Grocery store private brands - the ones that up until a few years ago were called "generics" - have been a solid source of growth for the industry, as stores increase their supply and quality of in-house brands and consumers looking to save money on food amid inflationary pressures are willing to make the swi...

The average new vehicle sold in the United States in May went for $49,220, with the typical small and midsized pickup going for $43,044, and the average new electric vehicle going for $54,532. Slate Auto, an American automobile manufacturer backed by Jeff Bezos, sees a niche that is not being served: people who don't w...

The decision to add "water breaks" to the World Cup outside of the ordinary halftime - even for teams competing in domed, air-conditioned stadiums - had more than a whiff of greed about it, and reports indicate that the added commercial breaks are indeed making broadcaster Fox a fortune. According to media bu...

Only a small fraction of data center opponents actually live near one, according to new polling by a consulting firm that counsels leading AI labs and tech startups. Why it matters: The findings by Milltown Partners, shared first with Axios, highlight how data centers have become a stand-in for broader anger at an AI f...

The number of operating vending machines in Japan fell about 20 percent from 2013 to 2025, dropping to about 1.95 million units. The largest operator of the machines - which are seemingly everywhere in the country, and contain a much wider arrangement of products than vending machines in other countries - is Coca-Cola,...

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has, within just four days, become as popular in the United States as the 2022 FIFA World Cup was on its final day, according to a new survey that tracked how much people reported having conversations about the cup in either year. In 2022, a week prior to the World Cup starting, just 7.2 percent...

...what do you do? A new analysis out of Notre Dame looked into the behavior of 209.2 million page views of a major United States newspaper's website, and found that while 59.2 percent of readers who hit a paywall left the site immediately, the practice of paywalling nevertheless had a significant effect on revenue. Fo...

Reptilian pets are increasing in popularity, with the number of households in the United States possessing a pet snake increasing from 810,000 in 2018 to 1.3 million in 2024. This has spurred the industry that supplies care and feeding for those snakes, and has spawned a unique form of factory farming that breeds hundr...

A new poll found that billionaires, CEOs, men and white Americans are seen as having the most power in the United States, with 75 percent of respondents saying that billionaires have a lot of political power, compared to just eight percent who said the same thing about workers. In general, 64 percent said workers shoul...

The United States has drawn 66 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an authorized release of 172 million barrels. At the current rate, we'll hit that sometime in early September, at which point the SPR will bring inventories to 243 million barrels, a historic low, down from a peak of 7...

According to a new MoffettNathanson analysis, the number of subscriptions to bundled television came in at 40.9 million subs, down 9.7 percent compared to 45.3 million subs in the same period last year, and down 20.3 percent from Q1 of 2024. Since March 2020, major providers have shed 48.7 percent of their video custom...

..food.... Food trends have turned decisively nostalgic, with formats and flavors that had long gone out of style making a comeback. For instance, creamsicle flavors are appearing on menus 37 percent more than they had been four years ago, with other phased-out flavors like baked Alaska and ice cream floats also appear...

The global market for stress toys is projected to grow from $5.88 billion in 2025 to $7.95 billion in 2030, thanks in part to rising levels of stress and anxiety among adults and also presumably in part to the ability to cheaply produce more durable, malleable plastic products. This is a remarkably popular class of toy...

...pineapple...? NO!?!?! The pineapple business Fresh Del Monte has spent years developing special and limited-edition varieties of the fruit that have been selling at eye-popping price points. Your standard pineapple goes for like $3, but the company's premium pineapples can sell for hundreds. Their Honeyglow specialt...

The audiobook market is ripping right now, with revenues in 2025 hitting $2.43 billion, up nine percent year over year. There were 750,000 active titles last year, up 43 percent from 2024. Among consumers, those who listened to audiobooks averaged 3.8 audiobooks in the last year. Interestingly, the much-ballyhooed AI f...

A new study analyzing the cellphone use of adolescents found that on nights when teenagers used their smartphone for an additional 20 minutes in the hour before bedtime, they had eight to nine more minutes of late night use later that night. This makes sense; texts or posts that one sends before bed invite replies that...

Internet traffic from bots passes human traffic on the web for the first time. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says bots now account for more than 57% of total HTTP requests (humans are around 42%), driven by a boom in AI agents. The crossover was originally anticipated at the end of 2027. (More)

The volatile price of cocoa has sent major food brands scrambling to find alternatives with a similar taste and mouthfeel. The price of cocoa shot up from $2,846 per metric ton at the start of 2023 to as high as $10,710 per ton in 2025, and has only recently come down to around $2,471 per ton. For large food brands, th...

According to Hershey's, $250 million of their 2025 annual revenue was attributable to people using their chocolate to make s'mores, up nine percent year over year. Hershey's sees significant growth opportunity in the s'mores business, and thinks it can generate another $50 million in chocolate sales annually over the n...

The latest data from the Entertainment Software Association found that 212.3 million Americans play video games for at least one hour per week, good for 67 percent of the population aged five to 90. Incidentally, that is up by 7.2 million people, or three percent of the population, compared to 2025. The median American...