"We could fit two million dollars there," he said, then peremptorily dropped the plank.
Skip the gem lettuces, a sort of deconstructed salad; for fourteen dollars, there aren't enough white anchovies.
"When you are selling handsets at twenty dollars, and their actual value is sixty dollars, there are going to be a lot of dealers repackaging them," he says.
"A billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about a fairly large business," Mr. Marks said.
They'd become sad little children, petty thieves and liars, swiping things that no one would miss — five dollars here, ten dollars there — and laying siege to it with large plans, intricate calculations.
When Twitter acquired Vine, in 2012, for thirty million dollars, there was no Periscope, Twitter video, or Facebook Live — there was no easy way to broadcast video.
But even if the developers can whittle the cost of the station by several hundred million dollars, there is a serious shortfall.
"We have revenues of about a billion dollars there, and we have network equipment contracts with some of the smaller providers," the spokesman said.
Each machine is a white rectangular box about the size of a chest freezer and costs a million dollars; there are more than fifty of them in the Platform, lined up in rows.
