But...but...but...but....a pair of pants from Sears only costs me $35!!!

Right, and that pair of pants is sewn up in Indonesia by someone who is making two dollars a day. The company buys nine miles of the cloth so they get a discount.

Let's work out out, you know....real quick and dirty, why a contemporary kilt costs what it does.

OK, the cloth... A Utilikilt or Freedom Kilt or R Kilt contains something like 6 yards of material. This stuff wholesales for something around six dollars a yard. It's 58 inches wide, so it's double width. Anyway, the cloth costs your kiltmaker about $18.

Snaps, D-rings, doo-dads, thread, add another $2

I can make an X-Kilt in about thirteen hours. If I really worked at it, I might be able to get that down to about ten hours. I know that in the past Bear of Bear Kilts has written that he can make one kilt, himself in one long work day. OK, so that's about right. Does it seem reasonable that your kiltmaker make, oh....ten dollars an hour? I mean, what is minimum wage where you are? Should they make fifteen dollars an hour? Twenty? Let's say.....twelve dollars and fifty cents an hour. That's a decent wage, but nobody will get rich at $12.50 an hour. OK, so labor to make the kilt is $125.

Dear Lord, but they have to have a website, don't they? I mean, if they don't have a website, with Pay Pal and online ordering and their own domain and pictures that change months, professionally designed etc. etc. etc well...get WITH it. I figure that adds about two dollars to the price of each kilt. $2

Perhaps they rent the building they're in? Let's see...$400 a month rent amortized over 20 kilts a month = $20 per kilt. I bet that rent in downtown Seattle and downtown Victoria BC is a heck of a lot higher than that. Let's try $30 per kilt.

Did the sewing machine break down? I guess there'd better be annual maintenance on the sewing machine. Let's say that's $1 a kilt.

Add that up... it's right about $170 - $180 per kilt.

Is this kiltmaker getting rich, sucking you dry for this outrageous amount of money when you can buy a pair of pants for thirty five bucks??

Well, lets say that a kiltmaker can crank out four kilts a week. After all, he/she has to answer your never-ending e-mails about where your kilt is in the "queue" and they have to pay the rent and answer the phone and so on. If they're incredibly lucky they will actually be able to spend the equivalent of four days a week, out of five, sewing and cutting. This is not to mention the time spent going to Highland Games to hawk their wares, right?

OK, the kiltmaker is making $12.50 an hour right? Everything else goes to materials and expenses....so just $12.50 an hour, or $125 per kilt. They make four kilts a week, or $500 a week.

If the kiltmaker takes off two weeks a year for vacation that means they're sewing 50 weeks out of the year. That makes an annual salary of $25,000 a year. In other words...an OK salary for some parts of the USA, but not evenclose to acceptable here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So the next time you complain about how much a kilt costs, remember that it was made in the USA or Canada (or Scotland) by someone who was making some sort of living, but hardly getting rich. If you want to buy a $35 kilt, then go get something from Pakistan or China or Indonesia.