Why would I be OK paying 3x the price of an actual poster?
And to be fair I did preface my question with the caveat that I could very well be wrong and that’s a reasonable price.
I went and looked at the link. There are two issues going on:
1) The seller is offering three
licensed prints as a single unit of sale. From their perspective, you're getting three custom-run 24" x 36" posters for $121 -- a little over $40 a piece.
2) The seller is also offering a wide selection of sizes. That means it's virtually certain that they don't have large lots of various-sized posters sitting around in a warehouse. Instead, they're digitally-printing orders as one-offs.
Now ... why would these posters at this size cost $40/piece while a same-size Spiderman poster over at Target costs $8 each?
Economies of scale and logistics. I worked at a large-format print shop in the 1990s -- everything from blueprints to festival posters to trial exhibits. If you needed to put it on huge pieces of paper, we handled it. If you needed 10,000 of them, we could do it. If you just needed one (like trial exhibits), we did that, too.
Even back in the 1990s, a one-off digital print of a poster-sized trial exhibit was in the neighborhood of $60-80 -- in low-cost-of-living New Orleans, not in NYC or LA. I don't know if any of our house lawyers get personally involved in ordering large-format prints of their trial exhibits -- but if they do, they can attest to the current costs. I'd expect most of them to be north of $100 today.
Long story short: Anything one-off, any kind of custom on-demand print of a single item is going to cost far more than a single finished piece from ten-thousand-piece run. If you go to a silk screener and ask for a piece of artwork to be screened onto a single T-shirt, it might cost you $80-100 bucks around here. But 100 of the same T-shirt might cost you $500 ($5/piece), and 1,000 shirts might cost you $2,500 ($2.50/piece).
So what's going on?
I looked quickly online for a quick layman's explanation.
These guys don't strictly do posters, but all the considerations are the same:
... [People] are generally more used to unit prices. I want 3 of these and each one costs $x so my total is $3x. If I decide I only need two than my total is $2x. It's simple that way, and most people don't buy things on a regular basis at quantities that justify a change to that model.
But
commercial printing is a volume-based business. Even if we do extremely short runs (which we
can do on our digital press), they tend to be of larger items - like a 64-page coil-bound book - that still justify the cost of coming to a
commercial printer to get it done.
The short answer to the question "Why does my price-per-piece change my unit cost when I change my quantity?" is economies of scale. It's always less expensive on a per-item basis to produce things in larger quantities. It doesn't matter if what you're producing is a widget or a brochure, more always means a lower price.
The reason for this is simple: Overhead. In
the print industry, most of the overhead comes from make-ready (aside from the obvious costs of rent, power, heat, etc.). Make-ready is the time it takes to set up a printing press, a folder, a saddle-stitcher, a perfect binder, or any other piece of equipment to run your job. Regardless of the length of the run (i.e. number of pieces) it takes the same amount of time to prep a piece of equipment.
...
As an example (the numbers aren't accurate but you'll get the point), let's say it takes 30 minutes to prepare a printing press to run your job and we can run that press at 10,000 sheets an hour. If you only do 1,000 pieces, a very large portion of your cost is in your make-ready because it will take longer to do that than it will to run the entire job! However, if you're doing 100,000 pieces, make-ready becomes a much smaller percentage of the overall cost of the job. If you imagine that a make-ready costs you $100 on each piece of equipment (the real number is based on a number of factors that we don't have time to go into in this article!), then for 1,000 pieces to go from a press, to a folder, to a
saddle-stitcher means your make ready adds $0.30 per piece (3 * 100 / 1000). For 100,000 pieces that cost is only $0.003 per piece.
And those cheap posters at Five Below and Target are
printed on presses in large lots, not printed off as on-demand singles from a digital press (basically a huge color laser printer). Per piece, those mass-produced posters are likely less than a quarter each wholesale.
