Horse 1180 - The Bottle Deposit

On Channel 9's sister station Go! (Sic), they have been showing re-runs of Seinfeld. On last night's episode which is from Season 7 entitled "The Bottle Deposit", Kramer and Newman embarked on a scheme to run bottles and cans for recycling from New York City to Michigan state to collect the 10 cent deposit on them. Kramer claims that he had tried it before but "couldn't crunch the numbers", whereas Newman claims that because as a mailman for the US Postal Service, that he can effectively run the scheme for free because there will be a surge of mail the week before Mother's Day, the "mother of all mail days".

I have "crunched the numbers" and have come up with the following:

The closest town in Michigan state to New York City in which the characters from Seinfeld live is a place called Temperance, MI. If Seinfeld, Kramer and Newman live at apartments 5A, 5B and 5F 181 West 81st St, New York City, then the distance which we have is 573 miles.

- If we take any normal car such as a Ford Focus then 30mpg (US) is pretty typical. To cover 573 miles would require 19.1 gallons of petrol (US).

- 19.1 gallons of petrol at a typical price for 1996 in which the episode was written would cost US$25.02.
- In order to make the scheme pay they would then need to drive back home across the same distance which would double the cost bringing the total cost to $50.04
- At a cost of $50.04 they would need to deliver 501 bottles to Temperance, MI to make the scheme pay.

There are two other things which can of course negated; namely:
1. Newman works for the US Postal Service and effectively has the truck for free, because he'd be paid to deliver mail anyway.
2. Kramer has been on strike from his job at the H&H Bagel factory for over a decade and therefore is wage would be nil.

Of course for most people these circumstances would most certainly come into play and therefore you would also need to factor in the fact that it would take about 20 hours to make the round trip, in which case it would probably just be easier to find regular employment.

However the point that Kramer makes that he "couldn't crunch the numbers" and neither could Newman,  simply just doesn't add up because anyone with a calculator and a Sixth Grade level of maths can work out the sums.

Or it could be that the writers of the show just assume that people are idiots, which is also a fair assumption.