If all he’s doing is paying for stones of his selection, I can see that. I got the sense, though, that he’s disappearing rocks and appearing dollars.
He’s still paying people for rocks either way.
Regardless of the answer, the friend is a terrible businessman. Why is he charging other people anything less than $1.00 when he can just turns stones into dollar bills and keep them?
So low???
Given the price I paid for a small bag of landscaping stones, that price seems way too high! His ‘customers’ would be better off keeping their stones and selling them for use in stone-y situations: Landscaping stones. Concrete aggregate. Terrazzo floors. Stone kitchen countertops. Stone walls. Etc.
Superman can turn a lump of coal into a diamond without using his hands, but you probably don’t want to know how.
He’s paying people for the service they provide. I.e. he doesn’t have to go out and scrounge up his own stones. But as I said, he shouldn’t pay them anymore than a few cents per rock for providing that service. There’s probably a minimum size, otherwise he could be a billionaire just by changing a cubic yard of fine gravel and he wouldn’t need this service.
Landscaping stones aren’t that expensive even if you get the more expensive stuff. After all, people leave those stones laying around on their yards. But the OP didn’t say they had to be any special rocks. So the customers could just scavange them from the side of roads or somewhere like that.
[Moderating]
The math question here, such as it is, is trivial, and most of the discussion is therefore about the nontrivial questions behind it. Which are all a better fit for IMHO than GQ. Moving.
Yes, the latter.
Why has nobody mentioned that it is a trick question? That the fee is in cents and the target amount is dollars so it’s very easy to miss the extra factor of a hundred? Given a better scenario to dress it up, it might be worthwhile as a bar bet.
After looking at the original posts, I’m kinda suspecting that it already is a bar bet.
The Tooth Fairy has a money-losing business model that is, fortunately for her, limited by the rarity of teeth under pillows. The “friend” here has no such limitation. The costs in ledgers alone will be astronomical.