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Price tags · Puzzle #17 · Friday, October 16

Price tags: the answers

Four questions, each with one true number. Here they are with their answers, how to reason each one out, and where the number comes from. Play today's Price tags.

  1. 1. Pet food and treats: How much did Americans spend on pet food and treats in 2025?

    Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Jeffrey O. Gustafson assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0
    Dog-owning households
    71 million
    Cat-owning households
    53 million

    The answer is hidden while this question is still in play: it comes round again within 14 days.

  2. 2. A day at UPS: How much did UPS take in on an average delivery day in 2025?

    Photo: gillfoto, CC BY-SA 4.0
    Delivery days
    252 in 2025
    Ground
    About 15 million ground packages a day

    The answer is hidden while this question is still in play: it comes round again within 14 days.

  3. 3. Instagram: How much did Facebook pay to buy Instagram in 2012?

    Photo: Anthony Quintano from Honolulu, HI, United States, CC BY 2.0
    Bought by
    Facebook, April 2012
    Paid in
    Cash and Facebook shares
    Based in
    San Francisco

    The answer: about $1 billion. Facebook put the total consideration at about $1 billion in cash and stock, for an app it promised to keep running independently.

    Napkin math: A hot photo app with millions of users but almost no revenue: a big round number for a start-up, somewhere between hundreds of millions and a few billion.

    The answer comes to about $1 billion (Meta (Facebook) Newsroom). There's no tidy chain of numbers for this one, so the skill is a sense of scale: the answer is in the billions. Any guess from $500 million to $2 billion scores 7.0 or better, because the game only counts how many times off you are.

    Source: Meta (Facebook) Newsroom, Facebook to Acquire Instagram

  4. 4. Pokémon: How much did Americans spend on Pokémon toys, cards and games in 2025, the top toy brand of the year?

    Growth from 2024
    up 87%

    The answer is hidden while this question is still in play: it comes round again within 14 days.

All of puzzle #17 · The archive