It Just Makes Cents

Hand wipes. Pretty good to have around these days, especially when you’re out and about. At home? Wash with soap and water. But when you’re just wrapping up a crazy marathon grocery run, it’s nice to have a pack of good old wipes in the passenger’s seat for a little in-the-moment sanitizing.

And we’ll sell you 540 of those hand wipes for just $19. That comes out to roughly $4 per wipe. Wait, hold on, decimal point issues. It’s actually 4 CENTS per wipe. Which is crazy cheap.

Speaking of cents, a quick story (that I might’ve told before): after college, I moved to Chicago. The way I imagined it, I’d find a basic office job and enjoy everything big city living had to offer. The only problem, it was September 2008, not a super great time to be looking for full-time employment with almost no adult work history. After several months of temping and contract work, I decided the experiment had failed, and made plans to move back home.

Thinking I’d make my way around via public transit, I didn’t have my car, so I booked a flight. Night before I left, I barely got any sleep. Being a young twenty-something man, I had put off a decent amount of cleaning and packing until the last minute. And so I was pretty loopy the next morning at the airport when I was checking in. I put my enormous duffel on the scale and it exceeded the weight limit by a few pounds, meaning I’d have to pay an additional $50 or $100 (I can’t remember which). Exhausted, disheartened, and not ready to do any sort of luggage triage next to a garbage can in O’Hare at 5am, I said, “sure, whatever,” and paid.

Flash forward a few hours. I’m home in upstate New York with my parents. I go to get something out of my duffel, and, fishing around, I find an enormous plastic bag of change, mostly pennies, that had accumulated around my apartment. I pick it up and estimate the heft. Easily a few pounds. So I’d paid somewhere between $50 and $100 to transport what probably amounted to $5 in coins halfway across the country.

Which is all to say, change doesn’t just have very little value. A lot of times, it has negative value. It takes up prime real estate in our homes, occupying mugs and jars and dashboard compartments that might otherwise house something useful.

What does this have to do with the wipes? Almost nothing. We’re not going to let you pay in coins. But if you did gather up all the pennies you accrue over the course of a few years living in a place, and you deposited those pennies into your bank account–they’d have to let you, right? The bank can’t, like, turn away money, right?–and then you bought today’s deal, you could at least rest assured that those pennies were buying several whole cleaning wipes, rather than a tiny insignificant fraction of something bigger.

In conclusion, this is a lot of wipes for not much money.