All about Money
n the pages of The Green Sheet, we regularly talk about large numbers in the millions and even billions of dollars. First Data processes a third of a trillion dollars per year, the U.S. writes 50-60 billion checks each year, and each year The Green Sheet publishes a billion-dollar Bank Card Acquirers report. But it occurred to me that very few of us, if any, can fathom how big these numbers actually are.
Imagine that you were in a store that was giving away one-dollar bills. All you have to do is pick them up off the floor, and someone will pour out more bills for you as soon as you run low.
Let's say, for the purpose of our understanding, that you are able to grab a dollar every second (remember that you get to keep it, so you have to stuff it somewhere).
How long do you think it would take you to pick up as many dollars off the floor as First Data processes annually? Go on, take a guess. One week? One month? Five years?
If you picked up one dollar per second, you would have $1,000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort, 24 hours a day, you would acquire your first $1 million. Now that million wasn't too tough, right?
At this continuing rate, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days (3.3 years) to reach $100 million. Now we're getting serious: Within 31.7 years you would have a billion dollars, and after a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates.
Now hold your breath! It would take you, if you could maintain the 24-hour-a-day, one-dollar-per-second speed, more than 10,569 years to accumulate the amount of money that First Data processes annually, and that is only a third of a trillion dollars.
Guess we should go back to selling. What do you think?
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