Numlock News: December 6, 2021 • Encanto, Petabytes, Cream Cheese Shortage

Dec 06, 2021

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Leftovers

Quiet weekend at the box office, with Disney’s Encanto leading the weekend with just $12.38 million. This kind of post-Thanksgiving dip for Disney’s animated films is pretty par for the course, with Encanto’s 54 percent drop roughly in the same ballpark as the 50 percent drop Moana logged after Thanksgiving 2016, the 45 percent dip Coco had in 2017, the 54 percent drop for Ralph Breaks the Internet in 2018 and the 59 percent drop seen for Frozen II in 2019. Interestingly, in fourth place this week with $4 million was the faith-based Fathom Events show Christmas With the Chosen: The Messengers, which relies on a popular pre-existing I.P. library called the “New Testament” and is an attempted reboot of the promising Christianity franchise. Fathom announced an extended run that’s the longest in the history of the company owing to a big response from the fandom of the original source material.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Home Depot

While professional contractors account for just 5 percent of Home Depot shoppers, they’re responsible for 45 percent of the $132 billion of the hardware store’s annual sales. To cater specifically to this market — and to keep its typical store shelves stocked — Home Depot is building new flatbed distribution centers designed specifically to appeal to the kind of customer that rolls up in a contractor flatbed. Home Depot is conveniently in the middle of a five-year $1.2 billion overhaul of its supply chain, and the flatbed stores — which will be 30 to 35 of the 150 distribution facilities in its network when all is said and done — is a key part of that.

Jordyn Holman, Bloomberg

Cream Cheese

Madness! Catastrophe! Doom! New York City is on the brink of peril, with the supply of cream cheese in the city coming to a worrisome low. The general manager at Zabar’s estimated they had 10 days of supply on hand, Absolute Bagels can last until Thursday, suppliers are scrambling, and dozens of bagel shops are reporting a frantic rush to obtain cream cheese. Some are driving out to Jersey to get their hands on cream cheese. Most of the base for the city’s cream cheese comes from commercial-sized deliveries of Kraft Heinz’s Philadelphia cream cheese, which forms the base for individual localized formulations. The company has reported a spike in demand, and has shipped out 35 percent more product than last year to food service partners like bagel shops. All is not lost: at press time the heavily diversified bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich was doing okay.

Ashley Wong, The New York Times

Beef

When a massive cattle-raising operation imploded amid what’s described as a colossal fraud involving 200,000 made-up head of cattle and a $233 million loss for Tyson, it set off alarm bells in an industry that has seen many ranchers pushed to the financial brink amid industry consolidation. As recently as 2015, cattle ranchers got 51.5 percent of the value of boxed beef shipped to retailers, with the middle-men getting the rest. By 2020, that was down to 37.3 percent. A key reason? 73 percent of the beef processing in the U.S. is controlled by four corporations, Tyson, JBS, Cargill and Marfrig, and they’ve seen market power grow uncontested amid a shift to formula contracting. Under that system — which now accounts for 70 percent of the market for cattle, double the marketshare of 15 years ago — beef corporations front money to ranchers to buy calves, and will buy the cattle back at market rates when grown, at which point ranchers pay back the loan on 4 percent interest. This gives incredible leverage to the beef corporations, and a few bad years can wreck a rancher.

Lee van der Voo, High Country News

Mouse Movers

Many companies are installing spy software on employee machines in order to ensure that the workers are constantly active at their computers. Now, this was hardly the social bargain with work in the past — it is ridiculous to assume 100 percent efficiency — but following the pandemic, bosses needed to feel important and in the software goes. The number of large companies using productivity trackers rose 60 percent over the course of the pandemic, and in the next three years the number is projected to increase to 70 percent over pre-pandemic levels. Employees are rewarding stupid games with stupid prizes, including hardware devices that move a mouse to keep computers awake while they run to the bathroom or out for coffee.

Aaron Mak, Slate

Warehouse

The square footage of warehouses in the United States has risen from 10 billion square feet in 1999 to 17 billion square feet as of 2018, the most recent year for which there is data. As sales shift digital, demand for space is only increasing. For every $1 billion in online sales, demand for 1.25 million additional square feet of warehouse space is needed, and pandemic-induced demand as well as broader shifts in the retail business are making warehouses more desirable than ever. One issue, though, is their greenhouse gas emissions, given that warehouses tend to rely on gas heating systems more than office buildings.

Justine Calma, The Verge

Climate Data

As it stands, the total archive of U.S. climate data accounts to around 83 petabytes. Climate data streams in continually from an ever-growing network of satellites — 900 as of September — and NASA’s Earth Observing System Data is projected to explode in size over the next decade. Standing at around 15 petabytes in 2015, today there are around 55.6 petabytes of data; this year will mark a technical evolution that will send more data in faster, and as a result the amount of data in NASA’s system is expected to increase to 246.6 petabytes by 2025. Across the entirety of U.S.-based climate monitoring repositories, it’s expected to rise to 630 petabytes of data within a decade.

Robert Lee Hotz, The Wall Street Journal

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