Used to work at a market as a grunt and later in mgmt doing orders. No supermarket orders pallets of blades. Cost per sqft to warehouse a pallet for years as they slowly sell or are stolen is too high.

If you're using it as a proxy for cost per volume then lately prices have exploded such that blades win, but the winners used to be pharmaceuticals, batteries, film (ye olden days), and oddly enough spices. Spices were good enough for galleons in the middle ages, so I guess its no great surprise. The price of a cardboard box full of genuine vanilla flavoring or maple syrup is fairly shocking if never considered before.

If you demand pallet level ordering / money laundering it is surely laundry detergent. Nothing else comes close in cost at the required pallet level sales volume. Certainly not $1/gallon distilled water pallets or $5 bags of road salt.

and yet, the razor blades are right next to them not locked up. I remember that specifically because it seemed really strange

Depends on the store I suppose. They are in my local drugstore, though it's a long time since I bought razor blades at a supermarket.

"Give 'em the razor; sell 'em the blades"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing

Given you're replying to people talking about securing razors and making blades easy to steal, that's not really relevant.

It was late, and I apparently read that backwards.

Fair enough :)