Today, the low-margin, cost-conscious grocery store industry uses rotisserie chickens as a loss-leader product. Many Americans visit the grocery store to buy rotisserie chickens on a weekly basis, and leave with other, higher margin products too. In 2017, a whopping one in every two Americans bought a rotisserie chicken.
One of the biggest sources of flowers is the result of a regulatory arbitrage: the US government subsidizes Colombian farmers with hundreds of millions of dollars each year to encourage them to plant crops other than coca leaves, as coca leaves make their way into the US in the form of cocaine. The subsidy is so significant that nearly 70% of flowers sold in the US originate from Colombia.
It's illegal to take a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night and use it for commercial purposes: the lighting arrangement itself is intellectual property. This illustrates some of the surprising complexities involved in licensing and creating media, and it’s a source of demand for clever licensing hacks for stock photos.
The largest public transportation system in America is not one of trains or subways; it’s school buses. Every day, nearly half a million school buses move 26 million kids to and from school.
