Costco cordless telephones

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my attempt to replace the battery in a cordless telephone. Well, this week I purchased a new set of four cordless telephones from Costco for about the same price as three replacement batteries. The existing phones that they replace are now so much electronic junk. There's a problem when buying new is more economical than replacing a consumable component in an existing product, whether that be a phone battery or a printer cartridge. Either someone is taking a loss on the new product or else they're ripping us off on the cost of the consumable components. One time this only happened with razors, now more and more consumer products are following this path.