Numlock News: June 18, 2025 • Chick Fil A, Blue Shell, Denmark
By Walt Hickey
Chick Fil A
In 2024, the systemwide sales of Chick-fil-A hit $22 billion, one of only three chains in the U.S. to crack $20 billion alongside McDonald’s ($53.5 billion) and Starbucks ($30.4 billion). The thing is, Chick-fil-A pulled this feat off with 3,109 stores compared to McDonald’s 13,559 locations. The average unit volume at a Chick-fil-A is $7.5 million, by far the highest among their peers, and it’s not particularly close.
I Learned It By Watching You
An 80-year-old man drove a Mercedes down the Spanish Steps in Rome, getting stuck in the middle of the enterprise. Eventually, the vehicle was removed by crane. The 135 travertine steps, built in the 1720s, are near the Spanish embassy to the Holy See and have never been intended for motor vehicles. That is, unless you hate movies: driving a car down the Spanish Steps was a crucial action plot point (unless I’m mistaken) in both the most recent Fast & Furious movie as well as the penultimate Mission: Impossible movie.
Blue Shell
As a socializing enterprise, the Nintendo company can steer a person on any number of paths. Sure, there is the fundamental monarchial sentiment of “Super Mario,” the gender openmindedness of “The Legend of Zelda” and the NIMBY perspective of “Luigi’s Mansion.” But at the end of the day, there are two types of people: those who believe in the necessity of the Happening Star in “Mario Party” and those who get salty because of the Blue Shell in “Mario Kart.” As of the newest edition of the “Mario Kart World,” there are now 14 different ways to evade the blue shell. Anyway, bad luck, Bourbons and Romanovs.
Dowsing
A lot of places in Europe have stern rules against metal detecting. However, Denmark went in a different direction and explicitly made it cool to prospect for metals. Hobbyist metal detecting has fueled an archeological renaissance in Denmark, which has been inhabited ever since the glaciers gave the joint 12,500 years ago. The laws were rather unambiguous for a moment there; in 1241, all precious metals without a clear owner were ruled property of the crown. Today, anyone can metal detect in Denmark without a permit as long as they turn over any potentially historic finds to the government, and it’s worked. In 2013, 5,600 such items were turned in, and as of 2021, people have turned in over 30,000 items.
Elizabeth Anne Brown, Scientific American
Catholicism
Fully 47 percent of American adults claim some connection to Catholicism. A decent 20 percent of adults claim they’re Catholic, 9 percent call themselves “cultural Catholics,” 9 percent say they’re “former Catholics” and another 9 percent are connected to Catholicism in other ways, whether that’s a Catholic parent or spouse or just going to Mass. Pew Research Center neglected to mention the percentage of respondents who were raised Catholic then went to an all-boys Catholic high school and now have some complicated feelings about Catholicism owing to the whole homosexuality thing but still know a whole lot of Latin because of the aforementioned all-boys Catholic high school, but I’m sure there are dozens of us.
Patricia Tevington and Gregory A. Smith, Pew Research Center
Midnight Oil
New data from Microsoft indicates that the bounds of your typical workday are expanding. The number of meetings logged after 8 p.m. in the 12 months leading up to February increased 16 percent year over year. The average worker gets 117 emails and 153 chats per day; as it stands, about 30 percent of meetings span multiple time zones, up 8 percentage points from 2021.
Ray A. Smith, The Wall Street Journal
Surf
Wave pools have become a massive business, with pools with tens of millions of gallons of water making it possible to surf in deserts. For a while, this was antithetical to surf culture, but these days the consistency of the wave pools is seen as the future of the sport. There are roughly 20 wave technology companies trying to figure out the best way to address the market. The global market for surf parks is projected to hit $3.8 billion by 2028.
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1) I'm going to be in Denmark for a few days in August. I doubt that I'll have time to go metal detecting, however.
2) I get e-mails at all hours of the day. It's awful.
I am a retired altar boy, a class of Catholic not mentioned.