Despite having one of the speediest boarding processes in the industry, Southwest are employing a range of tricks to make it just five minutes faster; installing a colour-coded carpet that shows where different boarding groups should line up, and playing fast paced music in the jet bridge to hurry passengers up.
All Threads
The founder of Specsavers still spends time writing birthday cards for employees. As she says, “it’s caring for the people that are at the sharp end, working really hard every day, to make sure that nobody falls through the net.”
Owen Maclaren designed the undercarriage for the Spitfire, Britain’s most famous warplane, and years later applied the same thinking to create the first foldable pram. Aluminium rods enabled the plane undercarriage to retract and fold into the fuselage, so he used the same material for his prams.
We might associate Spotify with music, but the company describes itself as a “seamless one-stop destination for all things audio.” This has given it licence to expand into podcasts and audiobooks, both of which are growing at double digits YoY.
Spotify pays artists based on the number of streams they receive, which only counts if someone listens to 30 seconds of a song. As a result, artists are incentivised to pack albums full of short songs, all of which hint at the chorus in the opening few seconds, as opposed to longer experimental songs that take a long time to build.
Only 2% of Spotify artists earn more than $1k a year.
In the early days of Spotify, users complained the shuffle feature wasn’t random: how could two songs from the same artist play back to back? In reality the issue was a misunderstanding of chance and not the technology, so Spotify made the feature less random to make it seem more random.
Comparing claimed Spotify usage vs actual usage, one quarter of those who to use it monthly did not use it at all.
A fun nostalgia trip? Or a year long surveillance campaign?
People are a lot more negative about their spouses on Google search – where no one will see what they say.
The epic power of Squid Game. The hit Netflix show increased:
– Vans sales by 7,800%
– Korean signups on Duolingo by 76%
– Korean candy on show up 250%
In 2024, one of London’s most recognisable restaurants marked its 30th anniversary by returning to its 1994 menu (and prices). A great way of appealing to price conscious consumers and standing out in the process.
Stansted airport group makes more money from car parks and shops than it does from aircraft fees.
At any one time, Starbucks has about $1.8 billion loaded on to customers’ gift cards or its app. If Starbucks was a bank and you treated the gift cards as deposits, it would be in the top 10% by deposits of banks in the United States.
Foreign companies struggle in China because their jobs don’t always fit into the traditional notions of stable careers. So Starbucks found a creative solution to keep employees’ families happy, hosting “Partner Family Forums” in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu, with over 1,000 families attending.