Numlock News: June 23, 2026 • Counterfeits, Tide Pods, Dunes

Jun 23, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to new readers, we’ve got a fun newsletter today, plus a plug for a friend.

Gucci “Gucci” Louie “Louie” Fendi “Fendi” Prada

A clever new study managed to analyze data from an e-commerce platform that hawks dupes, or counterfeit goods designed to imitate the aesthetics of designer brands, and found that based on the zip codes of the fakes, there are some interesting patterns about who buys counterfeits. Namely, it’s a U-shaped distribution, where the highest-income and lowest-income places were vastly higher consumers of fake designer gear than middle-income areas. Shoes and bags accounted for 85 percent of orders, with the average counterfeit transaction-to-official-price ratio coming in at 35 percent of mass-market shoes (think: Nikes), 10.7 percent for luxury shoes, 8.4 percent for accessible luxury bags (like Coach), and 0.55 percent for ultra-luxury bags (like Chanel and Hermes). Indeed, it seems like the prices of counterfeits are only moderately different from tier to tier, with a fake ultra-luxury bag averaging $54 compared to the $32 for accessible luxury.

Rebecca Seel, Informs and Nan Chen and Mengqi Xiang, Marketing Science

Taking A Gamble

Procter & Gamble controls roughly 60 percent of the U.S. laundry detergent market, thanks mostly to the 38.3 percent market share held by flagship detergent Tide. That sector is responsible for lots of P&G’s revenue — fabric and home care was 36 percent of their business — which is why it’s such a big deal when they come out with a new laundry detergent product designed by its in-house R&D that could upset the whole business: Tide evo, a detergent tile that is the result of a decade of research and development. P&G’s three-inch squares made up of detergent fibers cost almost twice as much as a tub of the company’s 2012 hit Tide pods, and it solves what chemists saw as the key limitation of Tide pods: that it wasn’t feasible to add more chambers to the pods if they wanted to add more features.

Natasha Khan, The Wall Street Journal

Drawer

A new survey of over 4,000 Americans found that the most common thing a person does with a device they are finished using is storing it, with 39 percent of respondents just holding on to it in a box or a drawer. Only 11 percent recycled it, 11 percent traded it in and nine percent resold it. People who were worried that recycling a device would compromise their data — a valid concern — were 14 percent more likely to store it instead. I am in this crowd: You can take my old laptops from my cold, dead hands, I will be buried with my 2009 Sony Vaio like the heathen kings of old, my sarcophagus protected by a phalanx of monitors that only have a VGA 15-pin connector port to beguile and confuse intruders, my tomb encased in a dense mesh of 7.4mm 5.0mm round tip laptop charging cords that inexplicably don’t fit into any of the laptops I have saved, my crypt protected from looters by a pile of lithium ion batteries that have swollen concerningly and could go off at any moment. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Eric Williams, Payam Saeedi and Stacey Watson, The Conversation

I want to shout out a great newsletter called Semafor Media, written by a friend of mine, Maxwell Tani, and Semafor’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. It dives into the fascinating political, cultural and financial forces shaping global news organizations. I’m personally a huge fan; each issue is full of really thoughtful analysis and the occasional colossal scoop. In my experience, it’s basically where the news gets its news — check it out and subscribe for free here.

Olivia

Olivia Rodrigo’s third studio album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, entered the charts at No. 1, and is good for one of the longest titles ever for a No. 1 album. That said, there have been two No. 1 albums in the history of the Billboard 200 that have managed the feat coming in at even longer. It took decades of music to work our way up to these incomprehensibly long titles; while Frank Sinatra was the first to notch a seven word title at No. 1 in March 1956 with Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, it wasn’t until 1980 when Donna Summer’s On the Radio: Greatest Hits: Volumes I & II that got us to nine words, though I think we can all agree that the ampersand is doing some pretty heavy lifting for a “word.” The first 11-worder came in 2002 with P. Diddy & Bad Boy Records Present … We Invented the Remix, with again that load-bearing ampersand. But the winner is a clean victory: 16 words for the 2016 record from The 1975 called I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It.

Paul Grein, Billboard

Blackberry

There has been a surfeit of blackberry-infused whiskey on the market, which is interesting given that blackberry is a relatively uncommon fruit and Americans consume on average just 0.09 pounds of them per year, good for the fifth-most popular berry. Still, it’s been making some waves in spirits, with the Crown Royal Blackberry launching in 2024 to pretty massive success that spawned a host of imitators, including Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Blackberry (cited specifically in Brown-Forman’s earnings report as a driver of their first sales increase in two years) and now, Evan Williams Blackberry.

Aaron Goldfarb, Vinepair

Vehicles

Vehicles have mutated over the past decades, with sales of SUVs and pickup trucks causing the hood of an average passenger vehicle to now be three feet high. This has been catastrophic for pedestrians who are hit by these cars, as collisions that may have been survivable are now becoming deadly due to the height of the cars and their ability to knock people down. The average U.S. man would be knocked down by 29 percent of vehicles on the road in 2002, but would be knocked down by 39 percent of vehicles today. Add in the fact that the bulkier frames have created blind spots that simply didn’t exist a decade ago, and hundreds of pedestrians a year would not have died in collisions over the past 25 years if vehicles remained about the same size, according to estimates.

Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros, The New York Times

California

A new study out of the University of California, Santa Barbara puts a number on the amount of coastal dunes that California has lost since 1850 to land use changes and development, finding that the state has lost about 60 percent of the dune systems that existed when it entered the union. At that time, California had 739 square kilometers of coastal dunes, but 165 years later, that’s down to 300 square kilometers. Only 18 square kilometers of that was lost through natural processes.

Sonia Fernandez, University of California - Santa Barbara

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