This subject came up a few weeks ago and the general reaction was the same, "how much!"
I was interested because I'm always on the lookout for little gifts that I can give to my furniture clients, something that's quick to make and ideally something that showcases the highly figured timbers that I use to distinguish my furniture from High Street alternatives. Chopsticks seemed like a possibility.
It appears that after you've produced a blank there are three separate operations involved in making a chopstick. Tapering the length, adding a chamfer so the chopstick goes from a square section at the top to an octagonal section at the bottom, and finally adding a "pyramid" shape on the top. So I decided to knock together a couple of crude jigs to handle jobs one and three, but to do the chamfering by hand. Using some off-cuts of Rippled Sycamore, and by double stick taping some skids on the bottom of a block plane, this is what I managed to produce (after wasting the best part of a day),
They're okay for a first stab at the problem, but it was clear that to do these in any volume I'd have to invest far more time in producing better jigs. I reckon I'd have to make one more prototype set of jigs and then a fully finished set, and that would likely take three to five day's work. Plus I'd probably need at least one and possibly two dedicated high angle block planes (there are tear out issues that need taming) with better attached and more durable skids. I suspect I could do the pyramid forming with ganged up components on an SCMS or power saw, but to get the right finish the tapering and chamfering would have to be done manually which would hugely slow down production.
At that stage I decided it wasn't really viable for my purposes. For one thing you'd need really, really straight grained off-cuts and many of the timbers that I use may have toxicity issues. Even more significantly I think it would still take 15-20 minutes to make one pair of chopsticks including blank preparation. Not to mention that the making process itself would be so dull I'd lose the will to live! However, if I had been tempted to take this idea further, I'd think seriously about just buying this jig ready made and saving myself a lot of jig development and making time.
It's always the same, you think a job is trivial but when you actually get down to doing it you often find it eats up far more time than you first envisioned.
For a hobbyist I suspect this jig might be more relevant. You could quickly produce something with your own hands that's fully up to professional standards (or at least better than my initial efforts!), that's widely acceptable as a little gift, and could be made with minimal equipment in a very small workshop. If you've got the skills and equipment to make your own jigs to the required accuracy I guess you'll be beyond this anyway and already making more sophisticated gift items. In fact I suspect the biggest problem for most hobbyists with chopsticks would be actually sourcing suitable timber.
Anyhow, just my thoughts.
