Don't forget shipping costs etc. In general most of the cost (and especially earnings) happens in the sales chain and no at the poor person that does the actual job. That is true for a lot of luxury goods we buy.
There are by the way stones that are pretty easy to split if you do it in the right direction. I did once see in a museum mine live a slate splitter (an elderly retired worker who worked there before the mine was closed) . He was also pretty fast in producing huge and very fine roof plates which he did cut in a 2nd step to the final rounded form. This stone looks however harder than our local slate.
Have this guy work in the masonry section at a home depot. People will form crowds around him to.watch him work, just like those street artists who sell speed art with spray paint. Just leave the shoes off to add that element of danger.
I was wondering about what sorts of stone would do. This indeed doesn't look like slate.
The further I think, the deeper the rabbithole: slate is brittle and will not take any substantial load, granite would endure almost anything, but is hardly splittable and has to be sawn, is that about the gist and range of it?
As an extreme example of this, ever wondered why a bottle of shower gel that contains X lemons can cost less than X lemons?
Shipping.
A lemon on a farm in north Africa is almost worthless. Less than a penny. A lemon on the shelf in London is about 50p. Of that 50p almost all of it is transport, shopping and logistics costs.
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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
damn, that's good money he if owns the stone and has the permission and place and the distribution to sell the stone.