This is how much it would cost to buy one of everything on Amazon
Maybe it's time to disable that 'Buy It Now' button on your account, just to be safe?
Amazon's 'Buy It Now' button is the single greatest, most terrifying creation to emerge from capitalism.
One day you're singing its praises as you order a few books in a matter of seconds, the next you're bemoaning its existence after ordering £300-worth of stunt kite because drunk you "Thought it would be AWESOME".
But what if things got really out of hand? What if you set about with that 'Buy It Now' button like it was drunken a Tinder swipe session? How much could it cost you?
Around £9.1 billion ($12.86 billion) - according to the 'answer hunters' of website Quora.
Researcher Kynan Eng set about compiling a formula to predict the average price of items on Amazon, which equated to $26.86, with an uncertainty (standard error of the mean) of $6.03. You can have a detailed read of how he managed that over here.
He then ran that cost on the 479 million items available to buy on Amazon during 2015 - arriving at that eye-watering total. Sure, it's for the American version of the site, and Eng states that with more data he could get a more accurate answer, but it's still a good pointer to how much stuff is just one click away.
Maybe it's time to disable that 'Buy It Now' button on your account, just to be safe?
