May 28, 2021. A McDonald’s chicken nugget appears on eBay. The person who listed it, Polizna,
starts the bidding at a paltry $$0.99. Let’s face it, who’d even pay that?
For two days, no one bids, but then someone puts down $14,969. Something happens. We don’t
know what. The universe goes mad, that’s for sure. The piece of junk food sells for $99,997.
We are not kidding you. This story is every bit real. Today we’ll explore such madness
in all its glory, but let’s first talk about this very expensive bit of chicken.
184 people bid on the nugget, so it had to be something special.
First of all, it came as part of a BTS Combo Meal,
a meal it seems was very popular. That might not mean much to some of you,
so we should tell you that BTS is a South Korean boy band belonging to the K-Pop genre.
Still, even if you are crazy about this outfit of dubious musicians,
you’d likely just buy the meal yourself rather than pay a hundred thousand bucks
for a stale piece of chicken. But that wasn’t everything.
The nugget apparently looked like a character from the online, multiplayer video game, Among US.
Ok, so we’ll admit that there’s some resemblance, but then a pulled tooth also looks a bit like the
character, so does a stone, or…probably about 50 things you have sitting around your house. How
come this chicken nugget went for more money than most people will ever have in their bank account?
When it was listed, the seller wrote: “Item will be Frozen and then Air sealed to ensure
freshness with secure shipping method. This food product has an average expiration of about 14 days
and will be delivered prior to expiration.” He also wrote, “I have Szechuan and at buyer’s
request will ship some with the nugget.” With that in mind, was the buyer thinking
about eating it? And if so, was this nugget any tastier than other nuggets on the market
that you can buy for a handful of coins? We really can’t figure out why someone spent
all that money on the thing. It’s not as if it’s like modern art and will sell for more money in
the future. The person who bought the nugget will very likely be stuck with the nugget, and anyway,
we reckon people have already been making their own imposter nuggets and saying it’s the real one.
It seems the public isn’t sure why that thing was sold for that much cash. On a BBC online forum,
someone wrote, “I love Among Us but still...so much for a food item shaped like a character? It
wasn't even painted like one.” Another person wrote,
“Woah....seems silly to spend that much money on a chicken nugget! Sheesh!”
A person with the username Izzy simply said, “Pure stupid that.”
Maybe some of you guys know the answer to the mystery of the world’s most expensive chicken
nugget. The seller obviously had no idea why he got so much money, saying in an interview,
“I had figured it would get somewhere around $50 but nothing like this.”
The thing is, if you think this is an isolated case, you are wrong.
Such madness in the universe has happened before, and it will likely happen again.
In 2016, someone bid big on a bottle of MacDonald’s Big Mac
sauce. It ended up going for £65,900, which is around one hundred thousand bucks. The cash
in this case didn’t go back to MacDonald’s but to its Ronald McDonald House Charities.
But it turned out that the bid was a hoax. Still, 40 bids were over £50,000, so there
were plenty of people ready to spend big. You actually can’t just walk into one
of McDonald’s restaurants and buy a bottle of that so-called secret sauce,
so some folks are willing to pay a lot to get a bottle. We have no idea why,
but we do know that a bottle of the stuff was auctioned off in
Australia in 2015 for $23,000 AUD ($18,056 USD). If you think that’s crazy, we’ll now prove to you
that there are people willing to pay mega-bucks for stuff you probably wouldn’t buy if it was
offered to you for a solitary dollar. Imagine waking up in the morning to
an absolute mess and then selling your mess. Sounds impossible, right?
It’s not. A British artist named Tracey Emin said her mess was actually an installation. Basically,
she sold her un-made bed and a load of stuff at the side of it, including cigarette packets,
KY gel, tissues, a full ashtray, a pair of shabby slippers, and empty vodka bottles.
Seriously, that was it. There was nothing fancy, such as hidden diamonds stuck to the bottles.
She called the work “My Bed” and said she hoped it would give people a “portrait of a young woman.”
She said she hoped the piece would end up in a museum, but a German collector
stepped in and paid $4.1 million. He said, “I always admired the honesty of Tracey,
but I bought My Bed because it is a metaphor for life, where troubles begin, and logics die.”
Just so you know, the art world took this seriously. The curator, Elena Crippa, called the
installation an “incredibly vital” piece of art, showing how people lived in the 90s during the
Britpop era. She said, “I think the status of the work has changed historically but certainly hasn’t
changed in terms of the impact of the piece.” With that in mind, we’d like to ask how much you’d
pay for a sandwich, a half-eaten one at that? A woman in the US named Diana Duyser shocked
the world when she collected $28,000 for just that, a slightly nibbled grilled cheese. It was
no ordinary grilled cheese, though. She said the toast marks formed the picture of the Virgin Mary.
She first put it on eBay and politely asked people to take it seriously.
You see, she said the sandwich had brought her luck over the years she had kept it. She wrote,
“I made this sandwich 10 years ago. When I took a bite out of it,
I saw a face looking up at me - it was Virgin Mary staring back at me. I was in total shock.”
She was even more shocked when she said her endless run of fortune culminated with a
casino win of $70,000, so it just made sense that if anyone should take it off her hands,
they would no doubt experience a similar windfall. She was sure God had given her a sign,
so she told prospective bidders, “I would like all bidders to know that this item is
not intended for consumption.” Strange, but this is stranger.
The actress Scarlett Johansson appeared on the Tonight Show a few years back,
and while she was being interviewed, she grabbed a tissue and relieved herself of some snot.
She kept that tissue and later stuck it in on eBay, saying she’d give the
money to charity if anyone wanted to buy it. Someone did, and they paid a staggering $5,300.
It gets worse. In 2005, the news media reported that a guy named Wade Jones had
something special to sell. He said he’d been at an Elvis Presley concert back in 1977,
and he’d seen Elvis drinking water from a plastic cup. After the star put the cup down, a cop picked
it up and handed it to the young fan. For years he kept the cup at home,
but then one day he decided it was time to sell. He put it on eBay, saying you
can buy the water, but I want to keep the cup. Jones said one of his friends told him about the
cheese sandwich auction, and so he thought it was a good time to sell his water. He wrote on eBay,
“I promise this thing is 100 percent legitimate.” As the saying goes, “There’s one born every
minute.” Jones sold the Elvis water for a whopping $455.
And if you are going to drink that water, we think it would be best to use special
ice cubes. Such things exist. There’s a company in the USA called Glace Luxury Ice that sells
“luxury” ice cubes. Sure, they are just made out of water, but they say it is purified water.
50 of the cubes will set you back $325, which works out at
$6.50 per cube. Add a few of those to the Elvis water, and you have a very expensive drink.
Another bit of Elvis we found that fetched a high price was some of his hair. In 2002,
a collector paid a massive $115,000 for a jar of his hair. The thing is,
it was sold without any DNA evidence saying it definitely came from the King of Rock and Roll.
If you’re wondering how much you could sell a single strand of hair for, someone paid $3,000
for one piece of John F. Kennedy’s hair. A strand of Abraham Lincoln's hair was also sold on eBay,
but only for $811. Still, that’s good money seeing as the hair was likely pulled out of
the seller’s friend’s head. Listen carefully right now,
because this next one might teach you how to make a good bit of cash in the future.
Imagine you had a jar in your kitchen, and you made the jar look kind of unique.
Imagine after that you called it a “ghost jar.” And now imagine
that some fool on the planet would be willing to spend a ton of cash on it.
It happened. In 2003, a guy in the
US put such a jar on eBay and told people it was the real deal. He said whoever the buyer might be,
they should be careful to keep the jar closed lest the ghoul escapes and causes all kinds of mayhem.
This is what he said happened when he found the jar:
“While getting the jars out of the ground, I dropped one and it broke.
A black mist or something seeped out of it. I should have known something was
wrong right then and covered the find back up but being young and foolish I didn't.”
He started the bidding at $99, and it seems the final bid was $50,922.
That person might not have paid up, but we’re not exactly sure since news stories are conflicting.
It seems some people were putting down hoax bids, which annoyed the owner of the jar.
He later wrote: “Due to the high amount of emails I've
received concerning this item, I am going to try to answer some of your questions here. Number 1,
No this is NOT a hoax, it is real. Yes, I have tried re-burying it but it did not work,
it only made ‘The Black Thing’ more active until I dug it back up.”
This next ghostly item definitely did sell, so don’t give up looking around your house for
useless things you can turn into lots of money. The story starts with a woman in the US trying
to make her young son feel better. The lad had been suffering a bit because he’d been
seeing the ghost of his grandpa. The mother then told the kid that she’d put his grandfather’s
old cane on eBay, and once it was sold, the ghost would follow the cane to the new owner.
The woman wrote on the post: “I would like to ask you to write
a letter after you’ve received the cane (and the ghost) to my son letting him know that he’s
there with you and you’re getting along great.” Ok, so what would someone pay for a ghost stick?
The answer is $65,000. It was actually bought by the same people that bought
the cheese sandwich. They said that these kinds of things are a little bit of American history,
although isn’t the fact they bought them the only reason they have become history?
These same people bought a Dorito chip on eBay for $1,209 after it was advertised as
something that looked just like that giant hat (mitre) the pope wears.
The buyer said, “We believe that this chip, like the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich,
is another perfect example of American pop culture. In all honesty, the chip's resemblance
to the Mitre is phenomenal.” If you are in need of cash,
maybe it’s time you started trying to find food that looks like things. Or,
you could do what a woman in the US did in 2009. 36-year old Lavonne Drummond was pregnant, and she
was flat-out broke, so she put something unique on eBay. She said someone could buy the right to
name her baby. Someone bid $15,000, but then eBay shut it down because there was no actual item.
She tried again, and someone bid $510.99, but eBay did the same again. It seems she
just couldn’t make the deal, although there were people ready to pay to name that kid.
She said, “I'm still praying that someone out there will take mercy and make a huge difference
for my family.” The kid will be 12 now. Now we come to the best ones by far. We’d
like you to think for a second and come up with a number for how much you would pay for absolutely
nothing? A dollar? Twenty dollars? A few thousand? Surely nothing is worth at least 500 bucks.
In 2021, NPR reported that the artist named Salvatore Garau had sold his latest invisible
sculpture. In an interview, he explained just what the collector got for his money:
“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there
is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a
weight. Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”
We trust you now understand why this piece was so valuable. Garau got $18,000 for it,
which he said was a good deal since it could be displayed in any kind of light.
Invisible art is almost as good as thin air. You can’t get enough quality thin air. A few
years ago, people were bidding as much as $60,000 for a bag of air taken at Kanye West concerts.
We don’t think we can get any more ridiculous than that, so we’ll end this show here.
Now you need to watch “Most Expensive Things in the World.” Or, have a look at…