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You can purchase USB keys in bulk for around 1.50 U$D. How is this not a viable solution? Floppy disks today seem to cost only about half that price.

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1.50$ for an entire pack of USB sticks? Where did you find such an offer? Because according to amazon, the cheapest they have are a pack of 10 USB sticks, 1GB, for 39$:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E3MII96/

Not exactly cheap, if you ask me. Not exactly super-expensive either, of course, but definitely not cheap. And I think the reasons the price for floppy disks doesn't seem to go down is because only certain people still use floppy disks, i.e., the need for floppy disks is nearly non-existant.

Amazon is virtually never the best price on items <$5. They carry very, very few items in that price range outside their "addon" program (items that only ship with $25+ in other goods) -- what you linked is an ad for a product sold by another store.

eBay, Alibaba, or contacting the wholesale division of any of the stores you get searching "bulk flash drive" on Google would be a better idea. They start around $2.50/drive retail with your logo custom printed, so you can do much better wholesale.

And for the price you even get all the weirdness of file corruption, sometimes works sometimes not, and data-loss that you had with the cheapest no-name floppies back in the day ;-)

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