gumball.comAh, the anguish of the week before payday: the super noodles, the scrounging, the fear.
As your pound-count drops from hundreds to tens, from tens to ones, from ones to pennies, filling an entire piggy bank may seem like a pipe dream.
Alas, we inhabit a capitalist world – being skint is no cause to stop gleefully browsing the web, whether it be ogling shoes and clothes or pre-ordering games.
PixabayHere’s some good news – even at your most cripplingly insolvent, there’s still a way you can save up.
Enter the world’s smallest, and cutest, piggy bank – standing at a sturdy height of one inch, they’re large enough to hold a single coin.
They all have their own whimsical expressions, and are available in eight colours: pink, yellow, light blue, blue, purple, white and grey.
Unfortunately, they’re only available in bulk – which means you’ll need to get your finances in order to afford it. At the crisp sum of $14, they come in bags of 100 – you can order them from gumball.com.
If we’re saying the adorable little banks can hold a single penny (for convenience we’ll use the American cent), you would require 1,400 of them to save up enough money to buy a fresh bag.
If you withdrew Jeff Bezos’ entire net worth as the CEO of Amazon, you would require around 10.9 trillion piggy banks. This would cost you $1.53 trillion.
Let’s go a bit further: if you withdrew the 10 richest people in the world’s total, accumulated net worth – including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg – you’d have $722 billion.
Therefore, you’d require 72.2 trillion piggy banks to store all that money, which would cost you $10.1 trillion to buy.
How about the next big game release – for example, you’re absolutely dying for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
If you’re ordering from Amazon, it’ll cost you $59.99 (£49.99 in the UK). That means, you’d need 5,999 piggy banks, which would cost $840.
But where do piggy banks come from? Are they directly inspired by Hamm in Toy Story? The answer is more fascinating than you’d likely imagine.
Buena Vista PicturesBefore the inception of modern banking institutions like Santander and RBS, or Natwest’s infamous pig collectibles, people obviously had to find their own ways to store their money.
You can trace the origin of piggy banks back to around 600 years ago – people in the Middle Ages would save a spare coin or two by putting them in common kitchen jars.
However, as metal was an expensive commodity and used only when strictly necessary, they would put their change in jars made from an economical orange-colored clay – called ‘pygg’.
PixabayHowever, the true meaning of ‘pygg’ became lost in translation as the English language continued to evolve, with its pronunciation drawing closer to the animal (pigge).
So, in the 19th century, when English potters received requests for pygg banks, they started producing banks shaped like pigs. Hundreds of years later, they’re still a cornerstone of people’s homes around the world.
I bet you didn’t wake up this morning expecting a piggy bank history lesson – everyday’s a school day.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.