I deal with consultant price negotiations all the time and quite frankly it's one of the hardest challenges that consulting companies face. I think I might have lost you with my rent-a-center analogy; my point actually was to say that they aren't like rent-a-centers. In the case of a consultancy assessing the value of these transactions is extremely difficult do as a customer and more importantly as the owner of a newly established consultancy owner. Not to mentioned some of those transactions hold more value (and thus price/hr) to different sets of customers. This is really where the unfortunate math behind a starting a consultancy lies. At maturity (i.e. when you have consistent client pipeline) these are much easier to decipher.

EDIT: I just realized I did actually say "let's pretend a consultancy is a rent-a-center". I should have probably worded that differently - hence the confusion.