So on the way down to Palmerston North – since it’s such a long way, me and my buddy ol’ pal Luke got talking. Talking about starbucks coffee sleeves and cats eyes and their comparible profitability.
You see, the people who invented these two items get paid royalties for each one used. Say 1c each. So for every starbucks coffee sleeve and every cats eye someone out there gets 1c. Now me and Luke were trying to debate who would be wealthier, limiting this to NZ only just to make it a little easier to work out. We came to the conclusion that initially cats eye man would be wealthier initially but would soon be overtaken by Starbucks chap. But now that I have the wonderful powers of Google and the Internet at my finger tips I thought it could be time to crunch some numbers.
Firstly, the Cats Eye:
According to the Internet in 2002 there were 92, 350km of road in NZ. We can safely assume that since then the figure has grown so I’ll round that up to 93,000. Now just glancing at the road out side my house I’ll estimate that cat eyes are spaced appoximately 10 metres apart. That means there are 93,000km / 0.01km = 9, 300, 000 cats eyes on NZ roads. And if each one of those cats eyes earned 1 cent for Mr Inventor of Cats Eyes he would have earned him $93,000 outright.
Secondly, the Coffee Sleeve:
According to Starbucks NZ there are currently 40 stores operating here. I have absolutely no idea how many cups each store sells in a day but the Internet seems to think somewhere between 200-1000. Now if we consider the relatively small size of New Zealand we can safely assume we aren’t going to be some of the biggest buyers when it comes to a standard Starbucks day. So in this instance I’m going to assume each NZ store sells on average 250 coffees per day.
So 40 stores x 250 coffees = 10,000 coffees per day on average in NZ.
That is 10,000 x 1 cent for Mr Inventor of the coffee sleeve. Being approximately $100 per day. So $36,500 per annum which is fairly close to an average wage here in New Zealand. That doesn’t work out as an exceptional amount of money (and not nearly as high as I was expecting) but still, it definitely pays the bills.
Now comparing the two –
Cats Eyes earn a bigger lump sum for the initial implementation being approximately $93,000 and then a much smaller sum in the continuing years (say for example, a new road is laid of 100km, this would earn $100)
Starbucks Sleeves however earn a smaller amount consistently depending only on the demand for a delicious Starbucks coffee to bring in the bucks. After three years of earning $36,500 they would have surpassed the income of the Cats Eyes and will most likely continue earning higher and higher amounts as the population grows and more coffees are purchased!
Anyway – just something I’ve been thinking about. I totally recommend getting into that field of inventing awesomely helpful things that we don’t know we need yet. Seems to be a pretty sweet deal, invent something once and get paid for life. If you’ve got any ideas for that kind of thing feel free to let me know!
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