Of course those million toothpicks require you to cut down a million trees, while Sierra Club representatives stand around crying.
I like this logic.
For countable things sold only in bulk-packs, like @AHunter3’s boxes of 5000 staples, or @Beckdawrek’s pound of straight pins, or @TruCelt’s toothpicks, yes we’re buying individual countable items, but we’re not buying them individually.
The wheat kernels in a bushel or the rice grains in a 20 kilo sack are individually countable too. But not individually purchasable. If you get a big enough magnifying glass the grains of sugar in a 5# sack are fully countable. As are the pebbles in a dump-truck-load of gravel. That way lies madness.
So sticking with items you can actually buy just 1 of and not be laughed out of the store. …
Whatever it is, the lowest possible US dollar price for a one-each is $0.01. Which says a million of them will cost you $10K. Plus tax probably.
Sooo … What sells for a penny?
Gumballs from gumball machines did when I was a kid. Ditto chiclets. Haven’t checked recently but in 60 years I bet they’ve gotten more expensive. The last individual you-bag-em washers that I noticed the price of at the hardware store were on the order of 5 cents each. But I could have bought just one if I had wanted just one.
I think maybe, just maybe there are still a few gimmick slot machines in Vegas at a penny a pull. There were some pennies, and lots of nickel, slots in the tawdry locals’ casinos when I lived there, but that was already 30 years ago!
What sells for a penny that you can buy one of?
[Aside]
- Other countries with currencies that have less value or smaller subdivisions might be able to go lower. I recently spent some money in a country where ~200 of their “dollars” bought 1 US dollar. And they still advertised prices including cents and calculated sales taxes to the cent.
My resistors meet this criterion.
You can purchase a single resistor from DigiKey, and they will happily ship it to you in a big package for $4.99
Yes, but nobody is going to give you a pricing spec. as to the number of groats in a bag of oats. Whereas in my example the manufacturer specifies 11,000 toothpicks per kg.
Hmm. Which says that by the each they’re $5, but by the 100K bulk-pack they’re $55. I think that the ~10,000 to 1 price reduction for a volume purchase is probably a pretty impressive record in its own right. I can see the brightly printed come-on shelf tag now:
Buy 11 get the next 99,989 free!
A penny. I suppose you can go to a bank and get a million of them for $10,000.
But, one U.S. dollar will buy 1,321.14 South Korean won. So a better question is, what can you buy for a South Korean won?
Until March 1, 2020, there was a coin in Uzbekistan called the tiyin, which was worth 1/100 of a soum, and a soum was worth 0.00011 US dollars at that time. So if I did the math right you could buy a million tiyin coins for about US $1.10.
@Kent_Clark two above:
Probably not much. But up until 15 years ago they did make 1 won coins which are still in circulation if little used. And today they still make and circulate 10 won coins.
So a 10 won coin is about 130 to the USD, so about 3/4ths of a US cent. We could buy a million of those coins for ~$7600.
if 1 won coins still exist in quantity and can be gotten from Korean banks, even with some extra effort, we could buy a million of those for a mere ~$760.
The Korean won does have a 100 sub-unit subdivision. But there are no tokens for it we could buy, nor are ordinary things priced in those. Just whole won.
@bibliophage: If Uzbekistani tiyin really still existed in quantity then, as opposed to all having long since been melted for scrap, you almost certainly would have won the thread. Now that tiyin are no longer legal tender, I wonder how much they sell for as collector items or as scrap metal.
Assuming you could actually get a million of those for that price I have to wonder if their metal content was much more valuable than their face value?
For instance, I think pennies and nickels in the US cost more to make than they are worth.
Coins that cost more to make than they are worth is hardly a new problem. I think that’s been true of most US coinage for decades.
Where it gets ugly is when the price of them as scrap exceeds their face value as money. That’s when they disappear from circulation en masse as profiteers melt them, expecting the government to keep handing out more below-market priced scrap for them to melt.
Plus, it comes in the same form factor. If you buy 5000 of them, you get a reel with the resistors embedded within a paper/plastic tape. If you buy a single one, they just snip that one off the end of the tape.
And the numbers are exact. Buy a million and they’ll ship you 200 reels, each with exactly 5000 resistors each. The tape has sprocket holes so they can always get a perfect count.
I wonder if staples come in exact counts, or if they just snap off an approximate length.
Bottle imps?
Do coupons still say in tiny print at the bottom that they have a cash value of 1/50 of a cent? Of course because they can save someone far more than that on a purchase I’m not sure what the market in coupons would charge.
I had a beer with a guy who was in Purchasing at Intel. He said they ordered a billion capacitors one time…
Cheapest caps I can find on Digikey are $0.0011 each. So potentially a tad over $1M for a billion. It is an impressive amount.
I bought a box of paper covered wire ties (red and white striped-y, I know, don’t say it)
The cleaners use them. It was a site that sells that kinda stuff.
The box was $4 and change.
There were (I didn’t check) 50,000 in the box. The size of a file box. According to the printing on the box.
Someone can do the math on that. I’m not.
For just under $25 US, you can buy a million Iranian rials (currency). It has the lowest base unit value of any currency.
I bought a million shares of a stock a while back (just to say i owned a million shares of a stock). It cost me 100 bucks. Each share was worth a hundreth of a penny.
And today it’s worth even less!
The problem with staples and resistors is that when you buy them in those quantities they’re attached to one another. When I think of buying a million of something, I want to dump them in a pile so I can see a million discrete objects. You could separate the resistors or staples, but that would be a huge pain in the ass. I know that’s just my own preconception, and not specified by the OP.
Toothpicks were the first thing I thought of, but I’ll bet that a box of 250 doesn’t have exactly 250 toothpicks in it.
My wire ties are separate. I thought they’d come stuck together like the ones in boxes of garbage bags. But no. Just free floating.
I love them. I really do.