Food Deserts, Olive Oil, and Refund Fraud

Local governments thinking of taking control of grocery stores to address food deserts.

Also: America’s downtowns are empty, and fixing them up for how people consume, today (compared to pre-pandemic), will be expensive.

Older, used airplanes are often better bets than the newest models these days (mostly because of manufacturing defects in the latter).

Extreme weather is making olive oil expensive:

Cameo’s business model was based on some unrealistic expectations (and it’s once 400-strong workforce is now down to 33 following three rounds of layoffs).

Gen Alpha (kids under 13-years-old) is an age cohort brands are beginning to target with marketing (though caveat: “generations” of this kind are mostly nonsense).

The US defense industry does a lot of very targeted mass-transit marketing.

Bottled water company Poland Spring invested heavily in rewriting the law (in Maine) in its favor.

Airline loyalty programs could be a thing of the past (or changed beyond recognition) if a piece of legislation (that’s meant to reduce payment fees) is passed by Congress.

Best Buy is moving away from physical media (like DVDs).

There’s apparently no evidence that Vibram Five-Finger running shoes (those shoes with isolated toes) are good for your feet, despite the company claiming otherwise, and they’re getting hammered by a class-action (false-advertising) lawsuit as a consequence.

Refund fraud is apparently lucrative:

“The U.S. government has indicted alleged members of a criminal group that uses insiders at Walmart and other techniques to commit “refund fraud” on a massive scale, according to recently unsealed court records. In short, the scam involves someone ordering an item from, say, Amazon—which in this case says it lost $700,000—receiving the item, and then using one of various tricks to get their money back from the retailer. The person is then free to sell the item online, and the criminal group takes a fee.”

Lead-poisoning resulting from the artificial yellowing of turmeric powder (using lead chromate) has substantially dropped in Bangladesh following a government campaign that knocked the portion of turmeric samples containing detectable levels of lead down from 47% to 0%, and reduced the lead levels in the blood of workers in turmeric mills by 30% in just two years.

And, how to hijack a quarter-million dollars in rare, Japanese Kit-Kats.