SortStack #3412 — 2035-10-12

By price · Order from cheapest to most expensive.

1. A single sheet of printer paper $0.01

   A standard 500-sheet ream costs about five dollars — and the average office worker prints roughly 10,000 sheets a year.

2. 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.

3. A new hardcover bestseller $30

   Hardcovers exist partly as price discrimination: publishers sell to eager fans at a premium first, then release the cheaper paperback a year later.

4. A French Bulldog puppy from a breeder $4.5K

   Frenchies can't swim and most can't give birth naturally — nearly all are delivered by C-section — yet they became America's most popular breed.

5. The Oppenheimer Blue, the largest fancy vivid blue diamond ever auctioned $57.5M

   Blue diamonds owe their color to traces of boron and form deeper in the Earth than almost any other gem — only a handful surface each year.

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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