Thursday, June 26, 2008

The Sopranos Box Set: Worth the money?

I read a recent announcement about the release of a Sopranos Box Set, which will feature 30 discs, will retail for about 400 dollars and will weigh about 10 pounds, and it got me to thinking about how much other things cost by the pound, and I thought I would share my observations with you in the form of a list going from the least expensive to the most expensive. In no way is this list exhaustive, however, there were some interesting things that popped up as I put this together.

Since the boxset will cost roughly 400 dollars, and weighs about 10 pounds, let's just round that off to an even 40 dollars a pound.

Let's compare the price of the Sopranos box set by pound to other commodities:

Note: Some of these figures may be off due to the age of some of the sources, so if something looks really wrong, that would be the reason.

Tap Water: approaching $0.00
Steel: ~$0.55
Gasoline (at $4 a gallon and 6lb/gallon): $0.67
Turkey(2005): $0.81
Crude Oil: $0.97
American Pennies: $1.82
Budweiser: $2.27
Ground Beef: $2.50
Maxwell House coffee: ~$4
American Nickels: $4.54
Stephen King's The Stand (Modern Classics Edition): $4.54
2008 Kia Spectra: $5.02
Twix Bars: $7.97
Dunkin Donuts Original Blend coffee: ~$8
Boneless Rib-eye Steak: $8.92
2008 Toyota Prius: $10.02
Smoked Salmon: $18
American Dimes: $20.02
American Quarters: $20.02
Helium: $23.61
Freon: ~$28
Mercury: $31
Sopranos Box Set: $40
Omaha Steaks Bacon-wrapped Filets: $40.44
Uranium: $57
Truffles: $60 to start
2008 Ferrari 599 GTB: $81.30
Kopi Luwak coffee beans: $160
Human Blood(based on US Processing Fee): $171.53
Silver(16 oz pound): $275.84
Kobe Beef: $300
US 1 dollar bills: $454
A Boeing 747-400: $602
Ink Jet printer Ink: ~$700
Saffron: $800
Gold(16 oz pound): $14640
Platinum: $32848

So, do you think The Sopranos is worth how much HBO is selling it for per pound? I guess that is a question you will have to answer for yourself.

7 comments:

Semaj said...

I like the Sopranos and HBO, but I won't buy the set. I always thought the boxsets were too high from HBO.

Then there's the notion of the way it ended as a series...

Arjan said...

I'm faaaar to broke to buy box sets unless they're really priced down. I bought S2 of Lost for around 28€ (instead of the 50€ it started with). Weeds s1 (10x 40min) for 25€.

400€ is way out of my league. Time to burn some dvd's, got all seasons still on my pc..IIRC

Megan said...

That's pretty funny. Now I am going to look up why the hell saffron costs $800.

MC said...

Semaj: Because HBO is pay tv, they expect that their product should have a premium on whatever medium it is on. Thus the high prices.

Arjan: Europeans get the shaft when it comes to pricing of not just DVD's but CD's, don't they? I remember reading ads in Uncut magazine for cds, and the prices were the same numerical amount as they were here, but in pounds. That is insane.

Megan: Saffron is produced from a very small segment of a particular flower, and thus, requires between 75K-225K flowers to produce a pound of the spice.

Anonymous said...

You know what I don't get? How can gas ($0.67) be cheaper than crude ($0.97)?

According to this site, 42-gallon barrel of crude yields just over 44 gallons of petroleum products. So how does that math work out?

Arjan said...

a new cd overhere costs between 16-22 € (x1,5 for US $). I don't know what the prices are in London..but if what you say is right..I won't buy any cd's across the channel anytime soon.

MC said...

Paul: Hopefully I did my math right on that one... it did seem to be a little out of whack to me as well.

Arjan: Things may have changed though... my British music mags are from 2001-2, so things could be different now.