The weekly collection of useless and fun facts. In this week’s edition: Wal-Mart, Tuesdays, Band-Aid Jingle, Starbucks, and V-8 Juice.
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| Sven/Wikimedia |
There is no doubt that Walmart is huge in everything it does. It’s the world’s third largest public corporation, and the world’s largest private employer with more than 2 million employees. It’s comes as no surprise then that the retailer makes a lot of money in a short amount of time. Walmart averages a profit of $2.09 million every hour, $34,880 every minute, and $581 every second. $2.09 million may seem like a large amount of money taken as profit, but take into consideration that over $36 million is spent at Walmart every hour. If this wasn’t enough to boggle the mind, if Walmart was a country, it would be the 30th largest economy in the world based on it’s revenue of $405 billion per year.
What day do you get the most done? If you answered Tuesday, then you’re in agreement with most. According to a survey in 2013, the most productive day of the workweek is considered to take place on that day. And this isn’t the first time Tuesday has been picked as the day to get things done. It has held this position in a number of surveys since 1987. What is considered the least productive day, according to this survey? It was a tie between Thursday and Friday. Maybe this gives some ammunition for advocating a three-day workweek. We can dream, can’t we?
Barry Manilow’s career has spanned over four decades, and he has 29 studio albums, 4 live albums, 15 compilation albums, and 57 singles to his credits. It addition to these he’s written a few famous jingles. One of which was the famous “I am stuck on Band-Aid, ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!” jingle. Other notable jingles Manilow wrote were, “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is There”, “Stridex”, the acne fighting products, “Bathroom Bowl Blues”, for Bowlene Toilet Bowl Cleaner, and a Dodge jingle. He even performed others for KFC, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi. A compilation of these are below that he performs in concert he calls, a “Very Strange Melody”.
Starbucks is named after Captain Ahab’s first mate from Moby Dick. Gordon Bowke, a co-founder of the company in 1971, had originally considered naming the company for the name of Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, but his business partners decided on the first mate’s name instead. The name wasn’t the only thing that that was inspired by Moby Dick. The logo also has a nautical theme and is based on a Siren from Greek Mythology. The name could have been many others that were in Moby Dick, such as, Ishmael, Stubb, Flask, Queequeq, Tashtego, Daggoo, Pip, or Fedallah, so it seems Starbucks was a good choice.
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| James/Wikimedia |
The eight vegetables in V8 are tomato, spinach, carrot, celery, beets, lettuce, watercress and parsley. Thank goodness there’s no couchgrass, cleavers, and crampbark. You can get the reference below in this famous scene that has absolutely nothing to do with V-8.
Another edition of the Useless Facts of the Week is complete. Remember to annoy those around you with your new found knowledge.
Past Issues of the Completely Random Facts of the Week
