Ironic situation where characters spend an entire episode trying to get some minor product or object, but succeed only if they are willing to take excessive or ultimately useless amounts of the object with them. They typically become sick of the booty but are unable or unwilling to part with it.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Cowboy Bebop: The infamous "Mushroom Samba" episode had the crew unintentionally end up with a large stash of shiitake mushrooms. The crew ends up having to eat the mushrooms in a variety of dishes because they have no other food available. Possibly inspired by the Monty Python's Flying Circus skit below.
- Ranma ½: In a single-chapter arc (chapter 330), Cologne is sold a veritable mountain of horrible-tasting noodles. Rather than throw them away or demand a refund, she holds an all-you-can-eat contest, and hidden in one special order is a "Noodle of Strength," said to confer the strength of 100 men. Eat up! Just as expected, not only do the male members of the Nerima Wrecking Crew eat and fight over the horrible noodles, but several Muggles, too! Hilarity Ensues. In the end, the MacGuffin noodle was an even worse kind: it provided the digestive strength of 100 men, and Ranma, the winner, is so hungry he's given more of the original, horrible noodles.
Comic Books
- Asterix: In Asterix and the Cauldron, due to his lack of greed and complete ignorance of economics, Asterix ends selling fourteen wild boar for five coins. And as a Brick Joke, it causes a price fall revealed by a restaurant owner.
Films — Live-Action
- Batman Begins: A variant appears when Alfred comments that the components for Bruce's Batman mask (the ears and hood) will have to be ordered in large lots — ten thousand of each component — in order to avoid suspicion ("At least we'll have spares"). The first shipment of the mask proper turns out to be flawed and unusable, obliging them to order another ten thousand, albeit at a discount offered in apology for the flaw.
Literature
- Discworld: In a variant, Rincewind has accumulated a number of do-nothing titles at Unseen University, for each of which the University porter provides him with a bucket of coal to heat his office each day... even though for all his positions, he only has the one office. If Rincewind asks for less than that, or he fails to burn every last piece, the university won't provide him with any coal at all. Thus, Discworld's most put-upon "wizzard" must strip to his underpants and sweat atop a mountain of coal every summer if he wants to avoid freezing to death in winter.
- The Dogs of War: The avoiding suspicion variant appears when Cat Shannon has to buy 400,000 rounds of 9mm ammunition and 300 mortar bombs for a small commando raid so he can make the order as part of a legitimate arms deal, and even that's regarded as unusually small. Ironically Cat does find a use for this arsenal—supplying the soldiers of the ruler he actually puts in charge instead of the Puppet King his employers wanted.
- Porterhouse Blue (by Tom Sharpe): A university student's attempt to procure a single condom becomes a Trojan Gauntlet that ends with him acquiring two gross of them. He is then stuck with the problem of how to dispose of them.
- "The Second Bakery Attack" (by Haruki Murakami): Put to hilarious use — the narrator and his wife wake up starving in the middle of the night and set out to rob a bakery, but have to settle for a McDonald's because it's the only place open. At the same time, the narrator flashes back to a previous bakery robbery he and a friend had committed in college, in which the baker had allowed them to take as much as they wanted as long as they agreed to listen to a full Wagner record.
- The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted: A military troop ship is forced to spend several months eating nothing but heat-and-expand sausages. Don't feel too bad, most of the troops are willingly invading an Actual Pacifist planet.
Live Action TV
- The Andy Griffith Show: In one episode, Aunt Bee goes on a cost-cutting kick and discovers a way to save 10 cents a pound on meat — by buying an entire side of beef, 150 pounds. To make matters worse, her freezer proceeds to break down.
- Farscape: Played for laughs in an episode where the crew goes to a planet to get food and come back with "a thousand units" of "dried food rectangles" (basically, crackers.)
- The Golden Girls: In one episode, Sophia gets a membership to a Price-Club like store called "Shopper's Warehouse" where this was the hook, you got bargains, but had to buy things in large quantities. During the episode, she bought 20 cases of sardines and four gross of toothbrushes (which is over 500.)
- Monty Python's Flying Circus: In one sketch, the bandit Dennis Moore steals lupins from the rich and gives those lupins to the poor. Eventually, the poor get fed up with having to live on such dishes as "braised lupin in lupin sauce." This isn't because Dennis can only get lupins in large quantities; he just doesn't know what else to steal. Given that the rich nobles also value the lupins highly (one keeps a lupin stashed in her garter for safe-keeping), it may simply be that lupins are considered a valuable commodity for no comprehensible reason (think the Dutch "tulip bubble"), while the poor are the only ones sensible enough to question their worth. Then again, this is Monty Python, so try not to overthink it.
- The Outer Limits (1995): Variant in "The Revelations of Becka Paulson" — while at Liquidations, Becka notices an entire rack of picture frames, all containing the 8-by-10 Man... and so decides to buy all of them. To be fair, he did say he was on sale...
- Schitt's Creek: In "Milk Money", instead of 12 pints of milk, Alexis buys 12 canisters, amounting to perhaps fifty gallons for $400.
- Seinfeld: The characters once attempted to start a bakery which sells only the tops of muffins, but spent most of the episode trying and failing to dispose of the bottoms. They even try giving them to the homeless shelter, which turns them down because, apparently, it would be insulting to the homeless people to be fed muffin stumps. (You might think they could have saved themselves the trouble by just baking the tops, but this is handwaved in the episode: the tops don't taste right unless they are baked with the bottoms attached.)
- Thunderbirds: The episode "Ricochet" has one of the staff of a pirate satellite complaining that there's nothing to eat on board except Honey Crunch Crispies. His partner replies that as a major advertiser the company gave them a year's free supply.
Video Games
- Rock Band:
- "Bark At The Moon" and "Mama, I'm Coming Home" are only available as part of an 8-song pack. The former is notable, as it was the final boss of the very first Guitar Hero, made by the same company.
- The exportable songs for Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Green Day Rock Band, and the AC\DC Track Pack (except for a couple of songs by Bon Jovi, which have Updated Rereleases as DLC) are strictly all-or-nothing affairs. Some of the other track packs didn't have all of their songs available separately until later. Also, the Green Day songs were later released on the Music Store, only they only work in RB3 rather than across the series like the GDRB export.
- Inverted with Blitz; all songs from this game were also released as singles, and in some cases as parts of a new pack. Extra credit to the Foster the People pack in this case; the pack was comprised of two previous singles, plus the track from Blitz. The pack was only released when the Blitz track was released as DLC.
- Solium Infernum: Obviously justified based on how legion mechanics work in game, you are nonetheless incapable of only purchasing two of the 10,000 Screaming Bastards.
- Stellaris: The AI is incapable of using the Market to buy stuff at a fixed monthly rate — only in bulk. This is probably to keep them from focusing only on Energy Credits, since most of their building decisions are focused on maintaining a certain level of Resource inflow.
- Undertale: In order to get more Dog Salad, the Player Character must also fill their inventory with Dog Residue.
- Yes, Your Grace: The two resources that can be doled out to help petitioners are gold and food supplies. The player can only use gold to buy supplies or sell supplies for gold when certain merchants show up. Those merchants will only be selling a fixed, and fairly large, quantity of food supplies as a package deal, and will only buy supplies for gold in the same manner, with no option to buy less.
Web Animation
- A piece of animation making the YouTube rounds features Popeye (in his Brodax design), Olive (Fleischer design) and Bluto (Hanna-Barbera design). Bluto is making off with Olive, so Popeye eats his spinach but is overcome by what sounds like irritable bowel syndrome. He's doubled over on the ground which is attributed to possibly tainted spinach. "I buys in bulk!" Popeye explains.
- Minilife TV: In "Abel's Story", Chris has some trouble with a merchant in the Oni Region who sells boxes of apples and carrots and refuses to let him buy only a few individual ones. However, he gets the upper hand on the merchant by paying for a single apple and carrot and running off with them in hand.
Merchant: Stop that kid! He's trying to get reasonable amounts of food for a fair price!
Webcomics
- Roomies!, It's Walky!, Joyce and Walky!: Once Joyce and Walky finally push the metaphorical beds together, they go out to buy some condoms, and do it in such an awkward and clueless manner that the cashier eventually pushes them into buying a whole box so that none of them will have to go through this again for a long time.
Western Animation
- Craig of the Creek: In "The Dream Team", Craig and Bryon plead for their Grandma to buy them a box of corndogs while out shopping, which are bulk in a large box. She agrees on the condition they finish them all, which forces them to eat corndogs for every meal, including chopped up in a bowl of milk for breakfast. At the end, they're quietly sick of it, but Grandma sternly tells them to eat their corndogs.
- Daria: In one episode, Jake accidentally orders a bulk load of hot dogs, and the family has to eat several hot dog recipes over the course of the episode. Eventually Jake uses them for an Eating Contest.
- Dogstar: In the first episode, Mark Clark unwittingly agrees to move an entire Pacific island to New Earth. This includes a huge amount of bananas. After he damages their sacred statuary in transit, the Islanders pay him with him the bananas. This results in the Clark eating nothing but bananas, prepared in increasing unusual (and disgusting) ways, throughout the episode.
- King of the Hill: In one episode, Hank Hill needs a new spark plug, but the Mega Lo Mart only has them in packs of twelve. Hank insists he only needs one, then rips one out of the pack and tries to buy it alone. He gets really annoyed when he's told that's not allowed and is forced to buy the whole pack.
- Rugrats: In the episode The Stork, Stu ends up ordering 144 eggs just to make sure they have enough.
- The Simpsons:
- To quote Marge Simpson: "That's a good price for twelve pounds of Nutmeg!"
- Bart once bought Marge a gallon of cheap perfume for her birthday.
Real Life
- Howard Hughes is said to have had insisted on Banana Ripple ice cream for dessert every night, and his staff panicked when the flavor was discontinued. The ice cream company agreed to make a special batch, just for him, but it had to be a few hundred gallons. Allegedly, he ate two scoops of the new batch and then decided it was time for a change. The remainder had to be given away for free to customers at Hughes' casinos. One worker for Hughes joked there's probably still some Banana Ripple in a freezer somewhere to this day.
- Shopping at places like Costco and other small-business suppliers will invariably end this way. You're one person, who needs one tube of toothpaste, which is why your only recourse is to buy five and give thanks that toothpaste doesn't spoil very fast.
- The reason Costco and Sam's Club work this way, especially with food, drink, and other consumable products, is thanks to the Square-Cube Law. A standard box of cereal C might hold a volume of X cereal but a box of size of 2C will hold 8X cereal. Typically, the price of packaging of food will cost way more than the price of the food itself, so while the the total price for a double-sized box is more expensive than the standard box, the per unit price (or the cost of making a fixed amount of cereal) drops. If you're going to buy 8 boxes worth of cereal, it's cheaper to double the box size and buy one of those than to buy 8 individual boxes.
- Many bagel stores will sell day-old bagels for cheap, but only if you buy a few dozen. Most of the time it's worth it, especially if you have freezer space for storage.
- Clifford Stoll wanted to share physical Klein bottles with the rest of the mathematical community, but the only way glassmakers would produce Klein bottles was if Cliff purchased them in bulk. So he did, storing the excess of bottles in a nook in his basement only accessible by his specially-built robots and selling them online to other mathematicians.
- Some foodstuffs are only sold online in large quantities, which means that if you can't find a local store that sells one unit, they only way you can get it is by ordering half a dozen from the manufacturer's webpage.
- A state university had enough things happening on campus that they could justify printing a daily newspaper five days a week, supported by advertising. They needed about 30,000 copies every day. Because of labor cost minimums and the recovery from selling the extras to a recycler, it was cheaper to print 100,000 copies and sell for pulp 70,000 of them.
- A variation can show up when ordering from a seller who gives free shipping for a certain minimum purchase — it can actually be cheaper to buy more than you really wanted just to hit the threshold, particularly for items heavy/bulky enough to incur high shipping costs otherwise.
- One of Interplay's founders is known as Burger
because of a tendency to purchase huge amounts of cheap hamburgers ("Since I spent most of my time at the office, I didn't want to walk over, buy a burger, and walk back. So I'd buy a bag of twenty of them. Blow six bucks, get twenty burgers, go to my office, and put them in a drawer. I was too cheap to buy a refrigerator — well, really too broke. Every so often I'd open the drawer and eat a burger."). Following a Transgender transition, it even allowed for the Alliterative Nickname Burger Becky.