By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! Los Angeles readers, do stay safe out there.

We’ve relaunched the annual Numlock Awards pop-up award season newsletter! It’s one of my favorite things to do, and dives into the data and the chances for the Oscars!

Hoagies

Gas stations have begun to retool their offerings, following the playbooks of regional brands like Wawa and Buc-ee’s and ramping up their food business amid tighter margins on the gas side of the business. Casey’s, which is a gas station staple in the Midwest known for its pizza offerings, made $312 million in gross profit last quarter selling gasoline while earning $620 million in gross profit on its food and beverage business, which is almost $200 million more than straightforward pizza restaurant Domino’s made. Part of that is because the margin on the gasoline business is tough — 10 percent — while Casey’s profit margin on food is 59 percent. As more cars go electric, the opportunity to make more money on the grill than at the pump increases, as those EVs might need to take a couple minutes more to get the desired charge, time that could be spent housing a hoagie. The fuel business hasn’t given up the ghost entirely — fuel sales were $532.2 billion in 2023 compared to inside sales of $327.6 billion — but the inside sales have been rising steadily for two decades.

Max Knoblauch, Sherwood News

Salt

A 623-foot vessel has run aground in the Delaware River a mile north of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. The ship, the Algoma Verity, is currently carrying 45,000 tons of solar salt. As yet there have been no reports of any pollution, but maritime traffic has been restricted and the Coast Guard is responding to the situation. Though it’ll take some time to determine who is financially responsible for the incident, early indications and analyses of the manifest data indicate that the 45,000 tons of salt were indeed intended for my many haters.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Wild

A new study looked at 22 years of United States trade data to track the wildlife trade, and found that 2.85 billion individuals from 30,000 different wild species have been traded in the U.S., with 50 percent of those animals coming from the wild. The U.S. is unique in the sense that it documents the animals that go in and out of its borders, but not unique in the sense that there is a brisk trade in animals and species crossing borders and moving around the world over. Indeed, only 0.01 percent of the wildlife trade tracked was actually illegal.

Johnny von Einem, University of Adelaide

Mercury

The BepiColombo spacecraft, a joint effort of the European and Japanese space programs, has beamed back some really magnificent imagery of the planet Mercury that it took on its sixth and final flyby of the planet. The photos were taken from an altitude as low as 295 kilometers above the night side of the planet and went over the planet’s north pole. The photos include craters that never see light, volcanic plains, and the 1,500-kilometer-wide impact crater that is the largest on the planet.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Cocoa

Hershey sent the bulk cocoa market into a frenzy after news broke that it asked permission to make an uncommonly large purchase through the New York exchange, which sent the most active futures contract up 10.1 percent on Thursday. Hershey asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for the go-ahead to buy 5,000 20-foot containers’ worth of cocoa in a single go, which is nine times more than the exchange allows. It’s an odd move, and may show that Hershey wants to nail down supply, or may just be Hershey seeing an opportunity to get some cheaper cocoa and making a play.

Mumbi Gitau, Bloomberg

Worse Off

The vibes are off, and globally so. A Pew Research Center poll of adults in 36 countries found that in the median nation, 57 percent of respondents said that they think when children in their country grow up they will be worse off financially than their parents were, while only 34 percent took the optimistic point of view and said they thought those kids would be better off. This held in the U.S. (74 percent said worse off, 26 percent better off), Canada (78 percent worse, 16 percent better), most of Europe (with Canada-esque numbers in Italy, France and the UK), rich countries in Asia (South Korea, Japan and Australia) and even plenty of Africa and the Middle East. The most optimistic countries tended to be on the Asian subcontinent (like India and Bangladesh) and in the Malay archipelago (Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines).

Richard Wike, Moira Fagan, Christine Huang, Laura Clancy and Jordan Lippert, Pew Research Center

Referrals

An informal marketplace for referrals is increasingly formalizing, as platforms like Blind, Refer Me, Refermarket and Referral Finder begin to grow as intermediaries between would-be workers looking for an in at companies and the insiders willing to collect a finder’s fee for getting them through the process. The math is pretty cutthroat: According to hiring service Greenhouse, external applicants see their odds of landing a job jump from 1 in 200 all the way up to 1 in 25 if they manage to nab a referral, which in the aggregate can mean a shorter and more direct path to employment. For the referrer, they get whatever internal referral bonus there is to be had for referring a successful hire. For the intermediary, they get a couple bucks a month. It’s a solid system, even if it technically directly undermines the explicit point of a referral system and has increasingly been noticed by employers who are pretty mad about it, it turns out.

Jo Constantz, Bloomberg

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Taylor Orth, who wrote “Americans warm to driverless cars, though skepticism remains” for YouGov. We spoke about how attitudes have shifted since 2023, some of the biggest skews across demographics, and Orth’s own experience using driverless cars.

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