Be aware that the Brother P-touch CUBE (and maybe others) has an annoying thing where it will push out 2cm of label and cut it off to 'prime' itself every time you print. So you waste lots of your label tape.
You can print multiple copies at once and it will only do that once, or turn off the cutting feature, but in normal operation every time you send something new to the printer it wastes 2cm of label.
It's been engineered so you use up the labels quicker so you need to buy more 
(Pretty sure it's because the motor can only run in one direction and not pull the tape back in, so it has to cut it off each time)
example
https://youtu.be/m-lxpSKFZvU?t=238
All P-touch printers that use TZe (and the older TZ) tapes have the waste, but it’s really not some conspiracy. It makes complete sense if you actually look at the print mechanism and label design, and consider why it is designed the way it is. I cannot envision any way to design the system in a way that is _significantly_ more economical with the tape.
It’s not because they lack a bidirectional motor,* but because these are
laminated labels, and the ~2cm is the distance between the print head and the cutter. There needs to be a short distance between the cutter and the laminating rollers that bring together the (non-adhesive) laminating tape and the double-sided adhesive tape which determines the label color. The text is printed via thermal transfer onto the inside of the laminating tape. Realistically, it would be very difficult to design the system with significantly less distance than the 2cm, because of the number of things in that space: the print head, pinch roller for the print head, capstan and pinch roller that press together the lamination as well as advance the tape through the machine, guides to prevent the lamination tape and double-sided tape from touching prematurely, and to prevent the double-sided tape from touching the ink ribbon, and an idler to guide the spent ink ribbon to its take-up reel. The gap between the cutter and lamination rollers is necessary so that the layers can’t come apart by accident when handling the cassettes. (Realigning the layers is extremely hard to do accurately by hand, so they designed it so they’re joined at the factory and the user never needs to do it.)
Yes, there are TZe cassettes that aren’t laminated (including a few non-laminated labels, but mostly for the heat shrink tubing, gift-wrap/decorative ribbons, and the stencil tapes), but since the TZe mechanism is designed around laminated labels, the media path can’t be optimized to be more conservative with non-laminated tapes.
So while it’s absolutely frustrating that some tape is wasted on each print job, I don’t really see how it could be improved. The real frustration, though, isn’t from the waste as such, but from knowing that the wasted tape is quite expensive. But there’s an easy fix for this: buy generic cassettes! They’re like $2 each, and I can tell you from experience that you quickly learn to ignore waste tape when you know it costs next to nothing.
Commercial label printers that cost thousands use separate motors and gears so they can advance the ink ribbon and label separately, and many of these use sensors to not only detect the gaps between labels, but to detect the cut end, so they can then retract the label roll to print on the first one. But these don’t laminate the labels. (AFAIK a separate lamination unit can be added to some models, but these also need some space, which also gets wasted if you just need one label.)
*The motor isn’t bidirectional, but that’s because the laminating process means that tape must not be retracted under any circumstances. (Trying to do so by hand will ruin the cassette, as will attempting to pull on the tape by hand, which pulls the tape through the lamination rollers, but doesn’t advance the ink ribbon take up reel, so the ribbon gets pulled into the lamination rollers.)
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