Furniture

blah - as an average joe going to local builders merchant with no discount =£20 for good castors, £15 for brand new pallet, £3 for 100 screws, one hour labour max at a generous factory worker rate of £20 + generous 50% markup to wholesale + 50% markup to retail + vat and you are still looking at £150 tops

mass produced you could get these down to £20 a piece and retail them at £75 very easily, the truly embarrassing part is the suggestion of £525 rrp... i'd love to see the shop that sells them at that

Actually... Not really so for a commercial operation. For you or I, fair enough, but for a company.

Consider, they will need to reduce the pallet to it's component parts (to access all surfaces), as a minimum give it all a light sand (to remove splinters) and then apply some form of finishing coating. Then reassemble and add the castors (which aren't cheap for decent ones). Got to be at least two or three hours work plus materials - at £50 per hour (including overhead) I'd guess they are putting around £125 into each one. Then packaging, advertising, processing sales etc - not really a huge margin.

Still, if you actually paid £250 for one and didn't make it yourself, you either have far too much money or no arms.