Economy
Discover facts about economy. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Economy
Federal prison factories list wages starting at 23 cents an hour.
Federal prison factories list wages starting at 23 cents an hour. UNICOR, the U.S. government's prison-industry corporation, reports typical inmate pay…
Discover more
A deed to lunar land is not the same as recognized ownership.
A deed to lunar land is not the same as recognized ownership. Sellers have offered certificates for plots on the Moon, but the International Institute of…
Discover more
The Super Bowl creates a chicken-wing logistics event.
The Super Bowl creates a chicken-wing logistics event. The game lasts one evening, but serving more than a billion wings around it requires planning across…
Discover more
Depression-era farm aid paid to reduce food production.
Depression-era farm aid paid to reduce food production. With farm prices collapsing in 1933, the U.S. government tried to raise them by cutting supply,…
Discover more
A bet against the pound paid off when Britain abandoned its exchange-rate target.
A bet against the pound paid off when Britain abandoned its exchange-rate target. In September 1992, heavy pressure on sterling overwhelmed attempts to defend…
Discover more
Daraprim's price jumped from $13.50 to $750 a tablet.
Daraprim's price jumped from $13.50 to $750 a tablet. After acquiring the long-established drug in 2015, Martin Shkreli's company sharply increased its price.…
Discover more
STACKY FOR IPHONEA bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.
Keep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
Laundry detergent became valuable loot because it was easy to resell.
Laundry detergent became valuable loot because it was easy to resell. Reports in the early 2010s described theft rings targeting Tide and other detergent,…
Discover more
Scottish banknotes aren't legal tender—even in Scotland.
Scottish banknotes aren't legal tender—even in Scotland. Legal tender has a narrow meaning concerning repayment of debts, rather than a rule forcing every…
Discover more
Business.com sold for $7.5 million before it had the business to match.
Business.com sold for $7.5 million before it had the business to match. The domain attracted that price in 1999, when investors were paying heavily for…
Discover more
Cocaine traces turned up on most bills in one U.S.
Cocaine traces turned up on most bills in one U.S. money study. Research presented at a 2009 American Chemical Society meeting reported traces on up to 90…
Discover more
Chicago traded contracts on frozen pork bellies for 50 years.
Chicago traded contracts on frozen pork bellies for 50 years. CME introduced the futures in 1961 and delisted them in 2011. They let businesses and…
Discover more
Amazon's cloud earned more operating income than its two retail regions combined.
Amazon's cloud earned more operating income than its two retail regions combined. In 2025, AWS reported about $45.6 billion in operating income; North America…
Discover more
Avocado growers can become targets because their crop is valuable.
Avocado growers can become targets because their crop is valuable. Criminal groups in parts of Mexico extract payments from producers and interfere with parts…
Discover more
England recorded payments with notched wooden tally sticks split into matching halves.
England recorded payments with notched wooden tally sticks split into matching halves. The grain and cuts helped reveal whether the two records belonged…
Discover more
Millions of paranoid citizens completely distrust traditional banking institutions and actively choose to hoard massive amounts of physical cash stuffed into mattresses, buried…
Millions of paranoid citizens completely distrust traditional banking institutions and actively choose to hoard massive amounts of physical cash stuffed into…
Discover more
The 2010 flash crash showed how selling can feed on itself.
The 2010 flash crash showed how selling can feed on itself. On May 6, U.S. stock prices plunged and then recovered within minutes. Regulators described a…
Discover more
Unknown private investors successfully sold the internet domain name Voice dot com for a truly mind-boggling thirty million dollars in cash, making it one of the most expensive…
Unknown private investors successfully sold the internet domain name Voice dot com for a truly mind-boggling thirty million dollars in cash, making it one of…
Discover more
Wall Street's bear has a trail leading back to a bearskin.
Wall Street's bear has a trail leading back to a bearskin. One established account links the financial term to the warning against selling a bear's skin…
Discover more
Stockholm's central rental queue averaged 21 years in 2025.
Stockholm's central rental queue averaged 21 years in 2025. The housing agency reported that average waiting time for inner-city apartments, compared with…
Discover more
Tea bricks could pay for things before becoming a drink.
Tea bricks could pay for things before becoming a drink. Compressed tea served as a form of currency in parts of Asia as well as a traded commodity. Pressing…
Discover more
A Portuguese fraudster counterfeited the paperwork instead of the banknotes.
A Portuguese fraudster counterfeited the paperwork instead of the banknotes. In 1925, Artur Alves dos Reis used forged central-bank documents to persuade a…
Discover more
A kimchi-making shopping basket can make inflation painfully concrete.
A kimchi-making shopping basket can make inflation painfully concrete. A Korean price survey estimated that ingredients for a four-person family's kimjang…
Discover more
A cartoon bear has appeared on more than a trillion yen of merchandise.
A cartoon bear has appeared on more than a trillion yen of merchandise. Kumamoto reported cumulative sales of about ¥1.77 trillion for Kumamon-branded…
Discover more
You can buy a star name that astronomers won't use.
You can buy a star name that astronomers won't use. Commercial star-naming services sell a certificate and an entry in their own records. Scientific catalogs…
Discover more