That's the point. They aren't trying to sell IO with glacier, since they've already saturated that with EBS. They just want to sell the spare storage capacity, ideally in a write once read never use case. That way they can achieve 100% utilization out of the drives.
So if you use a lot of IO with Glacier, they are going to charge you like crazy, since you're potentially impacting EBS customers.
I'm that guy. I should update the post; Amazon "fixed" the retrieval fees in late 2016 and I would've paid less than a dollar had the current pricing scheme been in effect when I did the retrieval.
