Pricey Stuff
My parents (and grandparents) are thrifty shoppers. They taught me, probably before I was 8, how to divide the price of a grocery item by its weight or volume to get an absolute price-per-unit that could be compared between brands or sizes. It became habit for me to do this at the supermarket. Even when I finished residency and had some extra money, I would still sometimes find myself wasting minutes in front of, say, the spaghetti section, calculating whether a 20oz box of Prince pasta at $1.38 was a better deal than a 1lb box of Ronzoni at $1.12.
So I've been very appreciative of the recent trend at supermarkets to show, on the shelf label, the actual price-per-unit. This doesn't really save me much money, but, given my little compulsion, it does save me a lot of time.
Some things, though, don't get marked with the per-unit price. Such as pharmaceuticals. Today I had to pick up a little tube of steroid eye ointment. It contained 3.5 grams and cost $78. Of course, it was only 0.1% active ingredient-- or 0.0035 grams. I did the math, and it comes out to about $664,772 per ounce. Yep. I think the stuff is worth considerably more, per ounce, than my eye itself.
So I've been very appreciative of the recent trend at supermarkets to show, on the shelf label, the actual price-per-unit. This doesn't really save me much money, but, given my little compulsion, it does save me a lot of time.
Some things, though, don't get marked with the per-unit price. Such as pharmaceuticals. Today I had to pick up a little tube of steroid eye ointment. It contained 3.5 grams and cost $78. Of course, it was only 0.1% active ingredient-- or 0.0035 grams. I did the math, and it comes out to about $664,772 per ounce. Yep. I think the stuff is worth considerably more, per ounce, than my eye itself.
posted by Turbo at 7:23 PM
3 Comments:
And to think that people complain about the per-gallon price of gas.
Likely you are correct. It's hard to imagine that you would find enough buyers to use up the whole eyeball if you mashed it up, diluted it a thousand times, and sold it in tubes. Even then, most of the money would probably go to the processor and pharmacy.
If you did the processing yourself with a blender and sold via the internet you might get enough customers, but I recommend getting firm orders first. Also practice blending with one eye closed. And how DO you fill those little tubes?
After a bit more math, I stand corrected. My disability insurance policy will pay me 60% of my income if I lose one eye. Making some rough calculations, based on the average weight of the human eyeball, my eye is worth about $1.5 million per ounce.
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