February 26, 2025

The Appetizer

“Maybe we should just start keeping mackerel in the cruisers.”

• Police officer Christian Bruckhart after a 911 call regarding a baby seal wandering the streets of New Haven, Connecticut

Now, on to the numbers. Drum roll, please …

• $49,284: The average annual tuition for private day school in the U.S. in 2025, up 7.4% from the previous year.
• Two out of three: The share of Americans that bring back a souvenir from their travels.
• 29.2%: The percentage of individual investors that expect stock prices to rise over the next six months as of February 19, 2025, down from 41.0% at the end of January.
• 3 minutes and 45.14 seconds: The time Norwegian runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen posted for the mile, breaking the men’s indoor mile record. He also broke the 1,500-meter record in the same race.
• 31,000 miles: The expected length of the underwater cable Meta plans to build. Spanning from the U.S. to India, it will be longest underwater cable in the world.

Dig In
The Reservation Hustle

Picture this: It’s Friday night. You’re craving dinner at your favorite restaurant – maybe it’s a solo treat, a catch-up with friends, or a cozy family outing. The plan? Enjoy a fantastic meal, then head home to binge your latest TV obsession. Music to my ears.

Not so fast. If your go-to spot is even remotely popular, snagging a table might be harder than scoring front row tickets to Taylor Swift. That might be a little dramatic, but restaurant reservations have become a hot commodity, and we might have TikTok to blame. 38% of TikTok users admit they’ve visited or ordered food from a restaurant after seeing a TikTok video about it.

But here is where things get wild: You can always buy a reservation. Yes, restaurant bidding is officially a thing. Some foodies are spending thousands of dollars just to get a seat at trendy restaurants. One college student made $70,000 in a year as a reservation seller (or whatever we are calling this hustle). He flipped a lunch table at a popular Manhattan French spot for .855 and a nearly impossible Carbone reservation for $1,050. Food or drinks haven’t even been ordered yet – this is just for a place to sit.

Who is making all these reservations? Men! Turns out, guys are two times more likely to always book a reservation compared to women! Shoutout for planning date/family night ’ you’re keeping this whole system running! Moral of the story: Plan ahead or be prepared to pay up!

Weekly Specials

We have some fresh Gen Z slang to share. This week, we bring you “lore.” Lore is your origin story. All of the dramatic twists and turns that made you the person you are today. “Lore drops” may be when a reserved individual shares something about their personal life. You have a pet iguana!

Got $1.1 billion lying around? That’s the going price for a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper on Madison Avenue. Formerly known as the IBM Building, this is one of New York’s biggest trophy office buildings to be marketed since the pandemic.

With record travel in 2024, overhead bin etiquette on planes has become a concern. We need to work together to avoid the dreaded gate-checked bag. Utilize the space under seats and pile in to any bin available on the plane.

A legend of the tax prep game, Else M. Rike will be 101 this busy season and won’t be taking a day off to celebrate. She has been operating as an independent tax preparer for 70 years, and we respect her hustle.

Corporate Lunch

Nike has made its biggest move since signing Michael Jordan in teaming up with Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand Skims to bring us some new athleisure drip

Coca-Cola is making its own prebiotic soda, following the success of Olipop and Poppi. This beverage will be marketed under the Simply brand, the same lovely folks that brought us the Maybach of orange juice.

Meta is launching a new team dedicated to making AI-powered humanoid robots to help with household chores and definitely not take over the world.

Kentucky Fried Chicken is moving to Texas. What is going on? Is anything real anymore?

There are rumblings that Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) are in talks to acquire parts of Intel. You didn’t hear it from me, but there are reports that Broadcom wants Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, while TSMC is looking at the chip plants.

Southwest Airlines is cutting 15% of corporate jobs, accounting for 1,700 jobs. It was either cut jobs or they were going to start offering outdoor seating to cut costs.

Another top AI model has been released. Musk’s xAI dropped Grok 3, claiming better performance than rivals. The team is also rolling out a search engine called “Deep Search.” The influence of DeepSeek is undeniable.

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Past performance is not indicative of future results.