Good Job, Brain! - 107: Shop Til You Drop

Episode Date: April 24, 2014

Cha-ching! A whole episode about trivia and sizzling facts about shopping?! CHARGE IT. We buzz about the Lincoln shopping secret, 99-cent pricing, how supermarkets trick you into buying more, and where did those WACKY WAVING INFLATABLE ARM FLAILING TUBE MAN things you see infront of retail lots come from?! Get savvy with shopping in the department store quiz, and learn about how the iconic shopping cart came to be. ALSO: Easter eggs, Brainiacs' Book Club Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello and salutation squires, scavenging and sifting for science incintillating stuff. You're listening to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and Offbeat Trivia podcast. This is episode 107 in I. I am your humble host, Karen, and we are your excited exclamers excavating excellent eggs. Because it's Easter. Oh, okay, okay, okay. I'm Colin.

I'm Dana. And I'm Chris. So as we sit here recording, it is Easter. And speaking of Easter always makes me think of Easter eggs. A friend of mine passed along a tidbit of info to me the other day that I had not realized before. Do you guys know what the origin is of the term Easter egg as it applies to, you know, video games or movies or I, you know, Meaning a hidden bit of information for the... Or like a hidden reference to a gem in movies or shows.

I do not. Dana? It's not just like, oh, you're hunting. No. No, like where was it first used? Right, right, yeah. How did somebody put two and two together? Okay.

It dates to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the cult classic horror spoof movie from the 1970s. And during the filming of the movie, they were apparently the cast and crew were hiding actual Easter eggs around the set of the film, It was kind of just a fun little thing to do on set. And when you watch the movie, they're still there.

Some of them are still visible in various scenes of the movie. Yes. And so we tried verifying this. The best example is Frankenfurter's throne at the bottom, at the kind of criss-cross stability beams of the throne. It's not color. It's just a normal egg, and you can totally see it from the movie. Man, I love finding and reading about Easter eggs in movies and shows.

Disney, obviously, lots of examples. They have a lot of cameos. Pixar really up the game. But the best one I found today when I was researching, I didn't know this. And I had to ask Colin because I know Colin's a big fan of Fight Club, the movie and the book, Chuck Pala Hanuick. Polanik. I believe he says Pollynewik.

Polanuk. In the movie, David Fincher, right? Yeah. David Fincher movie, Fight Club, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. In every scene, there is a Starbucks cup. in every scene Every scene We're like oh is that every shot

Not every frame Not every frame Every scene Every scene There is a hidden Starbucks cup I have not noticed that I know There's something that are really overt

Which is like someone who's actually drinking coffee But like you know There'd be one on the ground In a pile of trash That is awesome That is so weird I usually notice when they're drinking

Like a brand name soda Or they ordered from somewhere I just never noticed the Starbucks Starbucks coffee cup Look for it All right, without further ado, let's jump into our first trivia segment. Pop quiz, hot shot. And you guys have your barnyard buzzers, and I have a random trivial pursuit card.

All right, Blue Wedge, Geography. What is the only U.S. state whose name can be typed on just one row of letters? I'm looking at your keyboard. No, no, I just saw it. Chris. No, I'm wrong. Okay, Colin. Is it Ohio?

Incorrect. Dana? One row. So not one hand. Stop looking at the keyboard. I'm looking at, I already got it wrong. We're excluded. It is Alaska.

Oh, okay. All right, Pink Wedge for Pop Culture in 1997, who copyrighted how you could write his name? Oh. Chris. Prince. The artist formerly known as Prince, the artist formerly known as a symbol. The artist is currently known as Prince. The fine print.

The design first seen as an album title in 1992 was officially called Love Symbol No. 2. Sure. During the time that he was going by the symbol, he played a dead body in the movie Fargo. And so if you're looking at the credits, it's like, I think it's like victim lying in field. And then it has a little symbol. The little symbol. Oh, that's like an Easter egg. That is like an Easter egg.

All right. Yellow Wedge, what crayon color did Crayola renamed Peach in 1962? To, fles. Everybody. Flash. Flesh. Flesh. Fine, right here, the decision was spurred in part by the civil rights movement.

Yes. Believe it or not, not every person has the same color flesh. They didn't know that until the 1960s. Purple Wedge. Leroy Brown, Idaho's greatest detective, is better known by what nickname? Encyclopedia Brown. Panic. Only his parents and teachers call him Leroy.

And his muscle. Sallie. Badest man in the whole name town. His bodyguard. Which was actually, Sally, technically. Yeah.

She would punch you right in the face. Sally? Oh, Sally did a lot of punching. Yeah, she'd just punch you right in the face for nothing. Yeah. She really did. Was there ever any romantic undertones?

No. No. No. They're just childhood friends. Yeah, exactly. They're just buddies. Innocent. Ooh, fan fiction.

I know. High school. How did they never made that into a movie in Psychoadipedia Brown? Oh, they did. They did? Of course they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reboot.

Yeah, we should reboot. With some CG. They updated Archie Comics to the modern world. I think they could update. Yeah, but it's like, Picia Brown solves crimes. A lot of this information can just be simply looked up, right in there. That's true. My alibi is on Twitter, said bugs.

All 150 characters of it. Wait a minute. Twitter only has 140. You're the culprit. Anyways, all right. Green Wedge for Science. What's the American name for the food called Brinjal in South Africa? How did you sell that?

Yeah. B-R-I-N-G-A-L. There's another part of this question, but I think that gives it away. Oh, okay. I'll say it anyways. I would like the whole clue, please. The whole question, not even clue. And in aubergine in Britain.

Dana. Eggplant. Yes. A eggplant. Abergene. All right. Orange wedge. last question. What is Subway's trademarked job title for the person who makes your

sub? Collin. There are the Sandwich Artist. Yes. Artist formerly known. The Sandwich Artist formerly known as Leroy. Good job, guys. And I have a Lobtrotter tidbit here. Loeb-trodders are fan club members who bought a fan club pack last year. And this one is from Allen, and they get to write in little cool trivia tidbits and questions. for us. And he printed it on the card. Yes, printed and taped. Awesome. Which is a...

I like the diligence. Very nice. And I picked this one because today is Easter, so this is a biblical fact. Okay. The longest word in the Bible is the name. So it's someone's name, not like a normal word. Okay. Mahir Shalalhashbaz.

18 letters. Okay. Longest name. And there are, in the King James version, there are 777. 63,692 words. Oh, okay. This is a tie breaker question. If you go to Pubtrivia and they ask you a ridiculous question where you're trying to get the closest, 7-736-3-6-9-2.

Words in the King James. Okay. That is a good one to file away for the tie-breakers. I can't even think of a mnemonic. 7-7. Almost three-quarters of a million. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, you're right. Trinity.

It's a million. Well, we'll try to remember that. Well, thank you, Alan. That was a good tidbit. All right, so today's show actually has nothing to do with Easter. It has a lot to do with one of my favorite activities, which is spending money. Hooray! I don't know.

Do you guys like spending money? I like spending money. Yeah. There's something about buying things that does make me feel good. I feel bad. I feel bad for thinking that. No, it's a real thing. When I feel blue, I buy something for myself.

Yeah. And so today's episode this week, we're going to talk about shopping. Can't buy me love, love, I'll buy you a diamond ring, my friend, if it makes you feel all right, I'll get you anything, my friend, if it makes you feel all right. I don't care too much for money. Mine can't buy me love. So I agree with you, Karen. I mean, let's just get this up front.

Shopping is fun. I try not to be too consumerist, and I think I have pretty simple needs, but I know what you mean. I just get that note. You have very specific. You buy Star Wars joys off of the debate. And I like how Chris is like, what? Because he buys video games all the time. You guys, no, that's the thing.

No, I think Colin is pretty minimalist. If you go over his place, it's pretty elegantly. Well, no, I mean, Star Wars. No, but it's, yeah, but that's the one thing that Colin buys. He doesn't even buy Star Wars. figures, he despise the droids. That's true. That's true.

And, you know, I mean, you read a lot about jokingly, like, oh, I'm a shopaholic, or, you know, I'm addicted to shopping. And shopping compulsion is a real thing. I mean, as I was saying. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And for some people, you know, like a gambling addiction, it can become a real problem, you know. Like anything that feels good, you can get addicted to the, to the enjoyment that you get out of it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, and, you know, like, researchers have shown, like, you do get a little bit of a boost, you know, physiologically from buying and shopping. And, you know, where it becomes a problem is when you start buying things you don't need or don't use or even worse, things you can't afford. Yep. Yeah. Did you guys know that Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife and later widow of Abraham Lincoln,

was a notorious compulsive shop. Shopaholic? Yeah. Would she order things off QVC all the time? If they had QVC in her day, I think she would have been right in there, yeah. Like what? What does she buy? Well, I mean.

What even was it? Like horses? So, like, almost, almost right from the beginning. What? You know, mail order horses. Yeah. No, but, like, I feel like horses are expensive and we kept to keep them, you know, like, expensive probably. I don't know.

Almost right from the beginning of her time in the White House, you know. So Lincoln was inaugurated the first time in 1861. She started to make her name for herself as a prolific shopper. And she would take trips to New York City. While she was there, you know, she would make a lot of big, splashy purchases. A lot of the merchants in New York City, as you can probably imagine, are perfectly willing to extend a line of credit to the first lady. I mean, it's great publicity to be able to say, like, oh, the first lady shops here.

And you assume she's good for it. She's the wife of the president. Who's going to try and cheat you out of money? Yeah. Her first sort of real big shopping trip was not long after the inauguration, as I say. And a big focus of that trip was on her planned redecoration of the White House. She really wanted to redo the White House. Congress actually approved a budget of $20,000 for her to spend at her discretion.

You know, so this is $20,000. in 1861. That's a good sum of money. And that's all well and good, except she actually went over by $6,000. She spent $26,000 on rugs and china sets and decorations and faces and all this stuff. And she kind of panicked when the bills came due. So, I mean, it turns out that not only was she a lavish shopper, but she kept her spending habits secret from Abraham Lincoln. She was an addict. That's why. This bill for $26,000 comes due. And she asked for help. from a man named Benjamin French, who was the Commissioner of Public Buildings, and she basically said to him, I need you to go to my husband and convince him to pay this bill, but don't tell him

I sent you because he'll be mad. And sure enough, so these are from Mr. French's diaries about his meeting to go talk to President Lincoln. Lincoln said it would stink in the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the house had been overrun by the president when the poor freezing soldiers could not have blankets. And he swore he would never approve the bills for flub-dubs for that damned old house. And it is a good point. You know, this is a wartime economy. That's true.

And, you know, it was... She couldn't take them back? No, you can't take them back. You can't take them back. There were a lot of high society women had pledged not to buy imported fabrics for the duration of the war. Oh, okay. And this did not stop Mary Todd Lincoln. Her spending had started to become.

like an election issue, a campaign issue, when Lincoln came back up for re-election in 1864. Yeah, you can't, you know, have this. It looks bad to have the wife of the president, yeah, spending so freely. Oh, it was a compulsion. It really was. She was running up bills that she couldn't pay. Lincoln himself would pay out of their own pocket for anything that was, you know, that they couldn't handle. So now, when he was assassinated, that was, I mean, obviously devastating to her for every reason that you would expect normally and to the nation, of course, as well. After the of losing her husband, there was one more challenge, which is all of these bills

that were still starting to arrive. And she, of course, no longer had his name to kind of bail her out of trouble. From a single merchant in Washington, D.C., she apparently bought 300 pairs of gloves in the span of just a few months. So, I mean, like, this is into the territory of things that you could never hope to wear.

You can't wear 300 pairs of gloves. So all told, she owed over $25,000 to various merchants across the East Coast after his death. Abraham Lincoln's estate in total was only about $75,000. Oh, my God. So, like, she was in debt

to basically a third of what they had left, and most of that was tied up in legal proceedings for months or years, so she didn't have access to this money. Things got a little bit dire for her, actually. I mean, she held off her creditors as long as she could, but by 1867, she was essentially reduced to trying to raise cash

by selling off a lot of her fancy clothes and fancy things that she had bought. So she went to New York and tried to sort of sell clothes anonymously. You know, the idea was she could sort of sneak into town and have like, you know, trunk sales or go back to some of these merchants and see if they would buy her clothes off her. It didn't go well. I mean, you know, she tried to be sneaky. She checked into a hotel under a fake name. But, you know, Mary Todd Lincoln has plastered all over her luggage and her trunks and stuff.

I mean, word got out pretty quickly, you know, because everyone is like, who is this mysterious lady, this widow? So she eventually kind of fell in with a shady guy named, I don't mean in a romantic way, but became associated with this guy named W.H. Brady. And together they concocted a couple really poor elaborate schemes. One involved a bizarre blackmail scheme where they would ask, you know, wealthy high society people for money. And if they kind of didn't want a pony up the cash, they were sort of intimating. They would release, you know, tales of bad things that they had done. he eventually convinced her to do like a public display of her clothes like a public sort of auction, you know, like come see the clothing collection of Mary Todd Lincoln and bid on it. People showed up just for the sort of the spectacle of it. But no one would buy it. It did not raise her money that she needed. No. I mean, and you know, I mean, it should be said that over her life she had a lot of kind of anxious conditions and nervous disorders. I mean, who knows what she would be diagnosed with today. And it seems safe to say that shopping was sort of a refuge for her in a lot of these, you know, problems. But also a source of stress, though.

It did. So it kind of just built into itself. So this whole sad affair in New York of her trying to sell the clothes and attempt to blackmail became known as the old clothes scandal. And it really kind of tarred her name in high society circles. And she just sort of retreated from public life after a while. She died in 1882. And when she died, she left behind 60 full-sized trunks packed with clothes and jewelry and very

household items and all these things. And that was sort of the legacy of the stuff she couldn't afford and then later couldn't get rid of. Where did all this stuff go? Some of it was sold to pay her various debts. Some of it, I'm sure, went to auction houses and antiques collectors. I've never heard of any of this about her. Especially like the political part too, where it was like, oh, we're not going to buy imported things. And she's like, I'm just going to buy these things. Like, she wasn't rational anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she may have been a little bit of a hoarder. I mean, as I say, it sounds like she would just, it was kind of obsessive. Wow.

Yeah. Your segment was kind of a downer, but, uh, so here I have a quiz that is about luxury, um, items. Get your buzzers ready. Question number one. This company's name comes from the Greek word for beauty and the name of the wife of Moses. Dana. Sephora? Yes.

Oh. Sapphora. Cephos is beauty in Greek, and Zippora is the wife of Moses. Sephora, the French makeup retailer. Sephora, speaking of Sephora, Sephora is one of the many brands owned by what French multinational luxury goods conglomerate? Other brands and subsidiaries of this group include

De Beers Diamonds, Mark Jacobs, Belvedere Vodka, Don Perrinot-Champaign and Louis Vuitton. Wow. Just a couple. The list goes on. Wow. Oh, man. Very famous conglomerates.

Yeah, I'm sure we'll know. Four letters, four abbreviated letters. Man, I feel like I know this, but I can't retrieve it. What is it? LVMH, which is Louis Vuitt-Hon-M-H-Witt-H. Wow. So, yeah, just to throw a couple more high-end ones in there. Yeah, a lot.

I didn't know De Beers was owned by, I thought they were their own company. Man. All right. Number three. In 2011, English rapper Tiny Tempa scored the first pair of special edition of Nike Air Mag for about $37,000, $37,500, to be exact. These Nikes were special because they were designed to look like what? Oh, man.

2011. All right, that's got to be topical. Topical. Special edition. Look very futuristic. Oh, uh... Colin. Something with like Iron Man's boots or something. Incorrect.

Chris. The shoes that are in Back to the Future Part 2. Oh, yes! Oh, I forgot about that. That's right. Yep. The futuristic boots from Orn Maki Shoes were back to future two. That were self-lacing in the movies. Well, the shoes Nike made, the re-release did not have the power leases, but they made replicas, and they made only 1,500 pairs of these, and they're all auctioned off, and the proceeds went to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Okay, okay. According to many consumer reports and consumer expert, Paco Underhill, what percentage of all the things you buy in a supermarket you had no intention of buying? Oh. On average. On average? Meaning, like, things that you didn't walk in planning to buy. Yeah, what percentage of all the stuff? 75%.

Oh, I don't think it's that. Oh, I don't think it's that. I think, like, 45%. Yeah, I'll guess right around there. I'll say 40%, but... Average, Chris is the closest, about 66%. Wow. Wow.

So every trip to a supermarket, you come back, two-thirds of that stuff you didn't intend to buy it. I thought I was overachieving in that. I was like, it's probably that for me personally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's another price estimation question. In 2006, in England, they created the world's most expensive pie. It's traditional steak and mushroom pie, British pub food, which includes wagu beef, Matsutake mushrooms, which are really, really rare, and really, really expensive.

Two bottles of 1982 Chateau-Muton Rothschild. Is that like cooking wine? Black truffles and some gold leaf. Okay. Some gold leaf. Minimal. You can't escape the gold leaf. It's gold beef.

It's not that expensive. This pie serves eight. Tell me how much did it cost per slice? All right. So. This is what they charged at the restaurant or the ingredients? A charge of the restaurant. Okay.

I mean, the Chetotomuton Rothschild, yeah. I don't know my wife. It's a fancy one. Yeah, that's in 1982 vintage. When was this made? Like a couple years ago? 2006. Yeah.

I mean, this is going to be well into the thousands. I would, I would dance. I mean, per slice. And it serves a lot. Oh, I was thinking, like, total, and then, what, to eight slices? Yeah. I'll go with, I'll go with, like, $1,000 a slice. Uh, I'll say $700 a slice.

I'll say $1,500 a slice. $1,990 per slice. All right. The whole pie is about $15,000. Yeah, the wine. I wonder if it tasted good. Probably really good. You think?

But I don't know about, I mean, the wine, I didn't, you know. $1,900. The wine is kind of a shame, though. It is a shame. It is, it is. No one there is going to be that jackass. Be like, yeah, it was okay. You know what I mean?

If you spend $2,000, you're going to say you loved it. And psychologically, that will happen, right? I mean, if you're prepped to thinking it's going to be amazing, you will think it's amazing. Last question. So, Oud Oil is perhaps the most expensive oil in the world. Its value is estimated as 1.5 times of the value of gold. And it's sometimes referred to as liquid gold. Oud Oil?

O-U-D. Okay. What is it usually used in? Oh. Well, since I've never heard of it. Liquid oil. Food oil. What is it usually used in?

Yeah. It's an ingredient for... Oh, okay. It is edible. It is not. It is not. Okay, okay. Not food.

I mean, you can't eat it, I guess. Is it an ingredient for, like, a cosmetic product? It comes from what the plant is called an agar, which is a type of tree. When this tree gets a type of mold infestation, the tree will start producing resin to protect the tree from infestation and this resin this the sticky stuff that it produces has really complex notes and a fragrance and it's very very rare and this is used in some of the most expensive perfumes in the world i mean we've talked about this so many times before about perfume ingredients or or things that make sense it's always weird stuff it's always like

The ambergray. Animal butt stuff, whale vomit, and this is, like, resin from, like, infested, yeah, wood. Not healthy wood. No. Fested wood. Yeah. Well, there you go. All right, thanks.

So I went shopping the other day. It was actually at Walgreens, and I had to buy some dryer sheets. Oh, yeah. Oh, I made it rain up in the Walgreens. I had to buy some dryer sheets, and I went in, and they had two basically kinds of the unscented dryer sheets that I need, and one of them was $4.85 cents, and they The other one was $6.25. And I was like, oh, man, a $2 difference.

I'll get this one over here. You know, I got the cheaper one. And only later that I realized, like, I'm making up those last digits because I don't even remember what the last digits were. I don't know. All I know was one of them was sort of in the $4-dollar area. The other one was sort of in the $6y area. And I'd fall in victim, essentially, to the oldest retail trick in the book. It's fact of life, basically all over the world.

You go into a store and everything is priced at. it's not priced at $3, it's $2.99. Right. It's not priced at $10. It's $9.99. And everybody understands the sort of ostensible reason why. It's because if it's $2,99, your brain sees it as being like, oh, it's $2 in something sense, not as $3, which what it really is.

Is that actually true? Do our brains actually do this? And if it is true, where did the practice get started? Who came up with this evil genius scheme? It is really cool. So if you start researching. researching this, you will come across an anecdote. That anecdote is about Melville Stone, an old-time newspaper man from Chicago. And in 1876, he thought that he could compete with the five-cent

newspapers in Chicago by putting out a one-cent newspaper. And then he thought, I'll make sure that people have pennies in their pockets. I'll go around to the shopkeepers and I'll convince them that they should price their goods at $2.99 instead of $3 or $0.99 instead of $1.00. So their customers will leave with pennies in their pockets, and they'll spend them on his, yes, exactly. Is this true? Sort of? Not really. It's a great story.

It's a little too good. So he did run, you know, the guy existed, and he ran a newspaper, and it was one cent. As Cecil Adams, newspaper columnist who writes the column, the straight dope, which I think we've referred to in previous episodes, he pointed this out way back in the 90s he was writing about this and said, Stone only actually ran his paper. for a couple of months. So even if he did come up with this idea, it wasn't happening.

It wasn't kind of in circulation long enough for that to be the genesis of the pricing model. Also, if you go back and look at catalogs of the time, everything is priced in whole dollar increments. You know, all of the other data that we have suggest that things were still just priced in dollars, right? And it's actually, it's not until the 1920s, 45 years or so later,

that we start to see price. prices using this technique, and then he points out that the prices you start seeing are whatever, whatever, 95, not whatever, whatever, 99. So, this story does not wash. So it's kind of lost to history, but people figured out that if you price it, it also, I mean, it's lost to history probably because nobody was trumpeting from the roof tops. Like, hey, I'm the guy when they did this way to scam everybody. Shop at my store because I figured out.

how to fool you. Right. It may simply have been price competition. Like, you know, it was that consumerism was sort of, you know, flourishing. And it's like, you know, you're selling this for $3. I'm selling it for $3. I can't reduce it in any meaningful way. So I'll reduce it by a penny, you know, and then maybe that's the edge I need to get you in my store because you can still buy things for a penny. But the psychological phenomenon is real, right? I mean, oh, for sure. There's a psychologist's name is Jamie Madigan. Now, a lot of people have written about this, but there was just a piece that I found. from this psychologist.

And he wrote an article last year about the left digit effect. And what that says is that we are just, we are biased towards the leftmost digit that has a bigger effect on us. We don't think in like exact numbers. We think in abstract. And we think, oh, this is less than that. That is more than this. We don't think this is precisely 375 units less than this other thing.

We read in America, many other countries, from the left to the right. So we start reading on the left, we process that first digit, and then by the time we're reading the other digits, our brain has already jumped out way ahead of us, and if the item is $4.99, our brain is already going, this goes into the group of things that are $4 and whatever, before our eyes get to the $99. We can know in our heads, like, oh, it's really $5, doesn't matter. Lizard brain already dealt with that. It's already, like, just subconsciously put in the right area. sense sometimes show up in really tiny font than the big number. Yep, and that increases the effect. It increases the effect for sure.

That's why, you know, four and a little tiny little 99 above it. I like that it's called the left digit effect, too, because you see it in big numbers, too, right? I mean, like a car will be $29,99, you know, it's still, it's the same effect, even if it's just shifting the dollars. These days, if you go around various stores, you'll actually see lots of slightly different price endings. You know, the sense figures on prices might be, they might not be 99, there might be 98, it might be 48, it might be 48, there might be 47, they may be 76. A lot of stores, and this is not a secret, this is just what they do, they use those digits as a way of keeping track of inventory and whether an item's been discounted and whether it's going to move off shelves. So, for example, if you're at Costco, then you see something, you know, $3.99, that's their normal price. If you see something that's like $3.97, that is an indicator to you that that item has been discounted at some point.

If you see something that's like 288, that is like a manager special they're trying to get rid of it. So this has been chatted about all this. There's a lot of articles about like the Costco price code, how to save money. If you're buying stuff at Costco that you don't need because the price is 97 cents, which means it's a discount, which means you're saving money. you're not really saving money. You're just giving Costco more money. But like, man, our brains suck at shopping. They're the worst.

They did a study where they gave people a catalog where everything was priced in single and integers, in dollar increments versus things with 99 cent pricing. And they said, you have X amount of money to spend. Estimate quickly and tell me how many things you can afford. And the people where it was priced with 99 cent pricing, they estimated that they could afford more items from the catalog. So much lower. Yep. Wow.

So I have a quiz for you guys about department stores, about the big old department stores. There's like seven or eight main ones that you know about. So I have some questions about their origins and maybe the founders or what they sold or where they were located. Yeah, all right. So everybody has a pad and a pen. There's multiple choice. First question, the red star on the Macy's logo. So, you know, there's like a red star and it says Macy's in the apostrophe is a star.

Where does that come from? Is it based on a political party, a girl's name, a tattoo, or a boat? Oh. So, Colin, Karen, both say boat. Chris says a girl's name. It is based on a tattoo. Wow. Yes.

Never would have suspected tattoo. So the tattoo was on the hand of William Hussie Macy, the founder of Macy's. His middle name is Hussie. Do you like how I had to say his middle night? I was like, well, it's worth noting. his middle name is Hussie. He was on a whaling ship, so it might be related to a boat, but he was like 15 or something when he got a red star tattooed on his hand.

The logo is the same tattoo that's on his hand. Sears originally sold what? We got watches, shoes, pants for young boys, or hardware. You can go always. Okay. All right. So, Colin. says shoes. Karen says pants

for boys. Chris says pants for kids. It was watches. Oh, wow. I put pants for boys because it's not specific. It is, that's what I think. Yeah. You suck of the man. Gotcha. No, well, you know, it was originally a catalog

business. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Before that, so Richard W. Sears was a station agent at a train station, and he would take deliveries from distant cities and deliver them. So he got a big shipment of watches for jewelry store the jewelry store was like we didn't order these we don't want them we're not going to sign for him he contacted the wholesaler and was like oh well you sell these to me for a good price they were like sure and then he started selling them around town he made he made so much money

doing that he's like i'm not going to be money back in the day yeah he was scrappy and when you were saying the um mary todd lincoln story i was like ah she wasn't entrepreneurial and i was like sears would have made that work 300 pairs of gloves like all said it I'll look what it does for, yeah. Yeah. What did Bloomingdale's originally sell? Hats, hoop skirts, gloves, or flowers? Colin says hats, Karen says gloves.

Chris says flowers. It was hoop skirts. Oh, I really thought that was the... I was really specific. He went for the blooming and the flowers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had a lady's notion, store. So they probably had like some gloves, but it was the hoop skirts that got them

enough money. These two brothers, Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale had got made enough money to set up a big store. Last question. First public demonstration of what technology was shown or was demonstrated at Selfridge's department store in London. Was it the television, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner, or the electric razor? Colin says vacuum Karen says razor Chris says vacuum was the TV The first TV in Selfridges From the first to the 27th of April in 1925

Wow It's early That is really early Yeah All right we're going to take a quick break And we're going to bring back Brainiacs Book Club Where we each pick an audiobook available on Audible I'll go first

So my book is filled with a lot of facts. They just happen not to be true. They are very tongue-in-cheek, false facts. The book I am recommending is The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman. Oh, the funny guy. Yes, the nerdy multimedia funny guy, John Hodgman from Daily Show. He was PC in the Mac PC commercials. You've probably seen him.

Just in Lung. Yes, yes. And so this book is sort of, it's in the style of like old. style almanacs, so very firmly tongue-in-cheek and a highfalutin language, but all fake, all totally fake, and the audiobook is narrated by John Hodgman, which I think makes it even better in his trademark dry style. That would be fun to write a fake, fact, almanac, fact book. Well, so it was actually the first of a trilogy.

He went on to write two more. So if you like this first one, then you can get started down to the path. What are some of the examples segments? It's got everything from false histories of the nations of Europe to, I've been. universities to, as proudly touted on the cover, his list of 700 hobo names, which is one of my favorite parts. My book choice is educational in that it takes place at a wizard school. It is...

I like what you guys are picking books that are not factual. It is not Harry Potter. It's a book by Love Grossman called The Magicians. And it is really good. It's really, really good. It's like Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia. Is this for kids? No.

It is not for kids. Probably for young adults, two adults. There are sexy parts. Oh. But it's good. The book that I picked is a book that I have read many times over the years. When I was actually in Japan, I had a professor who was a Dutch guy. He lived in Japan for like decades.

And he always said that one of his favorite books about Japan that he recommended that everyone read if we had not read it was Dave Barry does Japan. It was the humorous. Dave Barry, he basically went to Japan for a few weeks, the intent of writing a funny book about Japan, which is what he did. It was written in the early 90s when America was just fascinated with the idea of Japan, but nobody had any idea really what was going on over there. Four kids were taking Japanese classes and stuff like that, you know, so it was just fascinating but unknown.

And so Dave Barry basically went over there and just did a really remarkably good job of getting at. It was very, he was, he's a very perceptive guy. He does. Like, the stuff that he wrote about the, the culture clashes between Americans and Japanese was, was actually so fascinating. Like, he was really going for humor and, and it is really funny. I mean, it's, it may be one of his funniest books. The great part about it is that, like, as a kid, knowing nothing about Japan, it was funny.

Like, when I read it now, knowing a lot more, it's funnier. Things that he describes, it's like, oh, man, I know all about that. Got it. So it doesn't feel, even though it's 20 years later, it doesn't feel outdated or like a lot of his observations are still very, very on point, accurate. Right. It's really, really good. Cool. So check these picks out.

And, of course, you can get your free audiobook download at audiblepodcast.com slash good job, Bray. And we're going to have these picks up on the site, too. This is a true story. It happened right here in my town. One night, 17 kids woke up, got out of bed, walked into the dark, and they never. ever came back. I'm the director of barbarian. A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways.

We're not going to find it in the news because the police covered everything all up. On August days. This is where the story really starts. Weapons. Throughout history, royals across the world were notorious for incest. They married their own relatives in order to consolidate. power and keep their blood blue. But they were oblivious to the havoc all this inbreeding was having on the health of their offspring, from Egyptian pharaohs marrying their own sisters,

to the Habsburg's notoriously oversized lower jaws. I explore the most shocking incestuous relationships and tragically inbred individuals in royal history. And that's just episode one. On the History Tea Time podcast, I profile remarkable queens and LGBTQ plus royals, explore royal family trees, and delve into women's medical history and other fascinating topics. I'm Lindsay Holiday and I'm spilling the tea on history. Join me every Tuesday for new episodes of the History Tea Time podcast, wherever fine podcasts are enjoyed. You're listening to Good Job Brain. Smooth puzzles, smart trivia.

Good Job Brain. And we're back. You're listening to Good Job Brain. This week we're talking about shopping and buying things. So, you know, when you're driving down and you're in a car, you're driving down, you're driving down road you'll see a lot of like those used car kind of lots or you'll see car dealerships and in a lot of these retail storefronts you'll see this item and i'm going to play a clip from family guy i know i know oh yeah wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man wacky waving inflatable arm flailing

tube man wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man hi i'm al harrington president and ceo of Al Harrington's Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tubeman Emporium and Warehouse. Thanks to a shipping error, I am now currently overstocked on Wacky Waving, inflatable Arm Flailing Tubemen, and I am passing the savings on to you! Yes, the, I can't even say, Wacky waving, inflatable, flailing, arm, flailing, arm tube man. Anyways, you guys know what I mean. It's like this tube of nylon or whatever.

it's kind of like a balloon and there's a fan underneath pumping air and also based on the the wind conditions outside sometimes the guy looks like he's flailing and he has arms where did this come from yeah and i couldn't even think of what the term is like what do you call this thing i think that's part of why that bit is so funny is because you know those wacky waving inflatable flailing arm guys what are they called it took me just like a lot of search just to find the generic name But I'm not even sure, like, what it is. So, and this is why I love sometimes doing good job brain research because I feel like a detective.

Yeah. So I'm, like, kind of like, finding these leads. So I found that air dancers, there's a company called Air Dancer Productions. And Air Dancer Productions, which is actually in the Bay Area, they state that Ear Dancers has been their registered trademarks. March 1st, 1999. Okay. Is this it?

I was like, it's a trademark, but it's not a patent. Who invented it? So then here comes deep, deep down in the tube man hole, I guess. So to speak. Yeah. Trying to find the origin of the tube man. A lot of places also call them balloon guys or fly guys or sky guys or air guys. Just a lot of tons of, tons of names.

And then I came across. this one guy, and his name is Doron Gazit, and he is an artist, environment artist, does a lot of installations that deal with a lot of wind and air, and so he was commissioned by the Olympics. In 1996, Atlanta Olympics, at the ceremony to have some sort of inflatable guy. And when you see pictures of this, you're like, that is the inflatable flailing arm tube man. The er, flailing arm tube guy. The guy, and this was in 1996. So he must have made it, so he made it before the Air Dancer Company, and probably he invented

before the 1996 Olympics to be used for it. And I'm guessing he didn't, like, copy it off of one that he saw outside his local car dealership. Exactly, because I found the patent. So he has a patent called Apparatus and Method for Providing Inflated Undulating Figures. So in the patent, it specifically says, the figure is provided with at least two spaced apart outlets. or vents to allow a continuous discharge of generally all of the air being introduced into the figure. Here's the thing.

His patent has two legs or multiple because it says at least two space apart outlets for fans. Does nobody have the one for one leg? Couldn't find it. I was looking in the patent library and looking for it, you know, I found the trademark for air dancers, but that's just the name. Wow, that's a lot later. If you had asked me, I would have guessed like early 90s. when those things first started popping up.

Oh, I was thinking like 70 or something. Oh, no, they definitely, I know, I never saw those as a kid. They came across sometime in the 90s, and then they were everywhere. They really are effective, though. They grab your eye. They're hilarious. You can't, I, anyway, I can't help but look when I see those things. It is wacky.

So there you go. Try to find the origin. I kind of have the 1996 Olympics is probably the earliest, but that's of a different. That's of a fancier, better model. Not the cheaper model. That is interesting. Oh, my gosh. answer, you're on the side of the highway.

Of course. I was like, how do you go highway in there? So when you shop online, most online retailers, they do a lot to kind of bring as many metaphors from real world shopping into the experience as possible. Yeah. And I think, you know, probably just the most obvious example of this is the shopping cart icon. If you're on Amazon or wherever, it's, oh, you click a little shopping cart, here's all the things I might be buying. I'm going to check out. Especially with the online shopping and online world, there's a lot of kind of net.

metaphors of real-life things. At least we still use shopping carts. Oh, it's true. Yeah, oh, I see. It's not like the disc on the save icon. Yeah, the disc on the save icon. It's still a floppy disk. Or, you know, iTunes had to actually redo their thing because they used to have a CD.

And it's like, who's a great example anymore? But at least we still use shopping carts. And everyone knows it instantly. I mean, it is perfectly truly iconic in that sense. Let me tell you a little bit about Sylvan Goldman. He was a supermarket owner in the 1920s, 1930s. owned various stores over the years, and in the mid-30s, he was running the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

I've heard of this. I've heard of this. Yeah, you know, there was a trend for a while. There was the pigly-wiggly. That was the first one. Oh, really? Yeah. That really started the...

Weird, fun, cute rhymes. You know, it's important to keep in mind that, like, the concept of the supermarket was a relatively new modern thing. You really didn't have any sense of what a supermarket was before around about the 1920s. When you were going shopping, you would go to a lot of smaller different places. If you needed some bread, you would go to the baker and get a loaf of bread. If you needed some meat, you'd go to the butcher and get your chops. And the supermarket really brought together a couple major changes to this.

So the most obvious one is everything's all together in one store. We got all the different departments, you know, we got this department, that department, one stop shopping. More importantly, was the concept of self-service. Yeah. This was a big change. This was a really... Not self-checkout, but like you go into the old stores and like, everything would be behind the counter.

Oh, right. As I say, yeah. Right. Yep. They would bring it to you. Right, right. Whereas opposed to a new supermarket model, you're going down the aisles, taking things off the shelf yourself. You know, for sure, like, there were a lot of stores before that where you would help yourself. It wasn't totally a foreign concept.

But you'd have your own little shopping basket. And maybe you'd bring your little handheld basket with you. Maybe they'd have one for you. But it was small. And it was just a few things in there that you would go and check out at the time. So back to the Humpty Dumpty chain. in 1930s, Sylvan Goldman noticed that a lot of his shoppers,

in particular women, who might be shopping with children in tow, maybe they have a purse or a handbag already, they've got this small shopping basket, and it was an ordeal to get everything you needed in the basket, carry around this new larger store with more things, and he's like, how can I improve the life of my shoppers? So he hit on the perfect idea,

a cart with wheels, the shopping cart. It seems obvious now, but this was 1936, 36, 30, seven when he rolled out, sorry. No, that's good. That's good. Yeah. When he rolled out the concept. It was kind of a breakthrough. He originally called the idea the basket carrier.

And if you were to see a picture of it now, you would recognize what it was. It was essentially a pair of metal wire baskets attached to a tube metal frame with wheels on it. So he drove up the plans, had some assembled, put them in the Humpty Dumpty shops, and people didn't use them. Wow. It seems like some men in particular felt it was. to effeminate. Yeah. So they're not lifting.

Yep, yep. Even a lot of women didn't like using them. And so Goldman's like, all right, I know this is a hit. I believe this is a great shopping experience enhancer. How can I get people to use these? So one idea he had was he hired essentially like greeters, like people in there like, oh, hello, would you care to use our new basket carrier service? That helped a little bit.

But what I think was even more brilliant idea was he hired a team of people to push the To do nothing but push around the shopping carts in his stores all day, doing fake shopping. Yeah. Carrying them around, modeling for the other shoppers. Oh, that's how you use it. That is so smart. Oh, I won't be a weirdo if I'm pushing this thing around the shop and putting items into it. And the rest is history.

I mean, people started using it. It was a hit. He made millions and millions of dollars on the royalties just for allowing other stores to use this idea. his patented shopping cart idea as it would eventually go on to be called. Are you dreaming about becoming a nurse or maybe you're already in nursing school? I'm Nurse Mo, creator of the straight A nursing podcast and I want you to know that I'm here for you. I know nursing school can be challenging. I've been there, but it doesn't have to be impossible.

Sometimes the key to succeeding in nursing school is to hear the concepts explained clearly and simply, which is exactly what you get with weekly episodes of the Straight A Nursing Podcast. Each Thursday, I teach a nursing concept or share tips and advice to help you succeed in school and at the bedside. My goal is to help you improve how you study, get more done in less time, pass your exams, and feel more confident and clinical. And if you're already a practicing nurse, these episodes are for you too, because as nurses, there's always something for us to learn. So subscribe to the Stray Day Nursing podcast, and I'll see you on Thursday. As shopping carts get bigger, people do buy more. That is one of the things that supermarkets will do, you know, to get people to buy more stuff is just make the shopping carts bigger, so you'll put more stuff in them.

So let me ask you guys this. What do you suppose is the average profit margin of a supermarket? Like you add all everything they sell in a year. You know, all the money they spent to get it and then all of the, you know, overhead and everything, what percent is the profit that is left over after everything they have to spend? Man, I bet it's either really high or really low. So I'm not sure what a higher low number is, but I think it's low. 60%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What do you, would you suppose low is? I have no point of reference. Right, yeah, sure. But I'm like, there must be so much breakage or, like, spoilage, you know, you break something in there. They just clean it up. Things go bad all the time before, you know, that's true. That's true. Right.

I'm going to go on the high side. I'll say, I say 60. 60%. I'll say 62%. What? All right. The average profit margin of a supermarket, as stated by a few sources that I've found, it's anywhere between 1 and 3%.

Oh. Probably closer to 1%. They are operating on razor, razor, razor, thin margins. Wow. Yep. The price competition on food is just, just so cutthroat that there's just there's no leeway and so supermarkets really i mean more than any other retail outlet if you think about it are highly incentivized to get you to buy more stuff yeah

to increase the profit margin in any way they can but really because because it's tough to do that just to get you to buy more because one percent of a larger number is more money you know just like 99 cent pricing there are tons and tons of tricks that supermarkets use to get you to buy more stuff. So the first thing that you go and you walk into the supermarket and you walk into the first section, what is that section? Flowers and produce. Flowers and produce. Flowers and immediately. Or bakery. Feeling of freshness. The bright colors and yeah. Yeah, yeah. And even if predominantly what you're going to eat that week is Funnions and Mountain Dew, like psychologically, it's like, oh, flowers, freshness, produce. Yay. I'm excited. Now, our supermarket, the Safeway supermarket that is

close to where we are recording this episode is actually, it's laid out, you might say, wrong, because the produce is actually the last section of our supermarket if you go, you know, from the entrance. But the first section of our supermarket is expensive deli meats, expensive deli cheeses. When you first walk into our supermarket, and you'll see this a lot these days, there's a coffee shop, there's a Starbucks, there's tables. It's right next to the deli. where they will make you a sandwich or give you hot foods.

This idea is, come in, relax, stay a while, you know, wander in, get yourself a coffee, have your lunch here at the supermarket, just make it an all day thing. It's a day, yeah. They want to keep you in as long as possible getting you buying. They do not want you going in, just buying the stuff that you need and coming out. That's what you want to do every time you go to the grocery store. You're like, okay, I got a plan. I'm going to go in.

I'm going to buy the stuff I need, I'm going to get out. And they need to subvert that in every way possible. The staples, the things that you actually need are going to be scattered throughout the store and most of them in the back. When I worked in a supermarket in North Branford, Connecticut, back in the day, at the very, very end of the supermarket, right before you got to the cash registers, last last things were milk and eggs, and then immediately next to that was bread. And then immediately next to that was the peanut butter and jelly, that Great East Coast staple, the marshmallow fluff.

Like that was where that stuff was. It wasn't like in the middle with the other cooking ingredients or anything. It was milk and eggs, bread, and then the peanut butter and jelly section was right there. So all the stuff that a small town mom would buy was all at the end, end, end of the store. When they know they've got you, you have to buy it. You can't not buy it. You have to traverse through the store. all the other stuff first.

And the produce is at the end, for some reason, of our San Francisco Safeway. Maybe that's just because the clientele, like, you know, they're going to buy produce anyway. They don't have to be tricked into it. Maybe that is the desk. That is where they're trying to go. Whole foods, too. Yeah. And then all your cooking ingredients are as close to the middle as they can possibly can.

So you just have to traverse the most distance. And there will be as many obstacles in your way as they can possibly put in front of you without getting too obvious about. So you have to navigate big displays, stacked high, full of products. that might not even be on sale, you know, they've just paid for that placement. Like Pepsi has paid for there to be like a pyramid, like an Aztec pyramid of Pepsi in the middle of your supermarket. And they've paid for that. They even pay for high-level placement. The stuff that is right in your line of sight, they've paid for that to be there, those companies.

That is not where the best prices are because the stuff that's on sale is going to be, probably is going to be maybe even higher, maybe lower. Bottom. The stuff that they think your kids are going to want is it kids on level. For sure. It's like, Mom, Dad, buy me this. It might be, depending on how much of a pushover you are with your kids, it might be less expensive. Just get a babysitter. Leave them at home and do all of your shopping without them being able to see stuff.

If you want to save money at the supermarket, bring your iPod, and listen to fast tempo music. And drown out, absolutely not. Drown out the music that they're playing because they're playing slow tempo music in the supermarket to get you to slow down and cruise through those I believe it I believe it you'll just spend more time and then of course everybody knows that the impulse buy stuff at the front when you're waiting in line they have turned the waiting experience into a buying experience so you'll buy those candies which have huge markups you will see the issue of the National Enquirer that is like well Beyonce is pregnant with quadruplets and you'll

You'll grab that, and of course, that'll be in the middle of the issue, too. So you're flipping through it to try to find the article. But then it's your turn to go. So you're like, well, what is this? I'll just buy it. I'll just buy it. They link this to decision fatigue, where your brain sometimes when you inundated with decisions and making decisions. At the end, you're just tired out.

You've been making decisions this whole trip at the supermarket being like, this is cheaper, this cheaper. What do I need get? Oh, this is good. What I'm going to make this week? And at the end, it's like, oh. I'll get some candy. Yeah, I need a treat. I deserve a treat.

Yeah, they definitely want you to feel like you have just, like, run a marathon. Exactly. And you're out of there. It's like, I deserve this. Yes. Oh, my God. I'm like, come to me, Oprah Magazine. I need your warm embrace after this.

Yeah, I know. Yes. Wow. And that's it for our retail shopping buying episode. Thank you guys for joining me. And thank you guys listeners for Lizzie. and hopefully you learn a lot of stuff about being duped or trying not to be duped at supermarkets.

They'll get you anyway. They'll get you anyways. 99 pricing, wacky inflatable, flailing arm tube tube man, and more. And you can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and on our website, good job, bring.com, and check out our sponsor, Audible, at audiblepodcast.com slash good job brain. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye.

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