If you already spend a lot of money shopping on Amazon for everything you need and, perhaps, plenty that you don’t, stop for a minute to think about what it would cost to buy one of everything on the site.
OK, wait. Don’t do that. Kynan Eng works in “brain-related research” and he took care of the heavy lifting on that calculation. In a post on Quora, where “questions are asked and answered,” Eng provides the answer to a question no one was really asking but that we’re kind of fascinated by.
He says it would cost $12.86 billion.
Eng writes that, according to export-x.com, there were 488 million items available on Amazon.com in 2015. He estimated the average price of an item is $26.86, with an uncertainty (standard error of the mean) of $6.03. Eng says that he used the site Random Amazon Product to generate items which gave him the average price. Go ahead and click on that site. Like Eng, we’re not sure why it exists.
There is further explanation in the post about how Eng arrived at his figure. He does say that if someone who works in Amazon IT infrastructure reads his findings, “I guess it would be quite easy for them to simply pull up the relevant database tables and do this calculation exactly.”
Eng has previously answered burning questions such as “How much money has been spent attempting to bring Matt Damon back from distant places?” and “How much money would it realistically cost to build an Imperial I-Class Star Destroyer?”
We searched Amazon.com for way cheaper outlets than satisfying those two questions and answers. “The Martian” Blu-ray is $21.70 and a Star Destroyer (Lego set) is $189.29.
