By Walt Hickey

Giant Slayer

B&G Foods, one of the massive food conglomerates you’re only vaguely aware of, is kicking the tires on a sale of its Green Giant brand of frozen vegetables, just six months after it sold off the Green Giant canned business to Seneca Foods. Known for brands like Crisco, Ortega and Cream of Wheat, the issue with Green Giant is that it’s their only non-shelf-stable business and essentially has an entirely separate packing and shipping process that makes it impossible to totally align with all the other stuff they sell. It’s a pretty good business to be in, though the company’s sales of frozen vegetables was down 16.9 percent compared to the same quarter of last year.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Podcasting

Last year saw slowed growth in the podcast world, with overall spending on ads increasing just 5 percent to $1.93 billion. The industry had been comfortably growing by double digits, and there’s room for optimism as this year the podcast ad market in the U.S. is nevertheless projected to increase 12 percent to $2.16 billion. The mix of what’s succeeding in podcasting is shifting a bit, with comedy podcasts now taking in 17 percent of the revenue, up from 14 percent in 2022, seemingly at the expense of sports, which fell two percentage points to 13 percent.

Todd Spangler, Variety

The Brass

The world of business is beset by CEOs who simply won’t quit, extending their tenures as they continue to deliver familiar and reliable management even if that means not actually being the best fit for the job. An analysis of 356 businesses from 2000 to 2010 found that the ideal tenure for a chief executive is 4.8 years, while other analysts put the figure closer to a decade at the helm, or perhaps in their 11th through 15th years. The risk is that they can become complacent, lose touch with the company, and potentially worst of all become risk averse and gun-shy, too fixated on short-term stock prices and extending the tenure.

Emma Goldberg, The New York Times

Satisfaction

A new survey of American workers found that 63 percent reported being satisfied with their jobs, the highest rating on record. Digging a little deeper, though, the numbers reveal that while people are more satisfied with their overall job in 2023 compared to 2022 (by a factor of 0.4 percent), on every single incremental factor they’re actually less satisfied. Year-over-year declines in satisfaction existed in each and every category, including bonus plan (down 7.6 percent), wages (down 5 percent), workload (down 3.8 percent), vacation policy (down 2.8 percent), quality of leadership (down 1.7 percent) and their supervisor (down 0.8 percent). Yes, people are slightly happier in their jobs despite hating each and every one of the 26 individual parts of it just a bit more, nevertheless.

Millie Giles and David Crowther, Sherwood News

Games

A survey of 1,423 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 found that 41 percent said they play video games at least once per day, with most teens who play them (72 percent) saying that a reason they play them is to spend time with others. There are some issues — 41 percent said it’s hurt their sleep, and 80 percent of them think harassment is a problem for people their age — but on balance a majority of the teenagers reported spending the right amount of time playing games. Overall, 40 percent of all teens said they had made a friend online because of a video game. Obviously, though, there are issues with this; after all, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight in no small part because conditions are perfect for a disastrous return of a wave of gamer-oriented webcomics, an apocalyptic aberration we endured for so long and we worked so hard to confine to the dustbin of history.

Jeffrey Gottfried and Olivia Sidoti, Pew Research Center

Harbor

Soon the remaining steel trusses of the Francis Scott Key Bridge will be removed from the Dali, the ship that collided with the structure. All told, the steel truss on the deck of the Dali weighs 8 million to 12 million pounds, is 500 feet long and is about 80 feet wide. It’s a lot of weight to deal with — every 12-by-12-by-1-inch square is 40 pounds — and explosives, about half of which have been installed, should be able to break up the bridge span and give the Dali room to refloat at high tide two days after the explosion.

Tolly Taylor, WBAL

Royalty

Spotify has changed the way that it calculates royalties, and it’s become clear what that means for income for the music business. Based on projections for 2024, Spotify will pay $100 million less in royalties over the next 12 months. If royalty value is kept to a conservative estimate, the losses would be $80 million, though other estimates put the lost royalty level closer to $140 million to $150 million, or, at the lower end, $120 million to $130 million.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Assessment

In New York, your tax assessment is based on what the property is worth, and that in turn is based on what you can make from it. For commercial real estate companies, the ascent of work from home means that their properties are declining in value, potentially so much so that they can make a compelling case that for taxation purposes, they ought to be worth less then they are currently valued. This can have huge implications for city tax revenue; in Atlanta, from 2011 to 2022, owners appealing their tax assessment were successful 62 percent of the time, which led to $654 million in lost tax revenue. If this catches on, it could put a major fiscal dent in municipal finances all over the country.

Patrick Sisson, Commercial Observer

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