You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

Piggly Wiggly was the first true self-service grocery store. Before their founding in September 6, 1916, grocery stores did not allow their customers to gather their own goods. Instead, a customer would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then go through the store, gathering them.

[Lee Stewart]

The Japanese never ate salmon sushi until the 1980s when a Norwegian businessman, hired by Norway’s government to offload excess salmon, made a deal with a Japanese company to sell the fish in its grocery stores, leading to its popularity today.

[Lee Stewart]

Ingredients in the average bottle of prestige perfume cost about $1.20 to $1.50. The actual liquid in a typical bottle of $150 perfume is less than 1% of the retail cost. The bottle, box and display carton typically cost four to six times more than the fragrance itself

[Lee Stewart]

The inventors of Hot Wheels (Elliot Handler) and the Barbie dolls (Ruth Handler) were married for over two decades before either toy was invented. Barbie and Ken were named after their children.

[Lee Stewart]

A New Orleans restaurant has been owned by the same family since 1840. Antoine’s, famous for Oyster Rockefeller and Baked Alaska, has had five generations of the family run it, and a sixth is preparing to take over. It is the US’s oldest continuously family-run restaurant.

[Lee Stewart]

Louis Chevrolet, the founder of Chevrolet died bankrupt and poor working as a mechanic for the company he started.

[Lee Stewart]

After racking up a $40 late fee on a VHS copy of Apollo 13, Reed Hastings was inspired to start Netflix.

[Lee Stewart]

When adjusted for inflation, the Dutch East India Company would be valued at about $7.4 trillion if it were still in business today, making it the most valuable company in history.

[Lee Stewart]

The cost of a taxi permit in NYC is around $1,000,000.

[Lee Stewart]