The plant sitting on your shelf — let's say a Philodendron luxurians, four leaves, a foot of trailing stem, paid for with a tax-return refund — passed through at least three sets of hands before it reached you. A grower in Chachoengsao who took a cutting in March. An exporter in Bangkok who packed it bare-root under a CITES permit in July. A US importer who unboxed it in a Miami warehouse, sweated through the agricultural inspection, and stuck it under fluorescent shop lights for ten days before flipping it to the shop you actually buy from. Each of those people priced the plant. None of them set the price you paid.
The retail tag is a story told in the last fifteen feet of the supply chain. The interesting numbers — the ones that explain why a verrucosum costs $90 one month and $40 the next, why spiritus-sancti refuses to come down, why every shop in your city seems to be selling the same gloriosum at the same price within a five-dollar band — happen earlier, in warehouses and Line group chats and pallet trucks you'll never see.