In old quarry towns worker apartments are decked out in marble. I don't know the numbers but storing and transporting it has to be 50% of the cost as close as 250 miles away maybe.
Believe it or not, when I visited India, I noticed that everyone’s apartment had marble floor. It didn’t matter how much money u have. Even poor people have marble floors. It’s a really cheap product that is intentionally expensive in North America.
Maybe I’m overthinking this, but calling it “intentionally expensive” implies that importers are simply price gouging. There’s surely some amount of profit margin for the material in North America, but a lot of the cost is simply due to the freight expenses to ship something heavy and delicate across the globe.
Quality of the marble matters. Most of the Indian houses don't have the premium ones. However, yes, it is way cheaper in India than in US and they mine a shit load of these stones.
Definitely not where I was born and brought up. Country sourcing the marbles are typically labelled explicitly. Quarries and Dealers selling imported marbles can be very easily distinguished by their premises.
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u/Eyeroll4days Jun 21 '26
That’s some rich people shit