I went to the store today to buy a new battery for our cordless phone. The battery that came with the phone still worked, it just didn’t hold a charge fore very long. It would last maybe 15-20 minutes before it died, and around 5 minutes before it died it would start beeping and get very annoying. When we first bought the phone a few years ago it would last for a long time before it died. Sometimes having the phone die quickly was a good way to get off the phone with someone you didn’t really feel like talking too, but for the most part it was just frustrating. So I’m at the store looking at the batteries, and the cheapest one I could find was for $23.99. I grabbed it and was ready to go to the check out line to buy it when while walking past the phones on display I noticed they were selling a cordless phone for $20.99. It wasn’t on sale so this was the normal price for it. I figured it was worth a shot so I grabbed the box and opened it up to see if the battery would fit in my existing phone. To my surprise it did. The battery selling for $23.99 did have a big label boasting the extended talk time, but really we don’t need that. So tell me this. How can they sell a phone with all the cables and the charging dock along with a battery for $3 less than if you just buy the battery. For that matter, why can’t you just buy a cheap standard battery for around $10 rather than forcing people to spend more for extra battery life. It’s just one of those mysteries that can’t really be answered, like why hotdogs are packaged in 10s and hotdogs buns are packaged in 12.