I know it’s supposed to mean something like ‘I am so certain of x that I will bet my dollars (something of value) to your doughnuts (something of much lesser value) that I am right. But a filled, glazed jam doughnut is about two bucks fifty. What would you take if you were offered twenty billion dollars (in loose change) or twenty billion doughnuts?
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20 Billion glazed doughnuts
The phrase is from a time period where a donut and a cup of coffee was like 10 cents.
20 Billion dollars because of simple Economics and I also work in Supply Chain Management.
+ Good luck storing 20B donuts.
+ Good luck selling 20B donuts, that are probably starting to go stale/rot at an increasingly fast rate.
+ There is no market for 20B Glazed Jam donuts. A quick Google search shows that about 100M donuts are sold a year. That means you have stock for 20 years worth. And of only one variety to boot.
+ Because of the 3 previously mentioned points, there’s 0% chance you can sell them for $2.50 each. Heck… you won’t even be able to sell them at a wholesale cost ($1 each). You might not even be able to sell them for 1 cent each.
+ Your best bet is to sell it as food waste. Not sure what the going rate is on that though, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone here did.
I would at least consider 20 billion custard filled long johns.
Did you ask a question, then answer it yourself, and then propose some absurd scenario? What exactly was your point in this post??
I mean this with all due respect, but maybe wait an hour or so after bong rips before posting questions on Reddit. XD
In the United Kingdom, the phrase is “a pound to a penny.” The idea being you’re so sure of the outcome you’d risk a pound to win a penny.
In the 19th century, Americans adopted a similar phrase “dollars to dimes”, which like the British one has the added advantage of being inflation proof.
Also you can find in print examples of the just as illustrative but not alliterative “dollars to buttons” and “dollars to cobwebs.”
But for whatever reason dollars to doughnuts — the alliteration, the matching syllables, the frivolity? — caught on and became the idiom.
I almost removed this as being easily google-able, but you’ve changed my mind OP. This question is Mod Approved^(TM)
But you have to consider opportunity cost. $100 or $100 nice donuts, well you’ve got yourself a party or you’ve got the love of all your employees. Twenty billion donuts, that’s something that is going to require infrastructure to even get rid of, let alone try and make a profit. You’d need to be putting your own money in (because of not choosing the dollars) before you can even make a profit. While that’s downright American, I’m not sure if it can be done before the donuts spoil.
Money. Tomorrow those donuts will only have about half their value, and none at all the next day. And I have no interest in trying to sell or dispose of twenty billion donuts.
I would look up the word “fungible” when comparing cash to an equivalent or greater value of donuts.
>The idea behind the shorthand phrase dollars to doughnuts is the sentiment that the speaker is so confident that he is right about something, he will put forth his dollars against the listener’s doughnuts in a wager, the dollars having much higher value than the doughnuts.
https://grammarist.com/idiom/dollars-to-doughnuts/