Visine Would Cost $1,021 If You Bought By Gallon
You cringe over the price of a gallon of gas, but what about a gallon of Visine? An article in the September issue of ShopSmart shows that if you bought the eye drops by the gallon, the price would be $1,021. Steak sauce? $48. Secret Platinum, $189. Obviously, no one buys Visine by the gallon, except for maybe Cyclops (hey, that stick still burns). Similiarly, except for hobbyists, no one buys a dropper of gasoline. And there are cost-savings by selling and buying items in bulk. Still, makes you think...
ShopSmart [Official Site]
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Comments:
Oh the irony that Pepto-Bismol and A1 have the same price per gallon.
Yeah, but one ounce of Visine will last 50 years with typical use.
See, this doesn't really give me a new perspective. I'm not sure I will use an entire gallon of Visine in my life. I probably will use a gallon of A-1 over the next two or three years. In comparison, there's a chance I will use a gallon of gas tonight.
Great, there goes my business plan for selling a steak sauce powered car.
And no doubt hedge fund traders will start buying Visine futures, driving up the price and causing us to increase our imports of redness-reducing products.
Our government will do nothing to assist bloodshoot eyed Americans, explaining that it is simply "supply & demand".
Johnson & Johnson, owner of the Visine brand does report record profits, which is does not invest into alternative red-eye reduction research.
Maybe I'll start putting yogurt in my bloodshot eyes instead of visine, look at the savings!
At $20/.4 oz bottle, Chanel nail polish is $6400/gallon. And it really gums up your engine.
I never understand why people do these comparisons.
What does a gallon of molten gold cost? OMG!
We don't use Visine by the gallon. We use gasoline by the gallon. We can't put Visine in our gas tanks. And even if Visine was $4/gallon, would most people buy that, or would they buy the $0.50 bottle to keep around?
Articles like this are pointless comparisons of ludicrous purchases. While I'll concede that the "cheap" cost of gasoline, bottled water, milk, etc, has spoiled the crap out of Americans and encouraged them to consume in an unwise manner, the costs for a lot of these other items comes from either production or the fact that the manufacturers can get away with it. Move along.
So, I guess my design of a automobile that runs on A1 should be scrapped.
these stories are a little silly, don't you think, Consumerist?
Visine is expensive if you scale the amount up to a gallon, duh, because people only use a few drops if they ever need it, and there is a minimum price that a drug or therapeutic agent is going to sell for in an appropriately sized container. Not to mention the testing and liability coverage that needs to go into a drug's development.
Is it really relevant to compare Visine with a gallon of bleach that sells for 99c? Do we learn anything from this at all?
I know some people who might as well buy Visine by the gallon...
It's posted for entertainment purposes. Chill out.
Shop Smart at S-Mart
Who's to say you wouldn't get a gallon for less than that. I'm guessing they took the price of X ounces of visine off the shelf and multiplied until they got to a gallon. You'd probably save money by not making them package and ship all those individual little bottles. Maybe someone should try to buy a gallon of it and see what they charge, now THAT might be an actual story people give a crap about. I demand more stories of scaling up ludicrous things and grocery shrink rays, I don't think we get enough of that.
I don't even want to imagine the gallon stick of Secret Platinum!
KY Jelly would be $288/gallon.
God, that's an embarrassing fact to know.
at Kepler11: Someone call the fun police.
@MissTicklebritches: Application would be awkward to say the very least....
I'm curious about the A1 though. Surely there's got to be larger sizes at restaurant supply stores.
Are these products interchangeable? Is The Consumerist suggesting that I put gasoline in my eyes instead of Visine? Cool, thanks for the tip! ;)
(Well, the entry is labeled as "FUNNY" above the headline, so I guess we can all relax?)
Creed Green Irish Tweed Cologne is $7200/gallon - ($225/4 oz retail x 32 = $7200/128 ounces)
Too bad Princes Charles doesn't run his Aston Martin DB4 on that, as he's too busy with his white wine. He does wear it for its intended purpose, however.
It makes me think, alright. Makes me think that there's no end for pointless comparisons.
@kepler11: Read the comment code. If you have an issue with editorial choices being made, those should be sent via email to the post's author, not aired in comments. Don't do this again.
This is called a false correlation.
It doesn't take a gallon of Visine to reduce redness in your eyes, it takes two drops.
Similarly, it takes a gallon of gas to go about 25 miles in your car.
Connection? Absolutely nothing, except they are both liquids.
So you might be realizing now that a gallon of moose urine costs about 10 cents and that this has no real meaning in comparison to gas.
Thank you and please let me know if you have any questions.
Lay that smack, Roz! SLAP!
Epson black ink is actually $5529/ gallon.
That's for the black cartridge for a C88 that holds 13ml of ink and costs $19.00.
Was that a reference to the Odyssey? Nice work, Consumerist.
@rinse:
(Well, the entry is labeled as "FUNNY" above the headline, so I guess we can all relax?)Bingo.
If you do the work to buy your saffron imported from Spain, you can get it down to $88.00/oz or just $1408/lb. It's quite a bit more expensive by the time it gets to your local Safeway.
@Ein2015: Because its funny to see;
VISINE A.C. - Astringent/Redness Reliever Eye Drops (Tetrahydrozoline HCl 0.05%, Zinc sulfate 0.25%)
Costs so much. Those two ingredients must be mighty expensive, lets see....
Hmm Zinc Sulfate, in pill form for oral consumption 100 tablets 220mg each are just over $5, imagine how many bottles of Visine that would be. So that must not be the expensive component. So the real story is that Tetrahydrozoline HCl is one of the most expensive substances on earth if .05% of a bottle of Visine is worth so much. Or maybe speculative futures in salt water are where I should be investing.. Hmmmmm
What exactly is Visine, though? I thought it was mostly distilled water, with maybe a little medication. That's a hell of a racket, selling water for $1,000 a gallon.
I've always found these types of articles interesting based on the new perspective.
What a worthless comparison. Shall we compare the cost of clothing, too, based on how much you can stuff into a gallon bottle? How about the cost of a refrigerator? How much does a refrigerator cost per gallon?
Yeah, so Visine costs a grand a gallon. But if you actually use 16 ounces of it over the course of your lifetime, I'd be surprised. Further, Visine is a lot more expendable in your budget than gasoline is. Yeah, you can cut back your bi-monthly trip to visit the in-laws. But you can't call the boss and say, "Hey, dude, I can't afford to come in to work today, gas is too expensive." But if your eyes are itchy you don't *need* Visine. You can splash your face at the sink and deal.
Mr. D - Yeah, so it's mostly distilled water. But there is a valid medication in it. You wouldn't say that someone's heart medication isn't worth the price because most of the pill is cornstarch, would you?
I'm calling my congressman right now to demand we start offshore drilling to increase out Visine supply.
Buy in bulk and share!
And why not, whenever possible, just share the same gallon and cut out the waste of all those containers?
On that note, how much is a gallon of penicillin?
@MercuryPDX: AHA! Found it:
$91.65 for 2 gallons = $45.82 per gallon.
It's actually cheaper in the larger size!!
Visine's got nothing. Try Abreva, the cold sore medication. A 2g bottle generally goes for $15 at the supermarket. Assuming a density close to water (which, I actually do not know if that's a reasonable assumption((Abreva is 90% Benzyl Alcohol, Light Mineral Oil, Propylene Glycol, Water Purified, Sucrose Distearate, Sucrose Stearate))), that works out to around $56.8k per gallon. I think its the most expensive fluid you'll find in a grocery store.
Let's go the other way here:
I pay about 25 dollars for 2000 gallons of water at my house...So, if we could run our cars off tap water I would pay about 1.25¢ per gallon.
Man, tough crowd.
More importantly, Visine is HORRIBLE for your eyes. Use Systane instead. It's what my optometrist recommended after I had LASIK.
It's funny, all right. But too often this comparison is intended to make us feel better about the high price of gas.
The fact remains, we don't use Visine to power our cars, and a gallon bottle of eyedrops would be steeply discounted, one would hope.
I did the math on those little 25¢ packets of Kool-Aid.
That powder costs $31 per pound.
So, what you're saying is that not all products for sale in liquid form have the same unit cost? When did this happen?
I remember reading an article similar to this in Economics in high school. That was over three years ago and I still have the same argument towards the validity of this article...the things that you list are not necessities and therfore are not as pertinent to [most of] our lives as gasoline is. No one wants or needs a gallon of nail polish or visine.
This reminds me of the logic I had when I was five. I couldn't understand how something very small could cost more than something big.
You mean that ring cost more than a loaf of bread? But it's so small...
And this is new information how? Try washing dishes with gasoline next time!