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depends if you're only measuring a point of sale financial cost.


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It doesn’t. But it’s almost certainly the cheapest way to assess it; doing it at point of sale would be far more fuss and administration.

But my point is that doing that analysis is pointless, because the dollar amount is so low. The difference in price will never be more than a rounding error in a company's expenses, so it's not worth worrying about.

If someone at the company wants it, price point shouldn't be what's keeping the company from using it.


Yes, but as long as the way you pick that price is reasonable at estimating fair market value and consistently applied that shouldn't be a big issue.

Yes but we’re talking about retail prices.

In the sense that it is a number that is taken to represent how much money someone would have to spend to buy it, but is only loosely correlated to the amount of money you would have to spend if you actually tried to buy it, yes.

If they can calculate it at the cash register, they can most certainly calculate it when putting up price tags.

It can, and has to, if you want to compare different qualities. That's kind of the whole point of putting a dollar figure on something.

that's fairly irrelevant, i think, since most of the cost comes from the per-item markups.

It’s just a rule of thumb and some costs do roughly scale. I’m sure there are more sophisticated calculators and spreadsheets for this sort of thing.

In practice I've found that to be incorrect. Prices quoted to me are either wildly inaccurate, or end up being the minor percentage of the total cost.

I disagree. Such a measurement method has several significant flaws (which work to the advantage of whoever is doing the measurement):

1. How do you decide which price to count? Do you count initial costs, or all recurring fees? Do you count additional services by third party vendors? Do you count training materials and so on?

2. It ignores products that have no price, and emphasises inflated pricing of products. This is obviously massively incorrect as a measurement when it comes to services that can be done by gratis software (which includes a large amount of free software).


That's not pedantic, those are the same metrics retailers use when making decisions.

This isn't sufficient to represent prices which often include fractional amounts of cents in non-retail scenarios. Think of AWS server prices per hour.

No, it's based on manufacturer and retailer using a 100% markup.

It is not, but you might want to dollar cost average in.

Presumably they're also priced with that taken into account, so you're not exactly going to be making bank.

How can they measure to give more meaningful prices?

Prices seem to be in $ instead of purchasing power. So not really meaningful, except insofar as it indicates where someone buying with $ would find the cheapest.

The marketplace disagrees strongly. Otherwise the cost of an angled measuring cup would approximate the cost of a nurse, which it does not -- the difference is at least 4 [decimal] orders of magnitude.
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