Jun

28

At around a $1.20/ball or less, a tennis ball is a pretty good deal.

"Tennis balls used at Wimbledon are made with New Zealand wool which travels 40,000 km around the world before being served up at SW19, new research has found."

and

'Dr Mark Johnson, Associate Professor at Warwick Business School, was stunned to unearth the surprisingly long and complex journey to one of the world's biggest sporting events.

"It is one of the longest journeys I have seen for a product," he said.

"On the face of it, travelling more than 50,000 miles (80,000kms) to make a tennis ball does seem fairly ludicrous, but it just shows the global nature of production these days, and in the end, this will be the most cost-effective way of making tennis balls."'

(link found via economist Justin Wolfers tweet)

Victor Niederhoffer writes:

In Following the Equator, Mark twain describes the genesis of the Rhodes fortune showing how the shark is the most efficient way to deliver mail (one delivered news of the outbreak of war with the Germans to Rhodes), and Rhodes made a fortune not in wool for tennis balls but wool for coats and shirts. 


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