Let’s say you’re a kid, and you’re trying to set up a lemonade stand in front of your parents’ house. You go to the store (possibly with parental supervision) to get lemons and sugar, you come home and mix the two into a pitcher, and you set up a little folding table near the sidewalk. Since children are notoriously bad at big-picture thinking, you probably think of the lemons and the sugar as your only real costs, and you price the cups of lemonade (which are set out by the pitcher) accordingly in order to achieve a worthwhile ROI.

Of course, as an adult, it’s easy to see that there were a number of hidden costs that you weren’t thinking about at the time: the cups, the pitcher, the folding table (all of which were in your “inventory,” so to speak), to say nothing of labor, time, transport to and from the grocery store, etc. In this way, it’s a lot like the modern supply chain. When it comes to something like an au