Content tagged with “business” under “The Interesting List”

“ Employers who took the effort to find and install an alternative web browser performed better on every metric and stayed in jobs longer. ”

“ When the Redbox DVD rental company filed bankruptcy, it ‘orphaned’ 24,000 machines around the country. No one seems to want to remove them. ”

“ A fascinating look into how a new LEGO set is born, and all the challenges that go into engineering and marketing it. ”

“ In order to fulfill a contractual requirement, a movie was shown a limited number of times, at odd hours, in a single theater, prior to being released overseas. This technically made it the lowest-grossing movie ever. ”

“ It takes a lot to launder the linens products by the largest hotel in the United States. ”

“ A professional athlete walked away to indulge his love of Pokemon and create a business around it. ”

“ A South Korean company is bottling water from the demilitarized zone between North and South, claiming purity because that land has been uninhabited for almost 70 years. ”

“ When you win a hole-in-one contest (or any other longshot contest), the organizer isn’t sad, because they paid a fee to ensure they didn’t have to pay out the prize. ”

“ There were some strange airlines in the past, that catered to very specific passenger demographics. ”

“ Airlines make little money on ticket sales. Most of their profits come from selling miles/points to marketing partners like credit cards, hotels, and car rental agencies. ”

“ No brand appearance is accidental. Here’s how it works. ”

“ Exactly who gets credit for writing a song is a complicated process and fraught with mild fraud and, occasionally, quasi-extortion. ”

“ Streaming pays the artist by the song, not by the minute. So two shorter songs pay more than one longer song. ”

“ During the late stages of construction, a Vegas hotel was found to have an engineering defect that could not be repaired. It was a total loss, but could not be imploded. It had to be dismantled, floor by floor. ”

“ With COVID having devastated the cruise industry, many companies are selling older ships off for scrap, thus clogging up ‘ship-breaking’ yards. ”

“ This reads like something out of a spy novel. ”

“ If you think Kirkland products are high quality, that’s because they are literally the best on the market, by design. ”

“ There’s an airline that is forced to fly a single route by a decades-old treaty. It tries very hard to hide its own existence. ”

“ Examples of when missing or extra commas became painful legal judgments. ”

“ A history of the credit card industry and the two biggest players, which were both named something else when they started. ”

“ In the early 1990s. Pepsi accidentally created a contest where a million people were grand prize winners, and Pepsi couldn’t pay the total prize money owed. ”

“ Lots of air cargo is carried in the holds of passenger flights, so it’s a problem when passengers stop flying. Here’s an analysis of how the industry has adapted. ”

“ The success of a product can be weirdly predicted by its affinity to a particular group of people who are drawn to failure. If they like it, it’s probably not going to survive. ”

“ A list and description of dozens of spreadsheet errors that had significant business impact. ”

“ When you have to renovate one of the most iconic jewelry stores in the world, moving all your inventory is a risky undertaking. ”

“ The children of Chinese immigrants are not planning to take over the family business. But that’s okay, because that was actually the goal for many Chinese parents. ”

“ When you buy stuff and return it, the retailer often just throws it away instead of repackaging it and reselling it. ”

“ Less than 10% of plastic is actually recycled. We’ve been told otherwise by companies who produce plastic to alleviate our guilt at buying it. ”

“ A good explainer of Amtrak’s current status and how their new CEO might get them out of trouble (hint: he has no deep love for trains). ”

“ A small town in Florida lost its only grocery store, so the town itself opened one. City workers help stock the shelves and checkout customers. ”

“ A good explainer of how art gets to auction, how that market is structured, and how people spend eight figures on a painting. ”

“ The description of the sad decline of a once-great news publication is very likely a mirror to the rest of the industry. ”

“ The story of the E.T. video game for the Atari 2600 which, along with Pac-Man, destroyed then-mighty Atari. ”

“ The story of a management theory that came and went, then sort of came back. Everything has a hype cycle, and Six Sigma was no exception ”

“ In 1991, the CEO of a British jewelry company made some jokes about the quality of his company’s product and effectively destroyed it and his own personal net worth. ”

“ Starbucks has created a closed economy of gift cards and app purchases that it controls. It essentially has a secondary income stream of loaning money to its own customers as a specialty private bank. ”

“ Two kids out of college get a musical all the way to Broadway where it flops spectacularly. This is how it happened, and what happens after you flame out. ”

“ A dissection of the demise of Mic that probably mirrors every digital media outlet in the world (hence the title). Well-written and consequently depressing. ”

“ A wonderful documentary explaining the business of contemporary art, and the intersection of artists, dealers, collectors, auction houses, and art fairs. It’s a deeply odd mix of emotion, ego, and big business. ”

“ Contrary to popular belief, small business is not a driver of job growth. Small businesses just grow faster than big business, so they just appear to increase job growth. ”

“ An article about technology progress, but I found it more interesting for the discussion of the technology hype/adoption cycle. ”

“ A company has crowd-sourced a quarter of a billion dollars and has been working on a video game for seven years. ”