SortStack #1025 — 2029-03-30

By price · Order from cheapest to most expensive.

1. A grande latte at Starbucks $4.50

   The coffee beans in a latte cost the chain well under fifty cents — milk, labor, and rent make up most of what you pay.

2. One month of Netflix's standard ad-free plan $18

   Netflix began in 1998 mailing DVDs in red envelopes — it shipped its final disc in 2023 after posting over five billion of them.

3. 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.

4. A new Ferrari 296 GTB $340K

   Ferrari deliberately limits production below demand — the company makes more profit per car than almost any automaker, and the waitlist is part of the product.

5. The Pink Star diamond, sold at auction in Hong Kong $71.2M

   A previous buyer defaulted after bidding $83 million, forcing a re-auction — the 59.6 carat stone took two years just to cut and polish.

6. Building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN $4.8B

   The LHC's 27 km ring is colder than outer space — its magnets sit at 1.9 kelvin — and it briefly held a section of the emptiest vacuum in the solar system.

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