SortStack #115 — 2026-10-02

By price · Order from cheapest to most expensive.

1. An average US movie theater ticket $11

   Theaters keep little of this — studios take most of the box office, which is why a bucket of popcorn can cost nearly as much as the seat.

2. A dozen red roses from a florist $55

   Most US roses are flown in from Colombia and Ecuador — around Valentine's Day, cargo jets full of nothing but flowers land in Miami daily.

3. A new MacBook Pro, base model $1.6K

   Apple's first laptop ancestor, the 1989 Macintosh Portable, weighed over seven kilograms and cost the equivalent of more than $16,000 today.

4. An average American funeral with burial $8K

   The funeral industry's pricing was so opaque that US law now requires itemized price lists — caskets alone often carry markups of several hundred percent.

5. Constructing the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building $1.5B

   It was renamed at the last minute for the president of Abu Dhabi, whose emirate bailed out Dubai during the 2009 debt crisis — it was to be called Burj Dubai.

6. The entire Apollo Moon program, in the dollars of its day $25.4B

   At its peak, Apollo employed about 400,000 people and consumed more than 4% of the US federal budget — per landing, each Moon mission cost less than a modern aircraft carrier.

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