Sometimes the keys to wealth lie literally under your feet. Or maybe in a trash can, a bathroom, or another place where you would never expect to see something unusual and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't believe us? Then we'll tell you about the most ordinary things that made their owners very rich.
10. Garbage
Nowadays, we pay for the garbage (or rather, for its removal), not us. However, Justin Gignac, a designer and artist from New York, uses garbage in his own way. He packs old discarded things in attractive packaging, and then sells them to anyone who wants them. Do you think Gignac doesn’t have customers? Not at all!
He has been selling trash since 2001 and has sold 1,400 cubic meters of New York waste in 15 years. Small cubes of trash go for $50, while larger cubes, timed to coincide with important events (such as New Year's Eve in Times Square), cost $100 and up. After all, people love with their eyes. And the contents of a beautiful wrapper are no longer as important as the appearance.
9. Cup of coffee
Sometimes the path to hundreds of thousands of dollars is through pain. Literally.
In 1992, Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, USA, spilled hot coffee from McDonald's on herself. She suffered burns to her thighs, buttocks, and genitals. According to surgeons, the burns totaled six percent of her body.
The case was widely publicized and became a shining example of the most expensive lawsuits in U.S. history. Liebeck initially sought $3 million in compensation from McDonald's, but the amount was later reduced to $500,000.
The defendant company's representatives admitted that they kept the temperature of their coffee between 82 and 87 degrees Celsius based on the advice of a consultant who believed that this temperature range was optimal for the best taste of the beverage.
8. Spring
The idea for a spring toy came to Richard James when he accidentally knocked a spring onto the floor. Instead of falling to the floor, the spring "stepped" in a series of arcs from a shelf onto a stack of books, then onto the floor, where it curled up.
James's wife Betty came up with a name for the new invention - Slinky (translated from English - graceful, smooth). In 1945, James first exhibited his new toy at the Gimbels department store in downtown Philadelphia. Four hundred Slinkies were sold in 90 minutes. This was the beginning of a sensation that continues to this day.
In Russia, this spring toy is known as "Rainbow".
7. Tulip bulb
In the 17th century, the "tulip fever" began in Holland - a speculative bubble in which entire fortunes were made and lost.
In the early 1600s, these flowers came to Holland from Turkey, and were soon found to be susceptible to tulip variegation virus (aka tulip mosaic virus). This caused the petals to have streaks, stripes, and spots of different colors, making the flowers even more beautiful. They became a true luxury item, with buyers coveting colorful tulips the way people hunt for rare stamps or Pokémon today.
And the bulbs infected with the virus cost a huge amount of money at that time. In early 1637, some tulip bulbs were asking 10 times the annual income of a skilled worker.
However, the market suddenly collapsed at the end of 1637, ruining hundreds of people who did not have time to sell the bulbs they had bought at exorbitant prices.
6. Stone
This is perhaps the strangest member of the top 10 ordinary things that helped their owners get rich. And its strangeness lies in the fact that the stone was positioned as a pet.
This absurd idea came to Gary Dahl when he was sitting at a bar with friends and listening to them talk about how hard it is to take care of pets. Without thinking twice, he declared that the best pet in the world is a stone. It doesn’t ask for food or water, and doesn’t require any care at all.
Amazingly, Gary managed to find two investors to bring the Pet Rock idea to life. Along with the pet rocks, buyers were offered a box with holes (to prevent the baby from suffocating) and a bed of pine shavings. And also instructions for care and maintenance. In it, the owner was advised to take the pet out of the box and put it on an old newspaper, where it would lie until remembered. There were also tips on how to teach the rock different commands.
In 1975, Pet Rock swept the United States. In the first two months of sales, 1.5 million Pet Rocks were sold at a price of $3.95 each. And the first six months of sales brought the author $15 million.
Granted, Gary was pretty drunk when the idea of such an unusual pet flashed through his mind. But most rock buyers were probably sober. Would you buy a rock in a box?
5. Excrement
The top 10 things that will help you get rich already included trash. And now we are talking about trash of a different kind - biological. But even it can be valuable if it belongs to a famous person.
Eccentric Italian artist Piero Manzoni carefully set aside 90 samples of his own feces and tried to sell them to his patrons in 1961. He wanted to draw the public's attention to the "gullibility of art buyers."
Less than two years later, he exchanged 30 grams of the substance for the same number of grams of 18-karat gold.
There are reports that some of the jars of "Artist's Shit" (as Manzoni himself labeled each jar) exploded, possibly due to corrosion and gases building up in them.
4. Air
Why go somewhere to breathe clean air? After all, it can be delivered right to your home. In a bottle.
That's exactly the business two Canadians are in. They bottle air from the Rocky Mountains and sell it for $24 a can. Chinese consumers, choking in smog-filled cities, have started buying bottles as a protest against poor air quality.
3. Surname
Some people like to have the most unusual name or the funniest last name. But American Jason Sadler had neither. But he had a great desire to earn big money and an interesting idea on how to achieve success.
In late 2008, Sadler created the website IWearYourShirt and, for a fee, agreed to wear a sponsored T-shirt with the company's logo. He posted photos of himself wearing the sponsor's shirt on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr
For this service, Sadler asked for only a dollar a day. As his popularity grew, the cost of his service increased to $2, then $5, with the amount increasing by another $5 each day.
Sadler said he wore the same T-shirt for 800 days, seven days a week.
Then Jason had a better idea: What if he held an online auction and legally changed his last name to the name of any company that came in at the highest bid?
Between 2012 and 2015, he became Jason Headsetsdotcom, then Jason SurfrApp, and then became Jason Zook (after his great-grandfather).
Of course, the new surname had its limitations. Pornographic terminology, political and religious names were banned.
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 traded a role in the film "Donna on Demand" for a two-story house that he had long dreamed of.
In 2007, McDonald published a book in which he described all the stages of his exchange. In the Russian translation, it is called "Let's Swap Without Looking. One Red Paperclip That Shook the World."
1. Two pizza boxes
On May 18, 2010, American programmer Laszlo Heinitz, now known as the Bitcoin Pizza Guy, promised 10,000 bitcoins to anyone who would order him two pizzas. At the time, this cryptocurrency was very cheap (about $40) and Heinitz had to wait five days before someone agreed to buy him the coveted meal.
The pizzas that Laszlo delivered on May 22, on behalf of Jeremy Sturdivant, are currently worth around $80 million. And in honor of this event, which vividly demonstrates how high the value of cryptocurrency can soar, “Bitcoin Pizza Day” is celebrated annually.
By the way, in February 2018, Laszlo repeated his experiment. This time, the pizzas cost him 0.00649 bitcoin.
Sturdivant didn't become a dollar millionaire either. He used them to pay for a trip around the country with his girlfriend.
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