By Walt Hickey

Redbox

The movie rental vending machine company Redbox is engaged in a messy bankruptcy, with the company described as “hopelessly insolvent” by the judge overseeing its hasty dissolution. Right now it’s easy to snap up Redbox DVDs on auction sites in no small part because the company stopped paying the people who stock it, who subsequently found an entrepreneurial spirit and sold ‘em off, 40 at a time. In 2019, the physical rental market for Redbox was $809 million, and at the point of bankruptcy they had 27,000 kiosks. In many ways, this is just MoviePass for dad movies, as an ocean of discs of Gerard Butler fighting an army, or a mean guy, or a fighter, or a foreign power, or a Persian, flows into society.

Janko Roettgers, Sherwood News

Factories

Vietnam has been a major beneficiary of tech manufacturers, particularly Apple, attempting to shift their products’ supply chains out of China. Apple’s suppliers and vendors like Luxshare, Foxconn and Goertek have all popped up shop there, and the eight Apple suppliers in Vietnam as of 2015 have exploded to 35 suppliers as of 2023. A selling point is the cheaper wages and solid export relationship with the United States. That said, the economy has been pretty great for Vietnamese workers, with real minimum wages up 11.3 percent per year from 2010 to 2019 and demand for workers so robust that companies are paying out signing bonuses and finder’s fees.

Lam Le, Rest of World

Ironmouse

Ironmouse is a Twitch streamer who has achieved unprecedented success, racking up a new platform record of more than 312,000 subscribers who pay her and reaching 2.1 million followers. What makes her unique is that Ironmouse is a Vtuber, who appears on-screen appearing as a pink-haired anime girl with devil horns. The previous record holder for highest number of active subscribers was Kai Cenat with 269,000, who isn’t even a pink-haired anime girl with devil horns.

Ana Diaz, Polygon

Drive-Thru

Taco Bell has done it, coming in with the fastest average drive-thru service time at 194.16 seconds, according to QSR’s annual survey. The average drive-thru experience came in at 244.86 seconds, with some better (KFC, 206.41 seconds) and some worse (McDonalds, 271.81 seconds). The perennial standout is Chick-Fil-A, which has a 298.27-second average service time and another 181.15-second average wait time on top of that, with customers waiting 479.42 seconds (about 8 minutes) in total to get from the end of the queue to food.

Danny Klein, QSR Magazine

Rao’s

Campbell Soup paid $2.7 billion to buy Sovos Brands, the centerpiece of which is Rao’s pasta sauce. The brand is putting up just shy of $1 billion in annual sales, and Campbell projects high single-digit growth. Rao’s is hot: Revenue is up 400 percent compared to 2019, and it’s doing it despite having vastly fewer varieties of pasta sauce product compared to its rivals (it’s got 60 percent of Prego’s SKU count) and a much, much higher price point (it can easily sell for double the price of $4 Prego).

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

SEC

High school seniors in the Northeast of the United States are increasingly looking south for school. The number of Yankees going to Southern public schools was up 84 percent over the past two decades and increased 30 percent from 2018 to 2022. Mississippi has seen the number of freshmen who come from the Northeast increase by 797 percent from 2002 to 2022. Many are motivated by the national ascent of college football, as what was once a regional sport has gone thoroughly national following a number of high-dollar broadcasting deals and a tweak to the national playoff format. The other big reason? Southern schools can be a comparative bargain compared to the alma maters of the Boston Brahmins, with Southern schools among the nation’s top 100 public research universities and charging a median of $29,000 in tuition and fees. Finally, even the Deep South can experience the joy of realizing that about half your freshman hall is, in fact, also from a New Jersey high school.

Douglas Belkin and Andrea Fuller, The Wall Street Journal

Theme Houses

Lots of investors snapped up land in Kissimmee, Florida, the suburb of Orlando, with the goal of making an easy buck renting them out to tourists trying to visit Disney. The suburb has over 30,000 short-term rentals, more than any other city in America, according to AirDNA, and landlords are realizing that the popular bet isn’t actually working out because supply is so loose. One solution is to hire a company like Home Theme Orlando, which will renovate the houses at a starting price of $150,000 a pop to make them themed after Transformers or Disney or something charming and Instagrammable for the visiting families. One version of a Pixar-themed retrofit runs $300,000, and with the Universal Epic Universe new park on the way, if you want to briefly rent a house that’s Florida up front and Hogwarts in the back, you may just get your wish.

Prashant Gopal, Bloomberg

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