Numlock News: May 16, 2024 • Toto, Dog Man, Coke

May 16, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Coke

McDonald’s announced a $5 meal bundle for this summer in an attempt to woo back consumers who got kind of mad that they have to pay over $10 for a burger from McDonald’s. The deal will involve a small soft drink, small fries, four-piece McNugget, and either a McDouble or a McChicken sandwich for five bucks. This came as a bit of news to franchisees, who set most menu prices and cause the inconsistent pricing seen between territories, and furthermore sparked curiosity among those franchisees as to whether it’ll actually drive enough traffic to be worth it. Most interestingly, Coca-Cola is itself kicking in $4.6 million to subsidize the costs of the promotion.

Heather Haddon, The Wall Street Journal

Books

The top-selling book in the United States in the month of April was Dog Man: The Scarlett Shredder by Dav Pilkey, which sold 201,000 copies over the course of the month. The book was released in mid-March. Among titles for adult readers, the top-selling book was Funny Story, which sold by comparison 167,000 copies, and overall unit sales of print books were down 4 percent year over year, partially because of an earlier Easter. The ongoing trend that backlist books — that is, books that were released over a year ago — consume more and more overall market share has continued. Where once frontlist and backlist essentially split the market evenly, as of the first four months of the year, new books accounted for just 30 percent of total unit sales.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Solar Storm

The visible auroras at lower-than-typical latitudes were thanks to at least five coronal mass ejections from the sun, thanks to a cluster of sunspots 15 times as wide as Earth called Active Region 3664 (AR3664). It may not be over; sunspot clusters can last months, and in two weeks it’ll rotate back into view of Earth again. The powerful solar storm also had the effect of increasing atmospheric density at higher altitudes, which made satellites orbiting the Earth feel more drag and move to lower orbits. No satellites were taken out, it seems, but plenty saw their lifespans reduced. The Hubble Telescope, for instance, descended 85 meters per day from May 11 to 13, which is twice the average daily rate of descent for the 510-kilometer-high instrument.

Michael Greshko, Science

Religion

One of the best-performing categories in books is religious-themed literature, which was up 7.8 percent in 2023 compared to the prior year, 9 percent to 10 percent above the rest of the trade publishing market. What’s really driving the numbers is, in fact, Bibles, which have been in strikingly high demand and tend to pop in sales whenever things get a bit weird geopolitically. HarperCollins Christian Publishing has a 42 percent market share in the Bible business, which is sort of the ideal industry to be in from a media standpoint, given the widespread fandom for the franchise and the extremely generous intellectual property situation given the disinterest from the estates of the original authors.

Cathy Lynn Grossman, Publishers Weekly

Toto

Toto, the Japanese toilet manufacturer, has set its eyes on the United States and hopes to double sales of its Washlet bidet seats and toilets by 2026. They think America has high potential to fall for the bidet, much like the rest of the world has, and are hoping to find a new market as the Chinese new construction market goes through a few hiccups. As of 2023, Toto does less than ¥58.9 billion ($382 million) in business in the U.S., but that’s already triple the level of 2018, and the company is targeting ¥99 billion ($642 million) in U.S. sales by 2026. With a plan to invest in 63 hubs in major U.S. cities, this company’s goal is to do what nobody yet has accomplished, not even the French, which is to finally get the American butt down with the bidet.

Osami Kinoshita, Nikkei Asia

Superhighway

The port of Antwerp in Belgium has become a major shipping hub for cocaine in Europe, fueling the continent’s $33 billion drug market. Belgian customs estimates that it’s only managing to capture 10 percent to 40 percent of the coke coming into the port, and in 2023 it managed to seize 120 metric tons of cocaine, so it’s a lot of blow blowing through. At issue is the sheer scope of what Antwerp handles — 12 million containers annually, 271 million metric tons handled per year — so it’s not feasible to catch it all. Currently, only 40,000 containers can be scanned per year, but Belgian authorities are aiming to double that.

Max Ramsay, Lyubov Pronina and Cagan Koc, Bloomberg

Paper

For a century, people have tried to make a reliable, durable, but nevertheless recyclable paper bottle, especially lately because of a desire to reduce the use of plastics. One company, Paboco, has managed to make a bottle where the plastic liner is just 15 percent of the weight of the bottle, which is down from the previous level of 40 percent of the weight. The aim is to get that down to 5 percent, at which point it’s sufficiently thin as to not cause problems during paper recycling.

Saabira Chaudhuri, The Wall Street Journal

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