And at least initially, the documents can be had only by either picking them up here, in remote Juneau — a city accessible only by plane or boat — or having them shipped, at considerable cost, to newsrooms across the country.
And the fuel most commonly produced, ethanol, can't be run through pipelines and must be shipped at high cost.
All faucets are shipped at a cost of $5.99 in the U.S. BEST: Five-faucet rating system educates buyers on the quality and features of most products.
"We saw air fresheners as products we could ship at low cost to America," said Junwu Liu, the chairman of TongDa and the president of Oscar Home Care.
They are shipped at the publisher's cost to the wholesaler's distribution depot.
Shipping at Amazon costs about 4 percent of sales, and Amazon loses money on it because it offers marketing benefits, said Aaron Kessler, an e-commerce analyst at the research firm ThinkEquity.
The rule of thumb in transporting of goods is that the higher the volume shipped at one time, the lower the cost per item.
Those missing features are symptoms of B&N's bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis.
As early as 2007, before the Navy awarded the contract to build the ship, the GAO said that there "were key risks in the program that would impair the Navy's ability to deliver [the first ship] at cost, on time and with its planned capabilities". The program consists of three nuclear-powered ships designed to serve as successors to the Nimitz-class carriers.
But use of a fuel that must be shipped in at considerable cost and from a great distance poses a number of problems, and leads to a lot of temporary blackouts.
But shipping at small sites usually costs about 35 percent of sales, said Mr. Schwake, the retail adviser.
