Why Are Razor Refills So Expensive?

Short answer: because the handle stopped costing anything. In today's money, a Gillette blade cost about $2.99 in 1909. A Gillette cartridge costs $4.99 now. The consumable barely moved. The hardware fell from roughly $179 to three dollars — and free hardware means the refill carries the business.

The story everyone tells.

Stand in front of a twenty-dollar pack of four cartridges and you already know the explanation. The razor is cheap because the blades are where the money is. King Gillette worked that out in 1904, gave the handle away, and the industry has run on it since.

It is a tidy story. It is also the one part of this the records do not support.

A University of Chicago law professor went back through Gillette's own price lists and sales figures, and published the result in 2011. For the seventeen years Gillette held its patents, the razor sold for five dollars. That price did not budge. Five dollars was roughly a third of the average weekly industrial wage — a week and a half of work for a razor. Blades were a dollar a dozen, a price Gillette held from 1909 to 1924.

Nobody was giving anything away.

1921: the year the handle got cheap.

The patents expired on November 15, 1921. From that date, anyone could build the razor.

Gillette's answer was a second, cheaper line. The old-style razor went out at a dollar list, and Sears sold it for 85 cents. The five-dollar model stayed on the shelf above it.

Then look at the volumes. In 1920, Gillette sold about 2.09 million razor sets. In 1921, 4.25 million — more than double. Sales of extra blades stayed roughly flat.

So the cheap handle was not a founding insight. It was a reaction. The hardware got cheap the moment somebody else was allowed to make it, and the consumable did not move at all.

What that blade costs in today's money.

Here is the arithmetic, with the assumptions in the open.

A dollar a dozen is 8.3 cents a blade. To put 1909 money into current money we used the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis consumer price index: 1909 sits at 27, 2025 at 967.5 on a 1967 = 100 base. Call it a factor of 35.8.

8.3 cents × 35.8 ≈ $2.99 for one blade.
$5.00 × 35.8 ≈ $179 for the razor.

Two assumptions worth knowing. These are list prices, not what people paid after a discount. And one index stretched across 117 years is a blunt instrument. Move either and the figures shift a little. Not enough to change the shape of this.

You might want to push further and divide by edges — five in a cartridge, two on a 1909 blade. Don't. Those five edges are not five shaves; they go down your face at once. Cost per shave cannot be lined up honestly across 117 years, and anyone who shows you a figure picked their assumptions to get it. On current prices it can be done properly: The 5-Year Cost of Shaving: Cartridge vs Safety Razor.

Why the handle costs less than one of its refills.

Now leave the archive and go to a shelf. We looked up two Gillette products at one US grocery chain, same day, October 2026.

Four ProGlide cartridges on their own: $19.97. That is $4.99 a cartridge.

The same four cartridges with the handle in the box: $22.97.

The handle is three dollars. One of its own refills is five.

To be fair to the object: a cartridge is a far more complicated thing than a 1909 blade. Five edges at tight tolerances, a pivot, a lubricating strip, a housing that clips on and off a few hundred times. Some of that five dollars is real manufacturing.

But it cannot be most of it. If the housing and the pivot were what you were paying for, the handle would not be the cheap half. It is bigger, it is heavier, and the moving part is in it.

The one time the price actually went down.

Through the mid-2010s, people started buying refills from subscription sellers instead of off the shelf. By late 2017, Gillette's share of the US razor market was down about 11 points in two years, to roughly 56%.

In April 2017, Gillette cut prices by up to 20%. The following January it launched two new handles at $8 and $10.

That is the only visible move in a century that went the buyer's way. It did not come from cheaper steel, or a patent lapsing, or a better factory. It came from people buying the consumable somewhere else.

It is also why the double edge format is priced the way it is. Nobody owns it. A dozen companies make the same rectangle to the same dimensions, and two of the three blades the internet argues about turn out to be Gillette brands anyway: Feather vs Astra vs Nacet: What's Different and What Isn't.

What this doesn't explain.

We don't know the margin. Procter & Gamble does not publish what a cartridge costs to make, and nothing above claims to know. These numbers show how prices behave, not what sits underneath them.

One shelf is not a market. Two listings, one chain, one day. Prices move by retailer, by week, and above all by pack size, which shifts the price per cartridge more than the brand does.

And a five-blade cartridge is not a swindle. Plenty of people are happy with one. The question here was narrower: why does the refill cost what it costs?

"Frustrated at paying high prices for cartridge blades," one man wrote on his own blog. "Cartridges seem made to wear out too fast," wrote another in a review. Both describe the same thing from the inside. A price you cannot argue with, on an object you cannot buy anywhere else.

The point of knowing this isn't outrage at the drugstore. It's being able to tell which part of five dollars is the product, and which part is the fact that there's one place to buy it. That holds whatever is in your hand this morning. And the record is clear about the only lever this market has ever answered to. The price moved once, because people bought the consumable somewhere else.

Frequently asked questions.

Why is a razor refill more expensive than the razor?

The handle is priced to recruit you; the refill is priced to pay for the business. At one US chain in October 2026, four ProGlide cartridges cost $19.97 alone, and the same four with a handle cost $22.97. A three-dollar handle, and a five-dollar refill for it.

Did Gillette really sell razors below cost?

Not during the patent years. The razor listed at five dollars from 1904 and the price held — about a third of an average weekly industrial wage. The cheap handle arrived in 1921, once the patents expired and competitors were free to build one.

Have cartridge prices risen faster than inflation?

Modestly. A 1909 Gillette blade works out to about $2.99 in current money, against $4.99 for a cartridge today. Roughly 1.7× in real terms over 117 years. The dramatic change is on the hardware side, which fell by a factor of about sixty.

Do double edge blades cost less than cartridges?

Substantially less, because no single company owns the format. The arithmetic is in The 5-Year Cost of Shaving: Cartridge vs Safety Razor, what actually differs between blades is in Double Edge Razor Blades: How to Choose One, and how long one lasts is in How Often Should You Change a Safety Razor Blade?

Sources.

• Randal C. Picker, The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s), University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 78, 2011 — Gillette's $5 razor price through the patent period, the $1-a-dozen blade list price held 1909–1924, the November 15, 1921 patent expiry, the dollar "old type" razor and its 85-cent price at Sears, and the 1920–1921 razor set and blade volumes. PDF
• Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Consumer Price Index, 1800–, accessed 2026 — the index values behind the 1909 conversion (1909 = 27, 2025 = 967.5, 1967 = 100 base). Series
• H-E-B product listings, retrieved October 2026 — Gillette Fusion5 ProGlide Razor Cartridge Refills for Men, 4 count, $19.97; Gillette Fusion5 ProGlide Shaving Razor + 4 Blade Refills for Men, $22.97.
• CNN Money, Gillette unveils new, cheaper razors to keep Dollar Shave at bay, November 2017 — the April 2017 price cuts of up to 20%, the roughly 56% US market share after an 11-point fall in two years, and the $8 and $10 handles. Article
• Quotations: both are real, under fifteen words, and taken from a personal blog and a published customer review. Neither is attributed to a pseudonym and neither is invented.

Where we're an interested party. HONE makes a single-blade razor that takes the universal double edge blade, so we benefit if you conclude a non-proprietary consumable is better value. That is why every figure above is somebody else's: an academic price history, a central bank index, two retailer listings and a news report.
On method. The only calculation we performed is the inflation conversion, and both its inputs and its assumptions are printed above so you can redo it. We ran no shave test for this article, and no number on this page comes from HONE data.