how the prices developed.
| Product |
Old Date |
Old Price |
Old VAT |
Price
Feb. ’13 |
Total Price Increase |
Price Incr./year |
| Pelikan M400 white tortoise |
February 2009 |
£107.65 |
15% |
£169.99 |
58% |
15% |
| Graf von Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil |
February 2010 |
£143 |
17.5% |
£188.95 |
32% |
11% |
| Graf von Faber-Castell Six Guilloche Pencils |
February 2010 |
£25.29 |
17.5% |
£31 |
23% |
8% |
Neither RPI nor CPI were as high as the stationery price increase, even when you take the VAT increase into account. One point to mention is however that these pens are what I would call luxury pens. So luxury stationery went up. How did the price of branded, good quality stationery increase?
| Product |
Old Date |
Old Price |
Old VAT |
Price
Feb. ’13 |
Total Price Increase |
Price Incr./year |
| Staedtler Mars Micro Coloured Leads 0.5mm |
February 2010 |
£2.24 |
17.5% |
£2.57 |
15% |
5% |
| Stabilo All Marking Pencil |
February 2010 |
£1.05 |
17.5% |
£0.96 |
-9% |
-3% |
| Faber-Castell 9000 Pencil |
January 2009 |
£0.79 |
15% |
£0.95 |
20% |
5% |
| KUM Streamline Chrome Canister Sharpener 460S |
January 2009 |
£3.90 |
15% |
£4 |
3% |
1% |
Interesting. That’s much closer to inflation. The Stabilo pencil even got cheaper. Unlike all other products mention so far the Stabilo is, as far as I know, not made in the eurozone. Maybe the Euro is one of the reasons behind the price increase, the Pound lost a lot of value against the Euro and QE certainly doesn’t help to keep it’s value up. OK, that’ Europe, but with Japan being a big manufacturer of stationery, how did the price of Japanese made pens develop?
| Product |
Old Date |
Old Price |
Old VAT |
Price
Feb. ’13 |
Total Price Increase |
Price Incr./year |
| OHTO Tasche Fountain Pen |
January 2009 |
£14.67 |
15% |
£13.99 |
-5% |
-1% |
| Faber-Castell TK Fine Vario L |
November 2009 |
£12.95 |
15% |
£12.42 |
-4% |
-1% |
| Zebra TS3 Pocket Pencil |
December 2009 |
£2.88 |
15% |
£2.81 |
-2% |
-1% |
The price were quite stable, they actually even went down, especially in real terms!
So. Luxury stationery prices went up a lot. Eurozone stationery got more expensive, but in real terms it probably kept its price, especially when taking the VAT increase into account. Non-Eurozone stationery went down in price. I wonder what happened to luxury stationery from Japan. Did it go up or down in price? Did anyone buy, let’s say a Pilot Falcon or something similarly priced in the last years in the UK? How much did you pay?
Percentages are rounded.
The old price was reconstructed from the order confirmations which listed prices for all articles without VAT and the VAT sum for the whole order. This means that the old price listed for stationery might be off by a penny or so. I’d also like to add that this is not at all supposed to be representative.
Price Increase / Year is what it say on the tin. Price Increase divided by the years since the item was bought. Compounding has not been taken into account, hey: I’m not an accountant or economist.
The pictures are from old blog posts (here and here), just to put some colour into this blog post.
