This is true for many items, some of which are simply too expensive to include in a price.
I don’t think I need to explain that if you’re buying an item on Amazon, you’re making a commitment to Amazon, so you’re going to have to pay a certain price for that item. If you’re buying something on eBay, you’re making a commitment to eBay, so you’re going to have to pay a certain price for that item.
On Amazon, you don’t have to pay anything at all if you don’t want to for anything. On eBay, you do pay a small fee if you want to buy something on sale.
I think there are two different types of “traditional” costing. One is the “traditional” costing that uses the product’s manufacturing components, materials, and labor costs to figure out the price. The other type of traditional costing is the “conventional” costing that takes those manufacturing costs into account for the price.
Now, you might be thinking that the traditional costing is the same thing as the conventional costing, but that isn’t quite what I mean. The conventional costing really does include your manufacturing costs, but does not include any of the product costs. For example, if you buy a book that costs $5 and you put it in your bookcase, you are still charged $5.
A similar approach is probably the norm in the UK, and it’s more prevalent in the US. The standard approach is to get a book that costs £10 (or $100 or less) instead of £10. In a world where no one is spending much time on the book, you’d be better off buying a new one.
The reasoning is that the more you pay upfront, the less you will pay in total costs over the life of the product. The traditional costing is also more expensive to administer and less accessible to the end consumer, so the fact that it includes manufacturing costs may be deemed a benefit.
I would say that manufacturing costs are really just a part of the “total cost” of the product if the product is intended to be used once and then discarded, but they are not part of the “total cost” because they are necessary to manufacture the product.
The number of times you might use the same product might be higher than the total number of times you use it, but the only way you can tell is if it is used once or twice. I know that at least two people with a similar story have found similar product choices.
So let’s think about a product that you’ll be using several times over the course of your lifetime. The first time you use it you are likely to find out a number of things about it. For example, you might find out that it has some feature that is difficult to use, or maybe you don’t really like it but you might find out the feature is really useful. You might find out that it has a design flaw that is hard to fix.