I’m sure you’ve heard this said a time or two in your life. Someone says they won’t do or sell something, “not for all the tea in China.” And I’ve never fully understood the logic. First off, I wasn’t offering you tea, nor any other drinkable dried-leaf beverage. And I certainly wasn’t offering China’s tea. I have no right to China’s tea. It’s China’s, and currently my trade relationship with that country is approximately zero.

But the real mystery to me is why anyone would want all the tea in China in the first place. This doesn’t sound like a good thing to have. It’s a storage nightmare to begin with. You’d have to rent out so many U-Stor-Its that it would offset any financial benefit you might gain from your sudden tea windfall. That’s assuming you could even sell any of the tea. People are willing to pay for tea from China, but I think they might question buying a big bag of Bob’s Homegrown Tea out of the back of your van. And if you are in fact getting all the tea, that includes the immature plants as well, so you’re going to need roughly twelve million acres of acidic soil, a massive irrigation system, a full-time staff to maintain and harvest the plants, shipping facilities, and on and on.

So since they’re apparently not the most savvy of businesspeople, the next time someone tells you they won’t do something “for all the tea in China,” counter-offer with “half the maple syrup in Vermont,” or “roughly a third of the potatoes in Idaho.” They’ll likely come back with “three-fifths of the cabbage in California,” or “an amount not less than one-eighth the corn in Indiana.” With enough back-and-forth offers of food-based barter, you might eventually talk them down to a can of Pringles and a couple of kumquats.

If you’re feeling generous, throw in a box of tea.