Numlock News: October 21, 2025 • Parcels, Peanuts, Staten Island Ferry

Oct 21, 2025

Delivery

About 4,400 small, independent regional companies have worked as delivery contractors for Amazon since the launch of the Delivery Service Partner program in 2018. It’s hard work, but entrepreneurs were drawn to it because of possibility for solid money. According to an analysis Amazon conducted last year of 648 delivery contractors, 80 percent of them generated annual profits north of $100,000. One issue for the delivery companies, however, has become increases in insurance premiums; they employ young male drivers for the most part, and a single incident can jack up the rates for the whole firm. To mollify some of those concerns, Amazon announced that it is increasing the payment for each package delivered by 20 percent to 12 cents per parcel.

Spencer Soper, Bloomberg

Convenience

Japan’s notoriously tight labor market and equally notorious love of 24-hour convenience stores has pushed the market to an impasse given the need for night clerks. However, that impasse has been solved in many cases by remotely-operated robots. One Tokyo-based startup, Telexistence, has deployed machines in 300 FamilyMart and Lawson stores in Tokyo. The kicker is that these machines are operated 24/7 out of Manila. The tele-operators working for Astro Robotics in the Philippines monitor about 50 robots at a time, earning $250 to $315 per month to control the robots operating in Japan’s convenience stores.

Michael Beltran, Rest of World

IKEA

IKEA plans to remain in business for the indefinite future, and the entity that operates IKEA stores in 31 markets (and is responsible for 87 percent of IKEA sales) has decided to plan for that eventuality. To esnure that the furniture company will have supplies of lumber for their products, it straight-up buying up entire forests. The latest acquisition of Ingka Investments is 720 million euros (US$840 million) worth of forest land in Latvia and Estonia, purchasing 153,000 hectares from Sweden’s forest owners association, Sodra.

Rafaela Lindeberg, Bloomberg

Louvre

The magnitude of Sunday’s jewel heist at the Louvre is only just now becoming clear, with authorities identifying eight stolen items including a tiara and brooch belonging to Empress Eugénie, a necklace and earings belonging to Empress Marie Louise, a tiara, necklace and earing belonging to Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense and the “reliquary brooch.” The stolen items contain thousands of diamond and gemstones. About 60 investigators are working on the case, hunting for the four believed-to-be-professional thieves working at the behest of a larger organized criminal operation.

Ian Aikman and Rachel Hagen, BBC News

John F. Kennedy

In 2022, comedians Colin Jost and Pete Davidson purchased a 277-foot boat that was previously used as a Staten Island Ferry for $280,100. It weighs 2,100 tons and the original idea was to convert it into an event space with two restaurants, six bars, a concert venue and hotel rooms. The LLC they set up to oversee the conversion, Titanic 2, has proven prescient and the ex-ferry has mostly spent the last several years racking up docking fees while not being repaired, and also getting sued sometimes. Honestly, it mainly seems like Davidson and Jost are having the median boat owner’s experience.

Steven Kurutz, The New York Times

Anime

While Hollywood has only just come around to the idea that adapting video games into movies can make both sides enormous amounts of money, there is a longstanding pipeline converting games into anime. According to data from Ampere analytics, game-to-anime commissions increased by 137 percent in 2024. The data further found that Netflix titles based on games like Arcane: League of Legends were 40 times as popular as other original animation titles. The release of Devil May Cry in the spring also pumped up the numbers of players of the game it was based on, with monthly active users of Devil May Cry 5 increasing 313 percent.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Peanut

A decade ago, a published study was published encouraged parents to feed peanut products to young babies as a way of preventing them from eventually developing dangerous peanut allergies. A new study has found that this has been a smashing success, and that about 60,000 children have avoided developing peanut allergies since introducing peanuts to infants became recommended. Peanut allergies in kids aged zero to three increased 27 percent immediately after the guidance for high-risk kids was issued in 2015, and then decreased 40 percent after the recommendations expanded in 2017.

Jonel Aleccia, The Associated Press

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