> it seems clear that one could save quite a bit 
> of money by buying 1 package and 2 spare 
> queens vs. 3 packages.

Perhaps, if buying one QUEENLESS package, and 3 queens, but not otherwise.
If one cannot get queenless packages, this falls under the heading of "Good In Theory, But Not In Practice"

It's been tried by more than one overly-optimistic fellow.
Beekeepers do the darndest things when under the misapprehension that they might save a few bucks.
I've observed this sort of antics more than once (in the interest of science, and for the considerable entertainment value), and it is not as easy as one might think to actually pull off.
One faces the task of getting 2 of the 3 pounds of bees, which have become accustomed to one queen's scent, to stay where they are hived, with a new strange-smelling queen.
Some bees will stay, most won't.

Even when one adds open brood, the ultimate bee glue, to the two hives with "new" queens, there will be significant population drift back to the hive with the "original queen".
One ends up with one hive with 2 lbs of bees, and two hives with about half a pound of bees each.
One might shake the packages into cardboard nucs or hives and them immediately move the two with "new queens" to another yard, but this is yet another level of nonsense.

Now, if one could get the package supplier to make up queenless packages, the bees would not have a few days to get accustomed to a queen in the first place.
But, the mass-production of packages these days and the use of contracted beekeepers to shake their bees to make up packages tends to imply that queens are universally added when the packages are first shaken.

To each his own, but I've been there, and it was a Three Stooges film festival, with many extra highly-creative ad-hoc steps, resulting in hives that could barely set up housekeeping before the flow, as the small initial number of bees dwindled, and the brood rearing suffered as a result, so the hive did not grow, did not thrive, barely hung in there as a "weak hive".  Very few bees shaken are going to live a full productive lifespan once hived as a package, so the concept of "minimum critical mass" comes into play, most important when clustering during the cold spring nights.  The exception to this would be NWCs, who overwinter in scary little grapefruit-sized clusters that make the first-time NWC keeper think he will lose all his hives, but this is the case of bees on stores not on empty drawn comb or (even worse) foundation.

Far easier and much cheaper to overwinter late summer splits with solid summer queens, and make spring splits with swarm cells, and avoid the whole overpriced spring package and poorly-mated spring queen lemming rush.

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