Oh, I absolutely MUST have the diamond encrusted mailbox. Nothing else will do.

and $279 for a locking, vandal-resistant mailbox.

What about snow plow resistant? My dad had to replace ours at least once a year.

Batter up!

My $440,000 home (NYC suburbs) does just nicely with my $35 (I think, I haven't looked at replacement costs) mailbox on a wood pole. It has even taken a hit from my in-laws car and survived.

Suddenly my Rubbermaid mailbox seems so tacky.

Heh, my aunt has a steel mailbox that sits on a 2 or 3 foot column with a roughly 1 foot square foot print. Filled with cement. She used to have trouble with kids bashing her mailbox. Never had a problem with it since. Well, unless you count the time her neighbor accidentally backed into it and messed up his car. Now the box sits at a slight slant.

the people with 400000 dollar houses ... will be the first with their backs to the wall when the revolution comes.

Why do you want to punish the poor? The median home price in the suburbs of Boston covered by this edition of the Globe is over $400,000. In eastern Massachusetts as a whole the average home is over $300,000.

It's kind of interesting how the makers of these products justify the expense, when basically they're just interested in making as big a profit as possible.

A friend of my elderly Mother lives in an upscale community -- where the homes cost a bundle and there's a HOA that tells you what you can and cannot do. All of the places basically look alike -- boring. Her mailbox got knocked over by a neighbor and she had to replace it within X number of days or get fined by the HOA. I figured maybe $75 for the somewhat ornate thing.

It was $200. It had to match all of the others on the street and was 'custom built' by a company for the development.

Years ago, we had a bit of a problem with mailbox baseball and then just having them plowed over. Now, technically, it's a felony to mess with a mail box. One guy, tired of having his box and post plowed over, rebuilt it with a steel I beam sunk into the ground with cement. He covered the beam with a nice wooden post. Some kid came along and ran the box down.

Well, he tried to but his car sort of crumpled like tin foil and he wound up in the hospital for a few weeks. Then his folks turned around and sued the guy owning the mailbox, ignoring the fact that their stupid kid hit the thing deliberately. I think they won.

A few years later, some folks started building brick enclosures for their mail boxes -- which got by legally because they 'looked strong', unlike the other guy's 'wooden post'. Then some other guy, pi$$ed at his box winding up plowed over, got what appeared to be an anchor chain for a medium sized battleship, welded it together in an S shape and encased his box in a steel cage.

They left that alone also, though some lawyer grumbled that if a car careened accidentally off the road and hit it, the owner might be held responsible for any injuries.

However, the article just lets you know that some folks have got way too much extra money that they don't know what to do with.