Well, cost effective programs rarely make the news.
Even the expensive ones that do are often overblown. As I understand it, the infamous $500 hammer was a specialized non-sparking hammer for use in an environment where the atmosphere was explosive. The $500 toilet seat was actually a full fiberglass molded unit (both seats, the thing they went on, and associated other stuff) custom fitted and produced in numbers of just a few dozen for an unusual space in an airplane.
Not that there isn't waste, but it's often different from what gets reported....
As I recall, and agreeing with the first link Google supplied (http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-...), the hammer might have been somewhat special, but the outsized price was simply an accounting artifact, the contract supplied N spare parts and tools, and overhead was evenly allocated to each part, whether it was a hammer or a complete jet engine (I think it was a contract for maintaining them).
The "coffee maker" was for the freaking C5, a huge transport, our biggest ever; if configured for carrying people, it might have to serve a lot of coffee over a long trip (can be refueled in mid-air). It would also be ... more than inconvenient if turbulence or whatever caused it to spray hot coffee. And if you're serving a lot of coffee, that leads straight to:
The "toilet seats" were much like you say, small quantity and being for a military airplane, weight is a big consideration. Note that pretty much any modern military plane that's big enough to have one or more toilets is going to produced in small numbers. Heck, Lockheed only made 650 P-3 Orions (naval patrol craft), Boeing only 744 B-52s; if this was for the C5-A as I remember, we only built 131 of them, and only 81 in the initial 1968-73 batch (no doubt canceled like everything else then), followed by an inevitably expensive restart of only 50 in 1985-89.
Ben Rich's book [1] about the development of the SR-71 explains the reason behind the hammer story. Cadmium plated tools were traced to embrittlement of titanium panels; they spent quite a bit of time tracking down the source of that problem and eliminating Cd plated tools from the factory.
As far as coffee makers go, it's not always true in aircraft---especially combat aircraft---that gravity always points down. You see the same awareness in NASA Tech Briefs: coffee makers, toilet seats, even simple things like cabinet latches can't depend on gravity always having the same magnitude, or direction, or steadiness.
[1] Ben R. Rich. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996. ISBN 0-316-74300-3.
The trend is towards building fewer of each type of aircraft, too. For example, while 744 B-52s were built, only 78 remain in service. Which makes a $40 million avionics upgrade program pretty impressive. Imagine trying to get a design and production run of under 100 units of military-grade hardware done for half a million dollars apiece....
And yes, overhead and accounting can make prices interesting, especially when somebody has a political axe to grind. The trend towards smaller numbers of more sophisticated aircraft exacerbates it. For a random example, the marginal cost of building a new F-22 (if they were still being built at all) is about $150 million, but if you just take the program cost and divide it by the relatively small number (under 200) built, you get about $350 million apiece. Someone who wants to portray the F-22 as cost effective will no doubt use the $150 million number, and someone who wants to talk about how expensive and wasteful it is will use the $350 million number....
Heh. While drafting the above I decided to omit WWII production numbers, such as 18,482 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers (the all time record for a single type), or perhaps more comparable, as long as we're talking heavy bombers:
3,970 B-25s Superfortresses, which we kept using for a long time, along with a B-50 upgrade, 370 units.
384 B-36 Peacemakers.
744 B-52 Stratofortresses (but we actually used them in hot wars).
100 B-1B Lancers, although they were built as stopgaps, and the remaining active fleet of 67 have had their nuclear weapon capability removed.
21 B-2 Spirits, for like the F-22 we stopped production way too early.
Anyway, the problem here is that, someday, we're going to fight a serious hot war again, and these paltry numbers, which will decline due to wear and tear and operational losses won't suffice absent it going nuclear. ALL F-15s built have a nasty problem with a structural defect, what was built was not what was specified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-15#Structural_defects) ... the F-35 looks like our generation's TFX....
Anyone want to bet the F/A-18F Super Hornet will play the same historical role the F-4 Phantom II?
I don't see a likelihood for any vaguely symmetrical hot war anytime soon. Who would we fight? Russia probably doesn't need fighting, just cut off their trade and wait. China and the US are far too dependent on each other. Europe wants to be buddies with everyone. Nobody else has the capability. If those situations change, by the time they do, I think sending manned aircraft into war zones to get shot at will be an obsolete technique, akin to sending in battleships to fight an enemy navy after the rise of the aircraft carrier. Another couple decades of technological advances will change things a lot.
the 300 dollar ashtray was built for naval use, that if it slammed against something it broke in to several dull pieces instead of tiny shards that went everywhere.
now that you mention it, yeah I think that is where i heard that. Although at one point I looked it up, and I seem to remember that it was an actual thing.
Even the expensive ones that do are often overblown. As I understand it, the infamous $500 hammer was a specialized non-sparking hammer for use in an environment where the atmosphere was explosive. The $500 toilet seat was actually a full fiberglass molded unit (both seats, the thing they went on, and associated other stuff) custom fitted and produced in numbers of just a few dozen for an unusual space in an airplane.
Not that there isn't waste, but it's often different from what gets reported....