10 on Value

by Leigh Simpson and Jeremy Topping and Leah Baltus
  1. The first barcode ever swiped was on a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit in 1974. Nearly 60 years earlier, William Wrigley began marketing his gum by sending four free sticks to every person listed in the phonebook—which included 1.5 million names.
  2. By taking one hour of independent study every day for one year, a person can learn at the rate of a full-time student. After five years the average person can become an expert in any subject.
  3. Ninety percent of the people who join a gym stop going within the first 90 days. Fifty-seven percent of health club members are over 35 years old.
  4. Buffalo Springfield, the band behind the 1960s anthem For What It’s Worth, formed in 1966 when Stephen Sills recognized Neil Young’s Canadian-plated black hearse while stuck in traffic on the Sunset Strip. Today Los Angelenos spend more time stuck in traffic than anywhere else in the country—approximately 90 hours each year.
  5. The nursery rhyme Pop Goes the Weasel is about pawning—the weasel in about 14,000 pawnshops nationwide.
  6. During the tulip craze of 17th-century Holland, a single tulip bulb is said to have sold for two loads of wheat, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four barrels of beer, two barrels of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a suitcase of clothes and a silver beaker. The Rembrandt tulip’s unique coloring, which made it one of the most prized varieties at the time, was actually the result of a plant virus and is outlawed today.
  7. The dollar-store industry expects to pull in $40 billion in 2004 sales, with the average shopper spending $8.50 per visit. Dollar stores’ fastest-growing customer pool is comprised of people who make over $70,000 each year.
  8. AIFF (Mac) and WAV (Windows)—two of the five audio file formats supported by iPod—are uncompressed, big and functionally identical. Using algorithms—or codecs—these formats can be compressed into MP3s or the new and improved AACs.
  9. Renowned international art auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s both held their first auctions in London in the middle-18th century—Christie’s in 1766 and Sotheby’s in 1744. While Sotheby’s watershed Goldschmidt sale in 1958 detonated the influx of big bucks for Impressionist and modern paintings, Christie’s 1990 sale of Van Gogh’s Portrait of Doctor Gachet takes the cake for a single painting at a cool $82.5 million.
  10. Olympic gold medals are silver medals coated with 6 grams of pure gold. Monetarily, the gold medal is worth about $83. In August 2004, a gold medal from the 1920 Olympic Games sold on eBay for $3,676.

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