Staple City

Can you imagine a city of staples?  Not a city of Staples, the big box store (that would be frightening and expensive), but a city made entirely of staples, the kind that go in a stapler.  Well I assume like most every other human being you have already notice the image right below this paragraph, but some of you may have not.  Anyway, checkout the photo below of a city made out of staples.

City of Staples

The linked page states it is an art installation from 2010 and that it was made from exactly 100,000 staples and took 40 hours to setup.  I have no clue where it was setup or how long it was actually ran as an installation.  This is the Internet, not an actual encyclopedia.  The important thing is that it was made from 100,000 staples.  That is one hundred thousand staples and forty hours if you are adverse to reading numbers.

I was initially impressed by these numbers until I realized that 40 hours is only a standard work week.  5 regular 8 hour days isn't much for creating a true and lasting piece of art.  100,000 staples sounded really cool until I remembered that staples come in boxes of 5,000.  I've got more than 20,000 staples just sitting in my desk drawer right now.  Since you can buy 5,000 staples for $0.60 getting 100,000 isn't even very expensive.  That's only $12.  Twelve dollars isn't even enough cash to buy food for a couple healthy Americans at McDonald's.

Cheap Staples

Each of these staples has a sheet capacity of 20 so one box is capable of holding 100,000 sheets of paper together in 5,000 different groups.  Now that's a number.  If you have 20 boxes of these staples, that means 2,000,000 sheets of paper.  That is 2 million.