Numlock News: April 23, 2024 • Mondo, Hydrox, Wingspan
By Walt Hickey
Hydrox
The packaged cookie business is a $9 billion category, and more than $4 billion of that is Oreo alone, owned by CPG colossus Mondelēz, with not only the flagship Oreo and the crucial Double Stuf line but also an armada of different flavors and iterations of the cookie that dominate shelf space in the grocery store. That domination, competitor Hydrox argues, is sufficient to warrant antitrust litigation, as the rival to Oreo contends that the tough cookie intimidates retailers into hiding, misplacing or moving Hydrox to exile in the cookie aisle. It’s not the first time Hydrox’s allegations of hegemony have hit the courts, as in 2018 they sought $800 million from an official complaint with the FTC. Calling Hydrox the David to Oreo’s Goliath is somehow charitable, as Hydrox sales as recently as 2017 were roughly $500,000, so a triumph here would be more like David’s gut bacteria successfully slaying Goliath with a hurled mote of dust.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
Mondo
Your new favorite athlete is Armand “Mondo” Duplantis, a 24-year-old Olympic pole vault athlete who was born in Louisiana and competes for Sweden. Mondo is the best at what he does, and on Saturday broke the men’s pole vault record at a meet in China by clearing 6.24 meters, which is a jump of 20 feet, 5 inches, in what is really a breathtaking bit of athletics that you really should check out. The best part, though, is that this is in fact the eighth time that Mondo has broken the record, and he has done so in back-to-back meets. Rather than just move the bar up to where he thinks he can hit it, Mondo has been imitating Ukrainian Sergey Bubka, who in the 1980s and 1990s moved the bar up by the minimum one centimeter every time. This way, the vaulter doesn’t just break the record, but he gets to break the record many, many times in a row — Bubka broke the outdoor record 17 times — which is not only extremely cool, but contractually means they get a monetary bonus for breaking the record each little time rather than just the big one.
Contact
After months of dead air, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has got the Voyager 1 probe successfully returning usable data about the status of its engineering systems following a memory problem. After months of analysis the issue had been traced back to the flight data subsystem and the malfunction of a single chip. On April 18, they sent the first of three commands to move code to a new location, a command which took 22.5 hours to get to Voyager 1, and then another 22.5 hours back over the 24-billion-kilometer distance. On April 20, they got the first proper status update in five months, and over the next several weeks they’ll relocate and fix the other portions of software, at which point the hope is Voyager 1 will resume sending back science data.
Calla Cofield, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Board Games
Sales of hobby board games fell off from their highs of $440 million in 2021 to $390 million last year. The biggest declines were seen in older, more evergreen games; the best example of that format, Wingspan, fell from 279,998 copies sold in 2022 to 208,506 copies sold last year. That’s a sign that for some of the most significant games, they’ve simply begun to reach their addressable market, as in everyone who would conceivably want to own, say, Ticket to Ride probably already has it at this point. This could pose an issue for publishers, as second printings tend to be where the real money is made, and if there’s diminishing demand that could be a problem. In the card game space, which fell from $160 million in 2022 to $135 million in 2023, edgy games (Cards Against Humanity) are in decline, while lightweight party games (like, say, Codenames) are on the rise.
MSG
New York’s Madison Square Garden, which has a capacity between 12,000 and 18,000, is a dream venue for many artists, and every year a new crop of artists makes their MSG debut. When exactly an artist is proven to be ready to take on MSG is an interesting math problem for promoters and the band’s managers. It’s an evolving data problem that many are trying to solve, particularly as the pre-pandemic algebra has become more like calculus given shallow interest produced by streaming platforms, volatility in the New York scene in general, and access to more and deeper data than ever before. For instance, one manager’s rule of thumb is that if a band can put up two nights at Radio City (capacity 5,700) or two Central Park Summerstages (about 5,000) and sell them quick, that’s a sign an act is ready for the Garden. When Lake Street Dive did two shows at Radio City in 2022, the fact that they sold 10,000 tickets across both shows, and upon inspection only 31 people attended both shows, meant they were ready for the Garden.
Bubble Tea
A bubble tea boom in China has been minting billionaires, with the market for freshly made tea hitting 108.3 billion yuan in 2022 and projected to rise to 201.5 billion yuan by 2025. Today the third-largest bubble tea chain in the country — Sichuan Baicha Baidao Industrial Co. — goes public in Hong Kong, and it’ll make its founders’ 73 percent stake worth on the order of $2.7 billion. Tea is a huge market; rival Mixue Group is valued at 23.3 billion yuan, and contends that it’s the second-largest drink chain in the world after Starbucks with its 32,000 outlets in China and 4,000 abroad.
Pui Gwen Yeung and Venus Feng, Bloomberg
Ump
Major League Baseball umpires are under ever escalating scrutiny, particularly any ump that consistently performs on the lower side of the accuracy spectrum, given new advancements in identifying blown calls. One who raises consistent fan ire is Ángel Hernández, who at 93 percent of pitches called accurately since 2020 is the eighth-worst performing umpire in the league out of 64 umps who have called at least 85 games in that time. Some of it comes to a few spectacularly rough games — a Pirates-Nationals game presided over by Hernández last year was the single worst game on record since 2019, with an accuracy rate of 83.9 percent — but it’s mostly just the zero-sum nature of umpire decisions clashing with improved accuracy of the robo-umps.
Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal
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Ticket to Ride is an awesome game. I have several different versions of it at home, and I have many fond memories of playing it with my kids.