The nursing staff to give the patient aspirin costs a lot more than someone stocking boxes on shelves.

This is like that thing about about $15,000 toilets at DoD. What's actually happening is a cost allocation function where an agreed-on list price for a whole project is getting distributed pro-rata over as many different line-items as possible.

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pstuart 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That seems like a way to disincentivize cost optimizations in the project (for the client).

	▲	tptacek an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, sure, it's bad! It's just a particular kind of bad.

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malfist a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, it's more expensive, but is it thousands of times more expensive? That $5 bottle probably has 50-100 pills in it. A single dose for $37 is 740X more expensive. And its not just that the apsrin is expensive to cover salaries, EVERYTHING is similarly inflated.