In article ,
Greg Copeland wrote:

According to the people, that *I* read and saw on TV, any hammer would of
met the specs. Likewise, the tub liner there was nothing special. And
you're right, therein lies the rub of why Congress was so ****ed off. As
I recall, it was a scam because they under bid a contract (or something
like that) and this was used to steal from peter to pay paul. AFAIR,
specs had nothing to do with it. It was a simple scam put forth to get
extra money. IIRC, toilet seats were also a line item which we were being
scammed on. Yes, that's right, normal, regular toilet seats. Plastic
seats at that.

Yet, according to Tom, we got the best value for our dollar from that
scam. Never mind that after the scandel broke, prices went back to what
they were before the scam started, which were all inline with what you
would find at any hardware store. Yet, Tom got his best value.

Seriously, you don't have to look that hard to see that Tom gets screwed
in just about every deal he makes.

The problem with this discussion is that it is on specific items. The
entire bid has to be considered to get the $900 hammer in perspective.
Often there will be thousands of items in the bid, many of which will be
in the hundreds of thousands if not millions per item. Weeks will be
spent getting the price down on the more expensive items and then the
cheaper items will be used to tweak the total bid.

The price of small items pale into insignificance when the total bids
are compared.

LG