Aldi makes it hard (actually, impossible) to buy branded goods and to have them delivered to your home. But this obstacle allows the brand to keep ruthlessly competitive prices, and frees up staff to assist customers in stores.
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The middle aisle in Aldi is notoriously difficult to navigate. Each week it stocks a strange mix of new products, everything from hanging plant baskets to metal watering cans. But the chaos of this aisle, known affectionately as the aisle of shame, has made it immensely popular among customers. It has even spawned a Facebook community with 3 million followers.
Aldi makes it hard (actually, impossible) to buy branded goods and to have them delivered to your home. But this obstacle allows the brand to keep ruthlessly competitive prices, and frees up staff to assist customers in stores.
Chiacago tribune all star baseball
Aloha Friday, the tradition of wearing more casual attire on Fridays, initially grew out of an effort to promote aloha shirts. In a campaign called ‘Operation Liberation’, the Hawaiian Fashion Guild distributed two aloha shirts to every member of the Hawaii House of Representatives and the Hawaii Senate. Subsequently, a resolution passed in the Senate recommending aloha attire be worn throughout the summer.
This came from from a 1925 Listerine ad campaign, claiming that clean teeth were the key to finding a partner.
Amazon loses 1% in revenue for every extra 0.1 second customers spend waiting for pages to load on their website. The desire for a friction free service is no joke.
In 2009, Jeff Bezos said that “advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product.” Now Amazon are advertising their own advertising business, which earns $50 billion annually.
Amazon Fresh stores allow customers to purchase items without checking out – supposedly using built-in sensors to track what they’re buying. In reality, as we now know, purchases are manually monitored by hundreds of Amazon employees.
Amazon’s AI shiny new recruitment tool served to highlight existing prejudice, downgrading female CVs because they were historically less successful. The tool was scrapped in 2018.
Amazon sellers benefit from positive reviews, but this has led to a dysfuntional system: certain sellers now pay companies to leave fake reviews, of which there were estimated to be 250 million in 2024.
In 2001 the government said all ambulances should reach a life threatening emergency (category A) within 8 minutes and there was suddenly a massive improvement in the number that did so.
But it turned out that a number of ambulance services were doctoring their response times to meet the targets, as well as ignoring more urgent cases over less urgent cases to meet the target.
You would expect to see a more rounded curve of responses.
For every $10 that moviegoers spend on hot dogs, nachos, popcorn, and soda, AMC company takes a whopping $8.16. By comparison, for every $10 that AMC takes on ticket sales, the company holds on to just $4.88 once the actual film exhibition costs are accounted for. In short, cinemas are effectively supermarkets.
The system means that number of votes isn’t enough – candidates have to win votes in the right places (as bigger states count for more seats in the Electoral College). Al Gore famously won the popular vote in 2000 with 540,000 more votes than Bush, but it was Bush who entered the White House.
Houses in Amsterdam are narrow because of tax evasion. In the 16th century they were taxed by the width of a property’s canal frontage, rather than total size, which incentivized the construction of narrow, deep, and tall buildings.