Opportunity cost
A few weeks ago the staff talked about how we feel about amiibo. The consensus is that they are neat little Nintendo figures that don’t have amazing functionality but they don’t break the bank. One anomaly showed up in the discussion: Community Playdate Manager Bill Platt had 38 amiibo figures, with some in duplicate or triplicate.
“Had” is the keyword there, because he now has 42, with 11 more preordered. At $13 a pop for 53 figures, that means he has spent upwards of $689 on amiibo alone. Some of those shipped from overseas and tax is not included in that figure, so that is a low estimate. Here is a list of things that Bill Platt could have purchased instead of all those amiibo with that money.
- A PlayStation 4 with 3 full retail games
- 45 gift copies of Super Meat Boy
- 1,380 Chicken McNuggets
- 0.538 ounces of pure gold
- 15 barrels of crude oil
- 2.55 Bitcoin
- 0.00098% of Notch’s new mansion
- Love?
- 7 1-day tickets to Disneyland
- 2 round-trip flights from Los Angeles to New York
- 155 pounds of assorted flavor Tootsie Rolls
- 34 lap dances
- Child care for 18 days
- Solar panels producing 146 watts of power
- 2,400 blank DVDs
- 0.0689% of an indecent proposal
- 40 Skylanders figures