Originally Posted by
greatscott
Ok, $3 for an odd ball nut isn't to bad out of line; these companies that make that stuff is simply grabbing cyclists by the balls and squeezing because they can. It doesn't cost anything more to make a LH nut as it does a RH nut, but it's different and it's for bicycles so lets burn people for it.
The nut with the non-standard thread is actually more expensive to produce than a standard one because there is less demand for it. It's a question of economies of scale--the production line producing millions of standard nuts costs less per unit to maintain than the line producing hundreds or thousands of the non-standard even if it's essentially just the same process with the same materials. The costs of the production line are amortized per unit, and the fraction of the cost per unit for the low-demand article has a smaller denominator.