Doing the Math with Megan M.

This off the AP Wire last night:

"A 28-year-old man who attempted to pay for his bar tab with gum wrappers was arrested after a scuffle with a police officer on Tuesday night, authorities said. A bartender told police the man was playing pool with an open bottle of beer and spilled some of it on the table. She said he first tried to pay his $32 tab with a credit card, which was declined.

When police arrived and ordered the man to pay his tab, they reported that he began counting out gum wrappers as if they were cash."

Now, anyone who isn't a drunken idiot can tell you: gum wrappers ain't worth squat.

When I first read this story, I thought that he might have tried to pay with Bazooka Joe comics, in which gum is also wrapped. The comics could also be argued to possess a monetary value, as they are redeemable for valuable prizes such as x-ray spectacles and gold-plated insignia rings. This, of course, led me to the question: How many Bazooka Joe comics would it take to pay a $32 bar tab?

Let's do the math, shall we?

Using the information gleaned from this circa-1985 comic, we can infer that, at that time, 195 comics were worth 40 American cents.

Ergo

.40 = 195 comics
32/.04 = 80
80 x 195 = 15,600 comics would cover a $32 bar tab

These numbers have obviously not been adjusted for inflation, and time constraints prevent me from further calculations. I am leaving it up to you, the Beware of the Blog-reading mathemagician, to help me figure out this weighty problem.

Images courtesy of The Onion and childofthe1980s.com

Comments

[Megan]

Aha - using the inflation calculator here http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

I have determined that 40 cents (not 4 cents as I mistakenly wrote above) in 1985 has the same buying power as 81 cents in 2008.

Therefore, if 195 gum-wrapping comics are worth .81, we can calculate:

32/.81 = 39.5

and

39.5 x 195 = 7703 comics would cover a $32 bar tab in 2008, according to my calculations, which is certainly more manageable in terms of carrying the currency in question, but good luck finding a bartender who's going to count them all out - or take any as a tip.

[bartleby]

The new Bazooka Joe 2.0 features things like text messaging in the "story"lines. For a while there they were printed on the obverse of the actual wrapper unreadable, that seems to have stopped. I never did get a tiny tool set.

[Clayton]

Inflation notwithstanding, I would think that at least a few of the original Bazooka Joe wrappers would be worth some money as collectors' items, since so many of them were thrown away immediately. But who knows... I hear you can still find original roadside Burma Shave signs pretty cheap sometimes.

[Bob]

I recently bid on a lot of 495 Bazooka Joe Comics on ebay.
I did not get them, as they went for over $150
Guess you'll have to re-think your math.

[Megan]

Thank you Bob! This is precisely the kind of information I needed.

The answer is 105.6!

495/150=3.33 for $1

3.33 x 32 = 105.6

oh, and of course tip the bartender, so add 20%.