There was a neat scene in Breaking Bad last night where Skyler shows Walt the huge stack of money Walt's operations have accumulated. However, Skyler's plan to count how much money is in the stack and her statement that she has "no earthly idea" how much money it is is ludicrious. First thing you have to realize is that trying to be exact when counting things is much more difficult than you would think. Unless you have a well established procedure in place with plenty of checks, you are going to get errors. For example, any time there is a close recount in American politics there is a silly controversy and multiple different vote totals each time the votes are tabulated. Skyler should just provide a rough estimate.
Her method of trying to count the bills by weighing them was silly. Here's a back of the envelope calculation I did in 5 minutes that is much more effective (and could be improved by spending 5 more minutes in that room... though there might be some "slippage" if you know what I mean).
Here's roughly how many bills were in the pile of money in Breaking Bad:
100 bills in a stack * 25 stacks high * 12 stacks long * 20 stacks deep = 600,000 bills
With a few minutes in the room those numbers could be drastically improved. Skyler's next problem was that "the bills are in different denominations." Oh whatever should I do! Here's what you do, you randomly sample stacks from the pile to find out what % of the pile is $20 bills, what % is $100 bills, etc. I looked at the bills I could clearly make out, found mostly $50's, some $20's and no other denomination type. Once again, this could be drastically improved by a few minutes in the room or pausing the episode and doing a closer count. The average denomination worked out to $40. So a pile of 600,000; $40 bills is equal to....
The pile of money in Breaking Bad last night was roughly $24,000,000. Yeah, yeah, I realize Skyler was probably being deliberately obtuse for dramatic purposes but her inability to count the money in the storage unit is a bit ridiculous.
A more important point than how much money was in the stack, is why were there so many $50 bills? Where did they get them all? I'd never seen so many fifties in my life. Is that some sort of southwestern gangster thing where they are too cool to use $100 bills and use $50 bills instead?
Edit: This post got a surprising amount of traffic. I decided to go back and look at some screenshots more in depth and try to fine tune my estimate. I believe the pile is roughly 12 stacks long, 35 stacks high (had trouble guessing this so counted a few different places and took an average), 18 stacks deep. The average denomination still worked out to roughly $40. My new guess is the pile has roughly 750,000 bills in it for a total of about:
$30,000,000.
4 comments:
Nicely done! I was waiting for Reddit to do the heavy lifting for me, and you delivered. As for the $50 denominations, Skyler actually requested (demanded) smaller denominations when they first started laundering money through the car wash because nobody pays with $100 bills.
Nice catch EvilDrew, I figured there had to be a reason for all those 50's and forgot about that conversation.
I updated the post after looking at some screenshots of the pile online. The main point still stands; Skyler could have gotten a good estimate with relatively little effort.
What do you think about the estimate calculated of about $100 million? The full details are on imgur.com/8yzei
It's an image so I couldn't copy and paste it here.
The first thing to note about the $100 estimate that you provided, is that it includes $100 bills. As you can see from this picture ( http://bit.ly/RDbXYW ), there do not appear to be any $100 bills. It appears to be about 2/3 $50 bills and the rest $20 dollar bills (judging by the color of the straps).
The $100 million estimate you supplied estimates that there are 1,400,000 bills. If you look at the link, I'm fine with the length and depth he uses (the length is a little short but the depth is about what I had and could be more accurate). However the height he has is about twice of what I estimated the height to be. He says it is about 70 stacks high, I say it is about 35. The height is the most difficult thing to count stacks of and my estimate may be incorrect. Still 70 stacks seems pretty high. I counted a few times and was in the 30-40 range each time.
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