It must be something you would have to order an exact amount of. Sand or sugar would not count.
My brother in law, a teacher of kids around age 10-12 had the students collect a million pull tabs on soda cans. Those were essentially free. It took quite a few years.
I would suspect some light metallic item, like a small washer. Or an o-ring.
Would milliliters of some liquid count? It’s not too implausible to measure out a cubic meter of something to a one-mL precision.
Flash memory cells.
Looks like you can get a million of these screws for $1000 from AliBaba:
The primary unit for trading water is a megalitre.
Current prices at the Murray Irrigation Water Exchange are around AUD75/ML
We probably have to restrict the limitations a bit. Should it be an item that is only sold by pieces? Then sand, water or computer memory would be out.
1,000,000 resistors are $550.
And, that’s through distribution. If you bought them direct, in that quantity, they would probably be less than half that.
I would stipulate that the quantity should be of individual units. So a million litres of water would only count if you were buying one million 1 litre bottles.
I’ll let the community decide whether crypto currency should count. You can buy billions of some currencies for just a few pennies so we should probably only count physical objects.
Straight pins.
You can buy them by the pound. Not sure but I think you could get a million easily.
Cheap as dirt
(I ain’t counting them out tho’)
Staples. They come in boxes of 5000 for about $3 so $600 would buy you a million of them. Hmm, that doesn’t sound like an unbeatable number. But it at least gives us a starting figure.
Wheat is extremely cheap. About $7.50/bushel which is ~60 pounds. So, $0.125/pound.
Which is about $2,083.33 for 1 million pounds of it.
Of course, we could divide those pounds into smaller and smaller increments…really no limit to that but that breaks the thread I think.
Going with yeast. Couple of packets . They are iddy biddy. 10 cubic micrometers? Betcha a cup full is a bunch… you could calculate it. I can’t. Never learned past the ‘times 7’ multiplication tables.
Yeast cells aren’t sold by quantity, though, the way that (for instance) staples are.
Can we get a bit of clarification. First it seems you want countable things not measurable stuff like any liquid or things typically sold by weight.
Do you want something which it would be possible to buy one of under ordinary circumstances. So e.e. not staples.
Count seems a difficult thing to compare. A pound of wheat costs ‘X’ amount but we can divide that pound endlessly into smaller amounts until I have a million at a really low price. Same thing with water (as mentioned above).
Near as I can figure staples cost about $3.64/pound. (I am not sure I did my math right on that one)
At Staples (office supply store), you can buy 25,000 Staples brand standard staples for $7.99, or $319.60 for a million staples.
It would be simplest and cleanest if the only “thing” considered were the things you purchase by the each.
Check my math here, as I haven’t slept in over 40 hours.
11,000 toothpicks per kg for the .3mm diameter option. At $.75 per kg that’s $68.18 for one million.
And if you think I’m not ordering enough to get that quantity discount, I promise you, I always get the best price they are willing to advertise. 