There are some dealers that send an extraordinarily high volume of cards to TPG"s like PSA for grading (4 Sharp Corners comes to mind), and they do receive a volume discount that most people don't receive. You probably need to send tens of thousands of cards for grading to get this kind of discount, so most of us shouldn't even consider it.
However, for the situation that you mentioned, where the card received such a low grade where it doesn't seem to be worth the cost of grading, it is usually because the submitter thought that he would receive a much higher grade than he did. Most novice submitters overgrade their cards. (You can see this from many raw card sellers on ebay every day.) Or even for expert submitters, they may have just missed something like surface crease, which wasn't visible except at an angle. There are other reasons also, such as some people submit nostalgic childhood cards for protection even if the condition is too poor to sell. Or if it's a tough card to find graded, some people just submit a poor condition copy anyway.
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