Originally Posted by eastport

Hmmm, the list price $15.45 for 200.

I hope that the government is getting a much better price than that.

BWI, the nearest airport, handles over 20 million passengers a year and it's not even in the top 20 busiest U.S. airports. If we estimate 8M pass through security, that's over $600K per year (list price) for paper disks at a single medium sized airport.

The real point is that even seeming trivial things aren't small over the whole system. The reaction of "We already spend so much, that amount just doesn't matter" is more of a condemnation of the system rather than positive response.