Allen Wrenches

TOPLINE 25-Piece Folding Allen Wrench Set, SAE, Metric & Torx

I've been looking for my Allen wrenches for about a week now and they haven't turned up. They aren't where they are supposed to be, so they might be over at John's house, in which case I should just buy a new set because it would hardly be worth time and gas to drive over there to pick them up. More likely they are in squirreled away in some pile of stuff left over from some other repair I was working on. 

In any case, they are still missing so I may as well order a new set, so I look on Amazon. Criminently, Amazon certain has a wide selection. How many different sets are there? Well, four items per row times 18 rows per page times 7 pages comes to 500 different sets. Can America really use 500 different sets of Allen wrenches?

At first I started wondering how many people would even know what an Allen wrench is, and then how many of those would ever use one, and how many of those would go to the trouble to obtain one, . . . but that's too much wondering. Can we go at it from a different angle? How about how many mechanically minded people start their own collection of tools every year?

Hmm, the birth rate is slightly higher than the death rate which is like 1%, so roughly 3 million people a year. If 3% of them are mechanical inclined enough to acquire their own set of tools, that comes to like 10,000 people per year, which means we might need 10,000 sets of Allen wrenches each year. If there are 500 different sets available, that means that on average, 20 copies of each set will be sold. Given that modern manufacturing methods entail a production run of thousands or even tens of thousands, 20 doesn't seem like it would hardly be worth it.

A tool maker could set up to build a run of a thousand and that would give them enough inventory for fifty years. And it might be that there aren't really 500 different sets, there might be only a couple of dozen different actual wrench makers, and their wrenches are just packaged differently and sold under different brand names through different distributors. All that takes is a bit of colored plastic.

Now I just went back and looked for set to feature and I looked at the prices and they are out of this world. Seems that back in the day you pick up a set of Allen wrenches for a couple of bucks and since the price of tools is the one thing that seems to have avoided the effects of inflation, I expected them to still be really cheap, but no. Now even a basic set is $15. Now I really wonder where mine are. If I used them more than once in a blue moon I wouldn't mind buying a new set, but geez, for something I only use once a year it doesn't hardly seem worth it. Where the heck could they have gone?

P.S. Found 'em. They were in the box of debris left over from the faucet replacement project. Why the heck would they be in there? Bah.