Yes, but I've also seen how cheaply a number of other conferences/events are able to run in the same or comparable venues.
Can you give some examples please? If there are people out there who can run large conferences cheaply I'd love to go look and figure out how :-)
Don't forget wifi :)
I wish conferences offered two rates: one for just the talks, and one for talks + (coffee,wifi,lunch).
I was at a conference that did that. The end result was that there was no way to prevent people who hadn't paid for lunch and coffee from just walking up to the buffet table and taking lunch and coffee, and the food being gone before everybody who had paid for lunch had eaten.