Didn’t they show you the toothpick manufacturing documentary when you were in elementary school? 
The exchange rate for the Iranian Rial is .000024 to $1. So to own a million Rial, will cost you $23.65
Or the sequel:
Staples is good, but you’re paying too much:
They’re charging $1.29 for 5,000. Two hundred boxes gets you a million for $258.00.
Edit: or go here. At $0.98 per 5,000, you can meet the demand for $196.
I think they make a machine for dispensing single staples. Comes complete with carpal tunnel syndrome if you use it a million times in a row.
According to Mad Magazine:
But, you can’t really buy a single staple.
Nor can you buy a single twist-tie.
I’m going by the OP, not the later discussion (which I somehow missed before I responded, but which doesn’t change my answer): although you can’t buy a single staple, you can buy “an exact amount of” staples.
So they’re different from rice or sand, because if I order 200 boxes of staples at 5,000 a box, I’m ordering exactly a million staples.
But is that for a million individual Rials? The shipping would cost more than the notes. ETA: answered by @Dewey_Finn
Scott Tissue is $29 for 36 rolls of 1000 sheets each, or $833 for 1,000,000 sheets.
I haven’t read every post to see if that’s in the ballpark for cheapest.
It doesn’t meet reasonable qualifications for the thread, but you can buy 100 million Zim for 20 bucks.
Considering Zim are worthless, and were only very slightly more valuable in the recent past $20 is not a good price.
Since nobody else has done the math yet, you’d need 20 boxes, so that’d be somewhere between $80 and $100 for the lot of them (depending on how much “and change” is in “$4 and change”). Unless I missed something, that’s the current leader.
50k pieces for $4 seems to be an order of magnitude better pricing than I can find on the web. You got a great deal, Beck.
Yeah–I suspect there’s a misplaced zero somewhere. At the same time, check it out.
If that’s accurate, damn! I can’t understand how one of these can be cheaper to manufacture than a single staple.
Same SKU, but look at the pricing and quanitity:
You can buy singles, or up to pretty much any quantity of metal washers. This was the cheapest I could find for a plain washer that you can buy any quantity of, although the minimum order for this item is 100. For 1,000,000 you would pay $5,200.
The site has a few cheaper items, but you can’t buy 1,000,000 of them.
Maybe they’re not. Maybe that particular company just found themselves overstocked on them, and just need to clear out their shelves to make room for something more profitable, and selling them for $4 a box is cheaper than throwing them in the trash.
Hey. I got a bargain.
I knew I loved those red striped-y twist ties.
Has anyone checked coffee stirrers or chop sticks?