I set out to compare modern prices for razor blades to prices from earlier eras. I got a lot more than I bargained for. Turns out, there really is nothing new under the sun. Except that razor blades have gotten a lot cheaper over time.
The basic question is, how cheap are modern razor blades? Compared to what they would have cost historically, that is.
But the fun part is the 1918 Sears & Roebuck catalog. This post is worth it for that alone.
They cost how much?
If you wanted to know about historical food prices, or typical rents, or average family income, or the cost of gasoline from bygone eras, you can find that information. Those were all important commodities, and their prices were duly tracked and recorded.
By contrast, there’s no such luck for a cheap disposable product like a razor blade. Nobody really much cared about them, in the sense of preserving their prices for history. Nobody systematically recorded information about them. And that makes it hard to find out what they used to cost, way back when.
Initially, all I could do was look for bits and pieces of advertising.
Even then, the only razor company modern historians much care about is Gillette. And Gillette was not only a super-premium product, Gillette also played fast-and-loose with their pricing, owing to patents on some key aspects of safety razors early in that era.
In fact, there is a term-of-art in economics called “razors-and-blades“, to discuss profit-maximizing strategies for companies who sell razor handles that will only fit their razor blades. Think inkjet cartridge pricing, and you’ll get the gist of it. And, sure enough, once you’re locked into a handle, the manufacturer tries to extract the as much money as possible in the cartridges.
Let me start with Gillette’s list price for blades.
I am supposed to say something like “Gillette introduced the safety razor in 1904”, but that’s not even remotely true. One can find ads for “safety razors” for many decades prior to that, all with the same basic design of a blade contained in some sort of housing, to make it hard to cut yourself.
What Gillette actually invented was the cheap, stamped-steel disposable razor blade (per Wikipedia). And, of course, the razors that would use those blades. Before Gillette, most safety razors had a permanent blade, designed to be re-sharpened. Gillette got the idea to do away with a permanent, knife-like razor and substitute a disposable blade.
At that time, Gillette’s razor was marketed as a superior and more sanitary way to shave, owing to the reduced likelihood of nicks and cuts from shaving. It commanded an appropriately premium price.
From 1904, until his patents ran out around 1924, Gillette razor blades were priced at 12 for a dollar, or 8.3 cents per blade. That was the list price, and some sources suggest that discounting was common.
But taking that 8.3 cents at face value, I’ll translate that to current dollars using the BLS inflation calculator. That only goes back to 1913, but it tells us that 8.3 cents, in 1913, is the equivalent of just over $2.50 in today’s (December 2022) money. Per blade.
As noted in prior posts, current prices on double-edge razor blades range from about 5 cents each at the low end, to about 40 cents each for high-end Japanese Feather brand blades. It’s reasonable to say you have your pick of medium-quality blades around 10 cents each. (Those are all Amazon prices for lots of 100 blades.)
Thus a modern stainless-steel quality razor blade costs about 4 percent of what a name-brand, list-price Gillette razor blade originally cost.
But wait, there’s more. Average (family, I think) income in that era was about 750 dollars per year. (Based on various sources). Median family income today is about $71,000. So, as a fraction of a year’s income, a modern 10-cent razor blade is just 1.3 percent as costly as Gillette’s original 8.3 cent blade.
Thank goodness for Sears & Roebuck.
But wait: Gillette was not the only blade on the market, it was just the best-advertised. And likely the most expensive. A comparison to the Gillette list price overstates how costly razor blades were, on average, at the dawn of the disposable razor blade. Unfortunately, the earliest pricing I can find on other blades dates to the WWI era.
I stumbled across a University of Missouri collection of old mail-order catalogs, all scanned and available on-line. You can get access to from this URL: https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1910-1919.
With that in hand, it’s just a question of looking up razors in any year’s catalog and see what’s on offer in the Sears & Roebuck. And it’s a real eye-opener.
Let me take the 1918 Sears and Roebuck catalog, despite that being in the middle of WWI. The source for all the images below is page 1321 of the 1918 Sears and Roebuck catalog, via the University of Illinois. Clicking this link should take you to a page that’s about 20 pages earlier in the catalog. Just page down to get to razors.
The first surprise is that stainless steel blade are NOT a 1960s invention. Check out this 1918 Sears & Roebuck ad, for a razor and 12 chromium steel blades. While technically incorrect, the term “chromium steel” is often used interchangeably with “stainless steel”, for the simple reason that it behaves like common stainless. It’s very hard, and it’s rust-proof.
Second, as is true today, you could also purchase carbon steel blades. Oddly, you will note that the chrome steel blades are NOT a premium product. At 12 for 38 cents, they are actually cheaper than the “crucible steel” blades at 5 for 20 cents. (I believe that, in that era, “crucible steel” was a catch-all term for higher-quality steel carbon steel, free of inclusions or impurities.)
Third, Gillette’s stuff was, indeed, pricey. Here you can see Gillette blades at 6 for 39 cents. That’s about twice the price of the most expensive blade on the illustration above. The complete shaving outfit from Gillette was four times the price of a similar outfit from the off brand. (Also, what’s with “We do not exchange old blades.”?)
Finally, re-sharpening blades by stropping must have been common practice. Not only do most of the razor outfits include “stropping handles”, Sears sold two different stropping devices, one to fit Gillette blades and one to fit most other blades. This comports with the findings from my tests, where stropping definitely cleaned up and re-formed the razor edge of a used blade.
I now wonder whether stropping might have been more effective on old-style (softer) carbon-steel blades, than on chromium steel. That’s sure the case with knife sharpening. It’s vastly easier to sharpen a high-carbon steel blade on a whetstone than it is to sharpen a stainless blade. Perhaps that explains the lack of premium pricing for chromium steel blades in that era?
The calculation, redone.
The cheapest blades offered above appear to be the 12-for-38-cent chromium steel ones, or about 3 cents per blade. In addition, with all that stropping going on, I bet those blades were used longer than modern blades are. But I have no way to factor that into my calculation, absent any data on average shaves per blade in that era.
At face value, then, the best bargain on blades in the 1918 Sears & Roebuck catalog translates to about 66 cents per blade in modern money (using January 1918 as the basis for pricing, WWI saw a brief but very sharp round of inflation in the U.S.)
Or, crazily enough, just about what a low-end name-brand disposable cartridge costs today. Still a good bit of money relative to the average family income. But not nearly as expensive as the list price for Gillette blades would have suggested.
Really, almost the only structural difference between the 1918 market and the modern market is that disposable blades had not yet been standardized. Gillette blades fit Gillette razors. (Again, just like disposable cartridges today.) Other brands seemed to have adopted a more-nearly-interchangeable standard.
If I had to point to one subtle-but-important difference, it’s in the quantities. Recall, this is a mail-order catalog, with all the time lags that implies. And yet, no razor blades were offered in lots larger than 12. And everybody seemed to offer either a stropping machine or a manual strop for use on their blades. Together, this suggests to me that you were expected to use each blade for quite a long time.
As opposed to Amazon, today, where almost any blade you’d care to buy can be had in a box of 100. And “strops” for disposable razor blades are niche-market oddities. Which both suggest that we probably re-use blades a lot less in the modern world than they did back in 1918.
