Numlock News: April 30, 2025 • Jack Black, Montana, Chips Ahoy!

Apr 30, 2025

Chips Ahoy

Mondelēz has been tweaking its $1 billion Chips Ahoy! brand and plans to continue using the 62-year-old cookie brand to push it past its current situation of being the replacement-level cookie in the aisle. Sure, it’s the second-largest cookie brand in the United States, but the company wants to get at the heart of a key issue: though 95 percent of customers know of Chips Ahoy!, internal data shows that only 30 percent of U.S. households actually keep the cookie in stock. Last year, the company started adding more cacao and vanilla extract to the cookies, which was their biggest tweak in years, and it’s been paying off. In the 26 weeks ending March 29, sales were up 2.3 percent, running ahead of the 0.3 percent decline in the cookie category as a whole and adding 2 million homes to the brand.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Diamond

The ongoing bankruptcy of Diamond Comics Distributors — the longtime middleman connecting the producers of American comic books with the thousands of comic book shops — has become a fiasco. The winning bidder for the company has not only yanked their bid but also filed an astonishing lawsuit in the courts on Monday, alleging that Diamond misled the buyers. At the core of the suit is Alliance Game Distributors (a subsidiary of Diamond), which acts as an intermediary between game companies like Wizards of the Coast and those comic shops. According to the suit, just eight days before the deal was supposed to close, Diamond revealed to the buyer that Alliance Game Distributor’s contract was in fact ending as of April 30 and would not be renewed, a deal that was responsible for $39.88 million of the $161.3 million in sales. The news that 25 percent of their new prizes’ sales would evaporate as of, well, today was enough for them to pull the deal and sue for alleged breach of contract, fraud, aiding and abetting fraud, negligent misrepresentations and breach of implied covenant of good faith.

Milton Griepp, ICV2

Jack Black

Movie star Jack Black’s song “Steve’s Lava Chicken” from the soundtrack of A Minecraft Movie appeared at No. 77 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the list dated May 3, after pulling 7 million official U.S. streams between April 18 and 24. It now holds the distinction of being, at 34 seconds in length, the shortest song to ever make the Hot 100, and that doesn’t even address the extended mix (which only lasts for 1 minute, 15 seconds. Black — an accomplished musician who for years was part of the duo Tenacious D — entered the Hot 100 for just the second time, after last year’s “Peaches” from The Super Mario Bros. Movie reached as high as No. 56. The previous holder of shortest song to make the Hot 100 was Kid Cudi’s “Beautiful Trip” at 37 seconds.

Gary Trust, Billboard

Subway

Subway, the sandwich shop, has shrunk substantially over the past decade, declining from some 27,000 stores in the United States in 2015 to 19,502 domestic locations as of the end of 2024. Last year, the restaurant dropped 631 net locations — they dropped 443 in 2023, 571 in 2022 and in 2021 they lost 1,043 locations. It’s a remarkable number of restaurants to shed in a relatively short time, and speaks to the scale of the company’s footprint. Since 2016, Subway has lost about 7,600 net restaurants, a decline which is itself larger than the total number of Taco Bells (about 7,200) in the United States and all but three rivals (Dunkin’, McDonald’s and Starbucks). Despite the contraction, Subway is the largest by far, with thousands more locations than Starbucks (16,935 shops) and McDonald’s (13,559 shops).

Ben Coley, QSR Magazine

Florence

Florence’s fine arts academy — Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze — was founded in 1784. It traces its roots to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, founded by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1563 and building on the rich tradition of art, painting and sculpture that has defined the reputation of the northern Italian city since the days of the Renaissance. It is also now embroiled in a tense labor standoff between the institution and the nude life models who are indispensable to artistic instruction. The models argue that the nature of their contracts — 500 hours of work over 11 months — doesn’t cover the intensely physical nature of the work, and the lack of other protections like paid leave and insurance makes the work especially precarious. The models have pledged to take their fight to the courts.

James Imam, The Art Newspaper

Subscriptions

According to survey data collected by TiVo, the average monthly entertainment spending fell below $160 in the fourth quarter of last year, well under the peak of $189.38 set in 2022. The average number of services per user declined from 11.1 in the final quarter of 2023 to 9.9 services in the same quarter of 2024, with the churn attributed to users who cycled out of streaming services when they found they weren’t using them enough. According to the report, 34.6 percent of respondents shared a streaming video on-demand password for at least one service. Just throwing it out there, who of the many, many people I lent my Dropout password to is the one watching Game Changer right when it drops? In the event you’re reading, next time be a dear and rewind the episode so it doesn’t spoil when I click to play it, alright? Also, friend who uses the Crunchyroll password, if you’re going to mainline Solo Leveling that fast, at least text me to tell me if it’s good.

Stephanie Prange, Media Play News

Montana

States all over the U.S. are fuming at Montana, which has become a hub of what other states increasingly view as cut-and-dried tax evasion by fostering a massive in-state network of agents who will register vehicles and allow their buyers to avoid sales tax, registration fees and environmental rules. This extends not just to hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks but also to sailing vessels and around 800 aircraft. Out-of-staters form an LLC, use it to buy the vehicle with no tax, and then do whatever they want as long as they’re driving with Montana plates. It’s obvious in the data: there are 2.3 million registered vehicles in Montana, but only 879,000 residents, and the 2.68 vehicle-to-driver ratio is completely out of whack with the rest of the country, being double the national average. Utah is cracking down and targeting abusers of the loophole, and California’s DMV estimates that 10,000 vehicles worth $2 billion were sold by California dealers to Montana LLCs since 2022. Supercar buyers love this strategy, as Montana has 5,281 Ferraris and 1,966 Lamborghinis registered, though good luck finding them on the road. Cool-down periods where buyers avoid tax evasion charges in their state by camping the vehicle out in warehouses in Montana have even led to a phenomenon known as “Tax Jails,” or large warehouses in Montana full of supercars worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the aggregate, waiting out the various time limits to avoid being an actual crime.

Michael Bologna and Laura Mahoney, Bloomberg Tax

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