A Piece of the Pie

Ebay is full of things you never knew you needed, but a million fruit pies just might take the, erm, cake.

Pressplay, a British company specializing in the sale of surplus goods, put 1,090,000 pies originally destined for supermarket chain Asda on eBay Monday. (The chain had cancelled the order.) Starting bid: 99 pence. As of Wednesday morning, bidding was over £500,000 (about $800,000), alas making the purchase a bit "pie in the sky" for most of us.

If it helps at all in your decision to snag a piece of the pie, the pies are frozen – although the auction specifies that the buyer must figure out how to transport and store the 76 tons of fruit-filled pastry.

"This is quite possibly the most bizarre and largest thing we have ever had to sell," said Luke Schonenberger, e-commerce manager for Pressplay, told the UK’s Daily Mail. "Most of us think it will make people laugh and it will be a 10-day auction and we're hoping for a bit of a bidding frenzy."

The Mail calculated that if all the little pies (were put side by side they’d stretch from London to Bournemouth (think Baltimore to Philadelphia) – and that finishing them wouldn’t be easy-as-you-know-what. Eating one 2.5-ounce pie a day apiece, it would take a family of four 746 years to eat them all.

As the eBay ad says, "The pie’s the limit."

Photo courtesy Pressplay.