Maureen O’Hare looked at Burger King’s latest store concept:

• Burger King has opened up a 15 person sauna in Finland. Patrons can give servers their orders and eat the chain’s grilled burgers in the steamed saunas.
• It sort of makes sense. Saunas are extremely popular in Finland with one available for every three people in the country.
• It is a place where Finns socialize and host business meetings.
• The spa offers Burger King branded towels and can be rented out for three hours for the equivalent of $280.

Read more here.

Source: CNN

Via: Marginal Revolution

Erik Rood put together figures on the cereal market:

• There is no better time for cereal aficionados to live. Since 2000 between ten and twenty new cereals have been released every year – the highest rate in the past 100 years.
• Just five companies, led by General Mills and Kellogg’s, are responsible for 95% of cereals that go to market.
• These companies operate in a cut-throat environment. Almost half of all cereals survive for less than five years before they’re pulled from the shelves.
• Once you find a winning cereal formula though, the rewards are lucrative. Kellogg’s Corn Flames have been going strong in the market for 109 years.
• Surprisingly though that isn’t the oldest cereal on the market. This distinction goes to Grape-Nuts which were introduced ten years before Corn Flakes, in 1897.

Read more here.

Source: Data-Driven Thoughts

Cadbury, the brand behind Dairy Milk, put its money where its mouth – well, tongue – is, writes Rosie Vare:

• Cadbury has bought out a £1 Million insurance policy on the taste buds of its chief taste scientist.
• As a condition to selling the policy, the insurer Lloyds requires that she not take up sword swallowing as a hobby, or eat certain types of hot peppers.
• Cadbury considers her taste buds key to ensuring that their chocolate has the right “mouth feel” and melts at the right temperature.

Read more at the source link.

Source: AOL (Auto-play video warning).

Carlye Wisel visited a luxury gym in Beverly Hills and took a look at what might be in store for our future:

• Exercise bikes stationed in a pod are submerged in water, to increase the amount of resistance on offer, leading to a more intensive workout.
• The water pods are also designed to provide aromatherapy to hopefully put you in a more relaxed state of mind.
• Another pod contains a treadmill. Once you seal yourself inside and start running, collagen lamps turn on, with some believing that they can help reduce cellulite.
• Of course each of the machines come with large touchscreens that allow users to adjust the intensity of their exercise.
• All in all these new generation machines cost as much as $20,000 a device.

Read more, and see photos of the machines here.

Source: Racked

Restaurants that serve a wide variety of cuisines, and are on the pricier end on the market, are all starting to offer burgers. Ryan Sutton looked into why this was:

• Restaurants that introduce a burger usually price it to be much cheaper than the rest of the options on the menu.
• And since burgers normally come with fries, it usually means patrons are too full to consider appetizers or deserts.
• Therefore, the economics of burgers are confusing – they seem like they would drag down restaurant margins.
• But restaurants reason that they attract a broader base of customers who might eventually order more expensive things on the menu.
• It’s the dinner period that is usually the most lucrative for high-end restaurants anyway, so several will limit the burger option to the lunch menu.
• Though classy restaurants also have to deal with grumpy chefs who didn’t get into the gourmet food preparation business to flip burgers. To placate them, some restaurants will limit the number of burgers they sell to as little as five per day.

Read more here.

Source: Eater

Via: Marginal Revolution

Lauren Alix Brown wrote about hospitals and the battle for quiet:

• Between beeping monitors, shuffling orderlies, and moaning patients, hospitals are not known for their silence.
• And it’s getting worse. According to one study noise levels at some hospitals are 100 decibels– as loud as a chainsaw.
• This is a problem since the hospital environment doesn’t encourage sleep – which is crucial to healing.
• The beeping machines could be replaced with wearables that monitor vitals and automatically inform hospital staff if something is going wrong.
• Other sounds could be blocked by the simple act of closing doors to patient rooms – at the moment hospital staff like to keep them upon so they can keep an eye on everybody.
• Some are looking into the kinds of ambient music that can be played to promote healing.

Read more about the battle to hush hospitals here.

Source: Quartz

Joshua Keating wrote about the multiple conundrums facing the shipping industry:

• After Hanjin, a South Korean shipping firm, unexpectedly went bankrupt; the 85 container ships it had out sailing at the time have been stranded at sea. Ports refuse to serve them because they’re not sure that they’ll get paid for their services, and the crews are running low on food and water.
• This all stems from over-capacity in international shipping. Shipping capacity grew 8.6% in 2015, while global trade only grew 2.6%.
• Shipping capacity increased because analysts expected demand for shipping to rebound after the financial crisis. What experts weren’t banking on, however, was a slowdown in China’s economy.
• This is also hurting Egypt, which controls the Suez Canal, and Panama, with its eponymous Canal. Both countries recently spent substantial amounts of money to increase the operating capacity of the Canals…just as global shipping crashed.
• And so 25% of the world’s shipping capacity is entirely unused, with hundreds of boats just waiting in docks.
• The industry would recover if supply were to decrease – perhaps by having some ships scrapped and sold for their metal. But with prices for commodities like steel at record lows, it’s not even cost-effective to do that.

Read about what will happen to the cargo on the stranded ships, the effect that Hanjin’s bankruptcy is having on other shipping companies, and other details here.

Source: Slate

The leaders of the United States and the Philippines have been having a rather public spat. Ian Sayson looked at the effect it was having on The Philippines’ economy:

• The Philippines stock exchange index fell 1.3% largely as a result of the feud.
• This is driven in part by foreign funds who have sold their investments in the country, believing that the once rising superstar of an economy, has seen its prospects dim, due to a President whose behaviour can be erratic.
• The Philippines is the only major Asian market that has seen stock market declines in recent times.

Read more here.

Source: The Independent

Daniel Kolitz examined all the ways that public infrastructure can be used to discriminate:

• Ever since anti-discriminatory laws have passed, racists have looked for subtle ways that they can prevent people of a different skin colour from entering their communities.
• Robert Moses, a city-builder for example, had all Long Island Parkway overpasses built with a clearance as low as 2.3 meters, to prevent lower income people, who are typically minorities and rely on buses, to enter the richer areas of Long Island.
• Public beaches with homes may not have public bathrooms, or public parking lots, ensuring that those who live on the waterfront essentially get to treat the public beaches as private property.
• Roads linking rich and poor communities may be closed due to “noise” concerns.
• Public infrastructure – such as subway lines – may be prevented from extending to richer communities, to keep the poor away.

The full article goes into all the ways that infrastructure can be used to segregate. Read it here.

Source: Hopes & Fears