If we did not have the “buy in bulk doesn’t count” rule, I’d suggest peppercorns.
While counting peppercorns one-by-one might be tedious, it should be noted that, legally speaking, they are good and valid consideration in contracts: Chappelle & Co. Ltd. v. Nestle Co. Ltd., [1960] AC 87, among others. A peppercorn has worth; therefore, it is good and valid consideration in a legal contract. As such, it should count.
Wait. You mean they make each individual toothpick from ONE tree? That’s remarkable. I never would have guessed that. Wow! Seems wasteful, though. I’m no expert but I bet they could get 4 or 5 toothpicks from each tree. Maybe more.
Although it just occured to me; maybe toothpick trees are really small?
Never, ever, mind.
I was so ninja’d by @bibliophage.
Yeah, but at about 38 cents/box, who’s going to care? Toothpicks were also the first thing I thought of. I think toothpicks are the cheapest thing in a typical grocery store you can buy by the count. Paper napkins and facial tissue are also cheap, but not that cheap.
Maybe the question needs to be divided into answer categories, to fulfil different people’s notion of what would qualify as a purchase of one million items…
IMO, it’s most reasonable to interpret it as items that you explicitly buy as a numbered amount - so staples would qualify because you buy a reasonably exact counted quantity that is usually printed as a quantity on the packaging. In this definition, it doesn’t matter if you can’t purchase just one - we’re not trying to do that anyway.
But I think the ‘items you could tip out in a heap of one million single pieces’ thing has some merit too.
Things that are referred to by uncountable nouns like wheat and salt seem to disqualify themselves on that basis, but I am not the OP, and wheat grains are at least pretty uniform in size and shape…
So maybe the question is really several questions:
Absolutely zero trees were cut down for those toothpicks in the link.
Straight pins, which someone said earlier, are usually sold by weight when in bulk, so disqualified by the strict OP rules. But numbered amounts of pins can be bought.
They’re made to surprisingly high tolerances, and their material is less variable than a natural material, so converting weight to amounts is actually reasonably accurate. So if the goal here is to have 1000000 things just to have them, I think they’re a good bet. at ~18c/20g box, each such box having hundreds of pins.
Like you’re going to check you didn’t get shortchanged?
Under these terms, I would suggest rice.
Some cursory googling suggests a million grains of rice will weigh between 60 and 70 kg depending on the variety; let’s say 65.
This page says the wholesale price of rice is $0.72 per kg.
Which works out to about $47 for a quantity of rice by weight which, if counted, should be about a million grains. Say $50 to be safe.
The resistors aren’t attached to each other. They’re contained within individual slots in the tape, but otherwise free. There’s a paper carrier with little holes that the resistors sit in, and a plastic film on top to keep them contained. The film can be easily be peeled away by hand to uncover a few hundred at a time, which can then be dumped out. Or, if you want a slightly more elegant solution, you can build a small machine that unreels the plastic film and dumps the resistors into a small bin. You could probably get through all of them in under a day.
The resistors beowulff linked to are about 1x0.5x0.25 mm. Packed tightly, they’d fit in a box only 5 cm on a side. In practice, they’d probably take double the volume, but that only brings the box up to 6.3 cm on a side.
Nooo thats the same as saying a million atoms or a a million grains of sand… its not counted out. the idea is its exactly (or thought to be ) one million. Not just roughly a million or at least a million.
and divisions of an indivisible thing a memory chip, also doesn’t count… it would be like you could give out one each to a million people, I mean we could just imagine a 90 minute audio tape was cut into one million sections, otherwise…
How about artifical sweetener pills. They list precise numbers, eg 200, 300 pills in each holder.
Canderel Red Sweeteners lists precisely 105 Tablets
From the OP:
It must be something you would have to order an exact amount of.
Sand of sugar is specifically excluded as an example; rice would fit this. You cannot buy an exact amount of 1,000,000 grains of rice.
Also from the OP:
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.
You don’t buy individual units of rice.
(Somewhere here a Mitch Hedberg reference belongs.)
I thought this might make for an interesting topic - and resistors (@beowolfe) is a very good answer which might not be bettered. But I do like @Mangetout’s extra rules!
I was going to suggest sand to beat rice, but I think I will disqualify it myself. If you look at a handful of rice with a hand lens, you would be hard pressed to tell one grain from another; if you look at a spoonful of sand under a microscope, you would struggle to find two grains that are alike, so yeah, when you buy rice, you are buying a million of a thing; when you buy sand, you are buying a million assorted different things.
You can buy a million Iranian Rials for $23.65
Planet Money did a piece where they tried to see what they could get for a penny retail. Read/listen:
But your exchange rate is just what the government officially lists… In practice , its worth only About 10%, so $3 US buys that million Rial …
But Googling, I think the smallest denomination coin for Iranian rials is Rls 50.
Yeah, so I can get a million 50 Rial coins for US $150 ?
Then sell them for scrap metal value and make a profit !.
Sure, walk into your local branch of an Iranian bank and ask them, “Could I get this $150 changed to rials? I’d like it in the form of fifty rial coins.” See how well that goes.