When someone publishes a cost for a utility, there may be more than one individual who wants the utility being offered.  Think of a service like ebay where people can post higher and higher bids.  At some point, there will be no more charge or cost of goods the seller is willing to give up left available for the vendor to post on the registry to increase what the seller gets paid, but the competing customers still want to compete with each other and offer even more, so that they are picked over the other.  The only means to do this is to give the seller physical goods (by it's cost of goods), or, give the person money by destroying cost of goods.