Sometimes the keys to wealth lie literally underfoot. Or maybe in the trash can, bathroom or in another place where you absolutely do not expect to see something unusual and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Do not believe? Then we will tell you about the most ordinary things that made their owners very rich.
10. Surname
Someone likes to be the owner of the most unusual name or a very funny surname. But American Jason Sadler had neither one nor the other. But there was a great desire to earn big money and an interesting idea how to come to success.
In late 2008, Sadler created the IWearYourShirt website and pledged to wear a sponsored T-shirt with the company logo for a fee. He posted photos on his sponsor T-shirt on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr
Sadler asked for just a dollar a day for this service. With increasing popularity, the cost of his services increased to 2, and then to $ 5, and every day this amount increased by another $ 5.
According to Sadler, he wore one T-shirt for 800 days, seven days a week.
Then Jason got an interesting idea: what if he holds an online auction and legally changes his last name to the name of any company that offers the highest price?
From 2012 to 2015, he became Jason Headsetsdotcom, then Jason SurfrApp, and then became Jason Zook (in honor of his great-grandfather).
Of course, the new surname had its limitations. Porn terminology, political and religious names fell under the ban.
9. Cup of coffee
Sometimes the path to hundreds of thousands of dollars is through pain. In the literal sense of the word.
In 1992, Stella Liebeck from Albuquerque, USA, doused herself with hot coffee from McDonald’s. She received burns to her hips, buttocks, and genitals. All burns, according to surgeons, accounted for six percent of the total area of her body.
This case was widely publicized and became a prime example of the most expensive lawsuits in US history. At first, Liebeck demanded three million dollars in compensation from McDonald’s, but subsequently the amount was reduced to $ 500,000.
Representatives of the respondent company admitted that they kept the temperature of their coffee between 82-87 degrees Celsius, based on the advice of a consultant who considered this temperature range optimal for the best taste of the drink.
8. Spring
The idea to create a toy from a spring came to Richard James's head when he accidentally knocked a spring onto the floor. Instead of falling to the floor, the spring “stepped” in the form of a series of arcs from a shelf to a stack of books, then to the floor, where it curled up.
The wife of James Betty came up with a name for a new invention - Slinky (in translation from English - graceful, smooth). In 1945, James first exhibited his new toy at the Gimbels department store in downtown Philadelphia. Four hundred slinks were sold in 90 minutes. This was the beginning of a sensation, which continues to this day.
In Russia, this spring toy is known as the Rainbow.
7. Tulip Bulb
In the 17th century, “tulip fever” began in Holland - a speculative bubble, on which whole states were created and disappeared.
In the early 1600s, these flowers came to Holland from Turkey, and it was soon discovered that they were susceptible to the tulip motley virus (aka the tulip mosaic virus). Because of it, strokes, stripes and spots of a different color appeared on the petals, which made the flowers even more beautiful. They became a real luxury item, and buyers craved colorful tulips the way they hunt for rare stamps or Pokemon these days.
And the bulbs affected by the virus cost huge money for those times. At the beginning of 1637, for some tulip bulbs, they asked for 10 times the annual income of a skilled worker.
However, the market abruptly “blown away” at the end of 1637, ruining hundreds of people who did not manage to sell the bulbs bought at exorbitant prices.
6. Stone
Perhaps this is the strangest participant in the top 10 ordinary things that helped their owners get rich. And his strangeness lies in the fact that the stone was positioned as a pet.
This absurd idea came to Gary Dahl's head when he sat in a bar with friends and listened to their reasoning about how hard it is to take care of pets. Without thinking twice, he said that the best pet in the world is a stone. He doesn’t ask for food and drink, and generally does not require care.
Amazingly, Gary managed to find two investors to bring Pet Rock's vision to life. Together with pet stones, customers were offered a box with holes (so that the baby did not suffocate) and a bed of coniferous shavings. And another care and maintenance instruction. In it, the owner was advised to get the pet out of the box and transfer it to an old newspaper, where he will lie until they remember him. Advice was also given on how to train the stone for different teams.
In 1975, Pet Rock swept the United States. Already in the first two months of sales, stone pets sold in the amount of 1.5 million copies at a price of $ 3.95 for each. And the first six months of sales brought the author $ 15 million.
Let's say that Gary was pretty drunk when the thought of such an unusual pet flashed in his brain. But most stone buyers were probably sober. Would you buy a stone in a box?
5. Garbage
Now we pay for the garbage (more precisely, for its removal), and not for us. However, Justin Gignac, a designer and artist from New York, uses trash in his own way. He packs the old discarded items into attractive packaging, and then sells it to everyone. Do you think Gignac has no buyers? No matter how!
He has been selling garbage since 2001 and has sold 1,400 cubic meters of New York waste for 15 years. Small rubble cubes go for $ 50, while larger cubes dedicated to important events (such as New Year's Eve in Times Square) cost from $ 100 or more. After all, people love with their eyes. And the contents of a beautiful wrapper are no longer as important as the appearance.
4. Excrement
In the top 10 things that will help you get rich, there was already trash. And now we are talking about garbage of a different kind - biological. But even it can be valuable if it belongs to a famous person.
The eccentric Italian artist Piero Manzoni carefully set aside 90 samples of his own feces and in 1961 tried to sell them to his patrons. Thus, he wanted to draw the attention of the public to the "credulity of buyers of artworks."
In less than two years, he exchanged 30 grams of the substance for the same amount of 18-carat gold.
There are reports that some of the jars with the “Shit of the Artist” (namely, Manzoni himself signed each jar) exploded, possibly due to corrosion and the gases accumulated in them.
3. Air
Why go somewhere to breathe clean air? After all, it can be delivered directly to the house. In a bottle.
It is this business that two Canadians do. They bottle air in the Rockies and sell it for $ 24 per can. Chinese shoppers, panting in smog-filled cities, began buying bottles, thus protesting against poor air quality.
2. Red paper clip
The unusual success story of Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald began with a red paper clip. In 2005, he exchanged it for a fish-shaped ballpoint pen. After 13 more exchanges, he exchanged a role in the film “Donna on Demand” for a two-story house that he had long dreamed of.
In 2007, MacDonald released a book in which he spoke about all the stages of his exchange. In the Russian translation, it is called “Swing without looking. One red clip that shocked the world. ”
1. Two boxes of pizza
On May 18, 2010, American programmer Laszlo Heinitz, now known as Bitcoin Pizza Guy, promised 10,000 bitcoins to someone who orders two pizzas for him. At that time, this cryptocurrency was very cheap (about $ 40) and Heinitz had to wait five days before someone agreed to buy him the desired food.
At the moment, the cost of pizzas that Laszlo delivered on May 22, on behalf of Jeremy Sturdivant, is about $ 80 million. And in honor of this event, which clearly demonstrates how high the cost of cryptocurrency can skyrocket, Bitcoin Pizza Day is annually celebrated.
By the way, in February 2018, Laszlo repeated his experiment. This time pizza cost him 0.00649 bitcoin.
Sturdivant also did not become a dollar millionaire. He paid for their trip with his girlfriend around the country.
