We are all familiar with all the advice on how to get rich. However here I analyse George Clooney’s wealth and provide a possible reason for his wealth.

George Clooney apparently earns $15m per film

Assume Clooney appears for 60 minutes of a 90 minute film

That works out at $250,000 per minute on screen.

George likes coffee, in my local supermarket Lavazza beans are $30 for a 2.2Ib bag.

So if he visits my supermarket can he buy coffee faster than he earns money?

The self-serve barcode swipe machine in my local store will process 9 items a minute (thanks to help checkout guy in my local store!).

The guy on the checkout tells me he can swipe up to 20 items a minute.

So if George Clooney goes mad and does it himself he could spend $270 in a minute on coffee, or $600 if he gets the checkout guy to do it. (and that is without waiting to pay or swiping his loyalty card for air-miles (remember Up in the Air?).

This leaves George with a net profit of at least $249,400 per minute.  So this isn’t going to work.

So George likes TV (he was on it for much of the 1990s), so what if he pops down to my local electrical retailer, and spends up big on Sony 55 inch 3-D LCD TV screens priced at $3300?

Now lets assume these items are stacked right next to the checkout (to save time hauling them through the store) and the swiping rate is also no more than 20 per minute.

Now he can spend $66,000 per minute.   This still leaves him with a profit of $184,000 per minute.

Clearly consumer goods is not the way to go.

So maybe cars or houses are the go. The trouble is, with all the paper work, he couldn’t buy one in a minute.

Ebay auctions are out because they last at least 5 days.

So what if George has some help?  Lets go back to that TV retailer. Now suppose we have  his old friends from ER helping him Anthony Edwards (Dr. Mark Greene)  Sherry Stringfield (Dr. Susan Lewis) and Noah Wylie (Med Student) helping him by also swiping 20 TVs a minute. That’s 80 TVs a minute.

Now we have 4 x $66,000 = $264,000 per minute which exceeds his income.

So here could be a recipe for bankruptcy for George. Would George Clooney be so rich after that?

BUT each TV box is about 60 x 32 x 5 inches and weighs 70lbs and they dont come from nowhere. Somebody has to freight them to the store. Each semi trailer has 40,000lbs cargo capacity. So there are 570 TVs in each load.

So George and ER friends would go through a semi-trailer every 7 minutes. Is that why George Clooney is so rich?

Now allowing for backing out the empty semi-trailer from the loading bay and manoeuvring the waiting full semi into the bay, and allowing for a team of loaders to offload the TVs, even if they were throwing them off the truck, onto forklifts taking 10 TVs at a time, each trip will take at least 30 seconds to get it from the truck to the check out – that is about 30 minutes per load!

But George’s team are buying ‘em at a rate of 7 mins per truckload!!!

So, in the best case scenario the store has 570 TVs stocked by the checkout, with a full semi-trailer to go. Let’s suppose they start offloading the TVs once George’s team starting their purchasing.

In the first minute the team purchase 80 TVs.

In that time the stockers, re-stock at a rate of 10 TVs every 30 seconds.  That is 60 a minute, or a net shortfall of 20 TVs a minute!

So I calculate that after only 30 minutes of this madness, George would be the proud owner of 1590 Sony TVs, and be owed 40 the store couldn’t stock in time and in the process would still be over $10 million richer.

And that is why George Clooney is so rich.