By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Sharks
Labor Day weekend was a sleepy one at the box office, with the second-highest-grossing movie being a re-release of Jaws, which made $9.9 million across 3,200 cinemas over the four-day window. These numbers were still enough to beat two new movies from major studios: The Roses and Caught Stealing. It’s a fitting capstone to a bit of a rough summer for Hollywood, with box office revenues finishing $7 million shy of last summer’s disappointing $3.667 billion, which itself was down from 2023’s $4.09 billion.
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
Loss Leader
Mixue Ice Cream & Tea is the world’s largest fast food chain, and one key item on the menu — a soft-serve ice cream cone — loses them money. The cones sell for 40 cents, and the Chinese company sells about 700 million of them a year. The point of the loss is your standard loss-leader sales strategy, where a retailer will price an item at a loss and then put it in the back of the store or buried on the menu so that customers have to look at products that will actually turn a profit. On Mixue, the loss-leader ice cream is at the top of the menu followed by 35 profitable items.
Stu Woo, The Wall Street Journal
Marathon
This Sunday, 35,000 competitors took part in the Sydney Marathon, a record attendance and significantly higher than the 25,000 entries seen last year, as well as the 5,000 entries in 2022. Part of the reason is Abbott World Marathon Majors adding the Sydney event to its running series. The series bundles up the major distance running events, including the Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York Marathons. This is exciting since running has a special place in Antipodean society, as many proud Australians owe their family’s existence to an ancestor failing to outrun a cop in London between 1788 and 1868.
Stick To Rye
Brown-Forman, which produces Jack Daniel’s and Woodford Reserve, among other liquor staples, reported that sales to Canada have dropped by 62 percent year over year as of their most recent quarter. Canadians have stopped consuming American spirits and switched to local booze following the installation of tariffs as well as a series of insults from the American federal government regarding Canadian national sovereignty early this year. The company claimed that net sales in international developed markets were down eight percent as a whole because of “macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty,” which is certainly one way to put it.
Cats
About 40 percent of New Zealand households have a cat, and there are millions of feral cats roaming an archipelago that houses many endangered and one-of-a-kind species of birds. A new study sought to find ways to stop cats from hunting birds. In a 21-day experiment, the researchers attached motion-triggered tea diffusers full of fish oil and put them next to a wildlife camera, spraying an odor at a cat mid-hunt. They found that scaring the cats worked, and that more than 40 percent of the startled cats abandoned their hunt, and a quarter of the cats never returned to the scene of the spritz.
Clock
A new generational dividing line just dropped: YouGov asked respondents the question “when you look at an analog clock — a clock with hour and minute hands — how quickly can you tell the time?” The survey found that 43 percent of those 18 to 29 said “instantly,” significantly lower than the 57 percent of 30 to 44-year-olds, 83 percent of 45 to 64-year-olds and 95 percent of those 65 and up. I think the answer here is not to be scandalized at the imbalance and but rather scandalized at the result of two trends that are inevitably out of the hands of the youth. First, they don’t have enough disposable income to squander on the wristwatch trend that Millennials have completely fallen for, and second, you learn to tell time based on the one on the wall of your most tedious class in high school. However, for this crowd, it’s a digital time in the corner of a laptop screen. At least the first one will probably work itself out over time.
Tools
A new study published in Ecology & Evolution describes stone tools unearthed from a riverside near London which suggests that the region was inhabited 480,000 years ago. This is wild because it would mean a hominin presence during a period when the British Isles were buried under ice before even ancient Europeans managed to master fire. Items have been dated as early a 773,000 years ago, with an ancient human presence at the site. The site was abandoned, and then once 440,000 years ago, humans reappeared once again during an extreme cold event known as the Anglian glacial stage.
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I was going to say that I have a bit of trouble with an analog clockface, but looked at my Apple Watch, and I have an analog face by default.
More disturbing? I was listening to something, maybe “No Agenda” yesterday, and the discussion was about the number of kids who don’t know things like the order of months, number of weeks in a year, number of days in a year, etc.
SMDH