New Air Force One refrigerators to cost nearly $24 million

[*Nately120*]

(01-31-2018, 10:27 AM)Au165 Wrote: Again, specialized Airplane design and fabrication costs no matter what aren't cheap. I am a huge Trump critic but this really isn't even an issue to anyone that understands how expensive anything in this realm is. This is about optics and being painted as "oh they are just refrigerators". If they were replacing something you had never heard of on an airplane no one would blink, but the reality is people think it should be cheap because they see the word refrigerator. Work on the planes can only be done by people with high level security clearance, which means these engineers aren't even your normal expensive aero space engineers they are even more expensive aero space engineers. They then must build prototypes to retrofit to 30 year old technology and then those must meet current department of defense testing standards for military aircraft. 

Industry experts have already come out and basically said there is nothing weird about this. 

Look, I'm playing devil's advocate here.  I'm a marketing guy and I'm more interested in the way people perceive things and how that drives their behavior.  I say this sort of scenario, if presented to a Trump fan before the election or now, would have been viewed as one where a career politician would have just passed along the max cost to the taxpayers with no care about the price, because that's what politicians do.

Trump would have fostered competition between bidders and used the free-market and his own skill as the best businessman in the world to save the taxpayers money.  That's the perception, and that's why this country needed THE businessman in charge, rather than just another tax-blowing, no-bid contract-loving politician.

You get it.  You know how this stuff works, but the consumer base doesn't.  It doesn't matter in the end though, because even the people who think Trump could have used "business" to save the taxpayers money would excuse it by saying that he's too busy defeating ISIS to waste time on refrigerator deals.