To calculate inflation, the ONS uses a typical basket of goods to work out the rate at which costs are rising – but the average doesn’t reflect most people’s experience. For instance restaurants have a strong weighting on inflation, but they have little impact on elderly people who don’t leave the house. Meanwhile cigarettes have a weak influence on the calculation, but tell that to the chainsmoker who buys a pack a day.
All Threads
Have you been in an accident that wasn’t your fault?
Contradictions are hardwired into humans. We are natural born worriers – to prevent harm from unknown threats – but we’re also wired for curiosity: a trait that gave our ancestors access to new sources of food, water and tools. This is why we can love and loathe uncertainty, depending on the context.
The food delivery business is slowly becoming an advertising business: a quarter of its revenue comes from brands promoting on its website.
Covid killed the ability to travel overseas, but not the desire to do so. In 2024 a record number of passengers travelled through Heathrow airport (83.9 million), making the need for a third runway greater than ever.
Apple raises the price of its phones with each new model, and yet consumers continue to buy them. To be fair this is also driven by the addition of new product features, and not just price.
When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod to the world, he didn’t say: “the iPod. A 5GB MP3 player”. He said, “the iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket.”
In 2002, MI6 revealed new intel that Iraq was stepping up its production of nerve agents – supposedly being loaded into hollow glass spheres. In reality, it was fake intel that was based entirely on the plot of the movie The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage (glass containers are not in fact used in chemical munitions). This fictional information was being used by the UK government right until the day of the invasion in 2003.
Actually, London gets 562mm per year on average; a bit less than Malta (592mm) and Rome (586mm), and about half of the annual average of Sydney (1,222mm) or New York (1,059mm).
Barclays and E-Trade both use this insight in their advertising, but the latter is more engaging because of the adult voiceovers and the humorous scripts.
Itsu started out as a sushi restaurant, but it’s morphing into a supermarket range: close to half of its revenue now comes from grocery products.
When the biscuit was losing out to competitor biscuit brands in supermarkets, its owners made a clever change: they moved it to the cake section. Suddenly the comparative set changed – shoppers realised they could get a box of 6 Jacobs Mallows for the same price as 2 cakes – and sales rebounded.
In the UK, older groups prefer Sean Connery as James Bond and younger groups prefer Daniel Craig – simply a function of who they grew up watching.
Spectre opens with an incredible shot of Daniel Craig, as James Bond, pursuing a villain through a Día de Muertos parade in Mexico City. The parade actually never existed before the film, but it was so popular that it prompted locals to put on their own real life version which has been running annually ever since.
Uber may never have existed without James Bond. In Casino Royale, Bond tracks down Le Chiffre through a Sony Ericsson phone. The phone seems highly outdated by today’s standards, but it allowed Bond to see the location of his car update in real-time – an image that inspired Garrett Camp to co-found Uber.