We follow the herd: in supermarkets, top seller labels result in an average sales lift of 41%.
All Threads
The Michelin guide might not be as influential as it once was, but restaurant reviews still sway diners. When the social media duo Topjaw gave a rave review to Bistro Freddie, based in Shoreditch, the restaurant received 600 bookings almost instantly.
In 1903, the French sports newspaper L’Auto needed a way to increase newspaper sales and beat off competition from Le Vélo. The chief cycling journalist created a six-day cycling race all around France, and invited the most famous road racers of the time to compete. The Tour de France increased L’Auto’s circulation more than sixfold, and is now watched by 1 billion people each year.
Once you hit a certain level of wealth, you show it in unusual ways – driving a Toyota could mean having lots of money or very little.
The proportion of transgender people in the UK is largely a function of language. In the 2021 census, those who spoke English “not well” or “not well at all” were most likely to be counted as transgender: 2.2% of them, compared with 0.4% of those whose main language was English or Welsh, suggesting the questions were simply misunderstood.
Treadmills were originally designed for punishing prisoners. Their designer, Sir William Cubitt, proposed using their muscle power to both cure their idleness and produce useful work.
Most people who own trucks don’t use them. 75% of truck owners tow something once a year or less, and a third don’t haul anything at all. In other words, truck ownership is mostly a form of costly signalling.
Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its national income from licensing its ‘.tv’ domain to streaming platforms like Twitch.
TV subtitles were designed as a hearing aid, but they’re now used as an attention aid. That’s why under 30s are more likely to use them than any other age group, even for shows in their native language.
97% of tweets come from one quarter of all accounts.
After Twitter / X privatised the likes feature, there was a huge spike (roughly 10%) in their volume – suggesting lots of people have opinions they are happy to express in private but not public.
Uber could have easily resorted to defining themselves as a taxi service. But they never wanted to limit themselves to moving people around in cars: Uber exists to “reimagine the way the world moves for the better.” This has given Uber a credible platform to provide services as varied as food delivery (Uber Eats), healthcare (Uber Health) and, more recently, travel services.
The taxi service – a poster child for technological disruption – has gone old school: it now accepts cash payments in the UK (outside London). It turns out that a significant proportion of people still find it difficult to use an app.
30% of Uber drivers in the US have never had a bank account, but they need a minimum of a debit card to get paid on the app. So Uber has allowed drivers to sign up for a bank account as part of the application process, and in doing so has become the largest acquirer of small business bank accounts in the US.
Or is it Dunkin?