Little sample-sized bottles, why so expensive?

[Aurora40]

If you order those little 2 oz bottles off the internet, you can get the price down to about 40-50 cents per bottle. But typically there are minimums like 100 bottles or more. And shipping is usually fairly pricey, raising the per-bottle cost.

I can get them locally for 70 cents a bottle with a flip-top cap.

But what I don't get, is why are they so expensive in the first place? It's a plastic bottle. How much does a plastic soda bottle cost? Or a plastic milk bottle? Why are these little things so pricey? They seem like they should cost about 10-20 cents each.

[2000]

just a guess..
supply and demand, alot more coke bottles sold in a week than 2oz. plastic bottles.

[Setec Astronomy]

Well....this is kind of a long story...some years ago I was talking to a friend of a friend, who had worked in an aluminum can plant that was attached to a brewery (the can plant was owned by the aluminum company, but was attached to the brewery because it's not efficient to ship empty cans...or plastic bottles). He was telling me that they made a million cans a day in the plant--I just about laughed him out of the room, but he went on to explain how they did it...and I started to think about all the people, all the cans...and a million a day started to sound like a real number.

A few years later I was talking to an aluminum salesman, and asked him about the "million cans a day", and he said that they had plants that made 5 million a day...but that was nothing compared to the plastic closures business (caps for soda bottles, etc.), which he said was over 100 BILLION per year. And this was maybe 10 years ago.

So, that soda bottle probably costs almost nothing, being made in huge quantities in a plant attached to the soda plant...which is a lot different than you buying a couple of bottles locally, after passing through a lot of hands, etc.

[DETLMAN]

not to mention virginplastic material is pretty expensive, and there is quite a bit of maintenance on the molds and injection machines. then there is packaging etc.

I used to work at a bottle mfg and even though we made a whole line of different sze bottles we still bought caps from another vendor and they were about the same price as a bottle was.

[jfelbab]

A few years ago I stopped into American Science and Surplus Center and bought a ton of plastic bottles of various sizes cheap. Like 10 for a buck. Their stock of stuff changes daily but you might want to check there if you need bottles.

http://www.sciplus.com/category.cfm?subsection=7&category=80