When you go to the store and buy twenty or fifty pairs of identical socks/stockings, you are NOT creating a storage crisis in your life, even if you residentially abode in a piano box. If you have an apartment or house, you should buy a hundred pair at once. You think you're smart? When did you last compute AT LEAST the following benefits, in whatever order they appeal most to your personal sense of priority?
 
50 or 100 pairs means you don't have to worry about going out to get new ones, not for along time. Plus, there's a synergistic effect which I won't explain if you don't grab it with its reference in this sentence, an effect that translates into your socks and stockings actually lasting longer, NOT shorter, as some of us erroneously think at the beginning. Lasting longer.

Please do not expect the cost of your socks/stockings to go down next year or the year after. That's about as likely as Elvis running for President. You certainly save money this way.

When you have at least 20 pairs of socks same color (go ahead, buy 20 pairs each of 5 colors), you rarely suffer that mysterious ailment referred to as, "the dryer ate two blues and a …."
It doesn't happen. I have fifty pairs of navy socks. I NEVER hunt for a lost sock.

Let's face it: If I only wear each pair thirty times, it means I don't have to buy socks for four or five years. Do you understand how powerful this tiny shortcut is over the long haul? The wisest people you or I have ever known are those who understand that the way we spend our minutes is a clear preview of how we are spending our lives. Minutes you save are very, VERY literally the years of your life. Let's double and triple some ten thousand of those minutes with ideas like this, not quite so absurd when you remember G. Bernard Shaw's reminder that "Reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."