The Rise And Fall Of 17 American Industries | Business Insider Marathon | Business Insider

America used to produce almost all of its own garlic, but when cheaper Chinese bulbs flooded in, most U.S. producers went bankrupt. Ninety percent of the shrimp Americans eat today comes from other countries. That's one of the toughest jobs you could ever do, and if you're not getting your due for it, why do it?

So what went wrong in these American industries, and can they recover? Christopher Ranch produces more than half of all garlic grown in the United States. Here, its crops span an area about half the size of Manhattan. In other words, 1 billion bulbs of garlic.

That’s Ken Christopher, grandson of the original Christopher who gave the ranch its name in 1956 when he first started growing garlic on just 10 acres. Garlic is an asexual plant; it’s essentially a clone of itself. Year after year, you’re going to be guaranteed to have the same flavor profile throughout the decades. So today, we can enjoy the same Italian bold flavor that my grandfather first selected 60 years ago.

They plant all of it in November. Bulbs grow underground over the span of 9 months. Once they’re ready, farmers have about a month to dig everything up by hand. Machines would rip the garlic's thin layers of skin, making it harder to sell and quicker to rot. There simply is no automated process; the hand selection process remains the best.

They ripen between June and August, so the company hires an extra 3,000 workers for just those few months. American farmers often struggle to recruit people for this work, so the ranch hires workers from Mexico on temporary agricultural visas. One problem you’re going to find with a lot of farmers in this area is labor. How can we possibly get enough people to produce the food that Americans eat?

It takes hundreds more hands at giant warehouses like these to get produce like garlic store-ready. It's critical to get it into one of these rooms as fast as we can. Each one of 100 million pounds, wherever they're grown in California, all come home to here. Workers wheel it all in in these 2,000 lb bins. It’s 90° in here; heat loosens up the skins so these scraps can fall off.

Then, the garlic goes onto this conveyor belt. Because garlic is a root crop, sometimes you're going to have some staining all around the skins. It's our job to make it give that perfect appearance that you're used to at the market. Ken runs sales for the ranch and checks that all the bulbs look packaged pretty. The crew’s job is to go through and physically clean every single one of these bulbs. Every day, workers inspect about 200,000 lb worth, then machines sort the bulbs into seven groups depending on their size.

The smallest bulbs fall through these tight chains. As the links get bigger, they let in larger bulbs. You’re going to have the largest bulbs coming here on the left lanes, and as we go to the middle lanes, we'll have the middle-size bulbs. On the far right, we’re going to have the smallest bulbs that we’re going to pack for our customers. Restaurants usually go for the big ones; those have larger cloves. They’re easier to chop into finer pieces and give chefs more control over how garlicky their food tastes.

Different customers require different kinds of garlic. Some customers want very large bulbs, some customers want smaller bulbs, and some customers want garlic in display trays. Others want their garlic in 30 lb boxes. But only the smoothest, cleanest bulbs will make it into the shipments that leave this warehouse. Christopher Ranch says that's only about 60% of all the garlic they harvest; the rest will get processed in another room, but we'll get back to that.

Another crew checks for any lingering dirty skin that might make the bulbs less valuable, and then essentially the final part is cleaning, and then it goes into a box. This is going to be found in retailers starting next week. About 5% of the garlic Christopher Ranch produces leaves the country, going to Canada, Japan, Mexico, or New Zealand. All the rest stays in the US. Our business model will split into retail, food service, and industrial.

The company ships these boxes off to major chains like Costco, Kroger, Trader Joe's, and Safeway across all 50 states. In some of our relationships with companies like Blue Apron, they’ve mentioned that garlic is the one constant they have in every single box of product they ship out nationwide. On a typical day, they’ll fill seven semi-trucks with garlic. But things were different when Ken’s grandfather started the company in 1956, when he only sold to a produce market in San Francisco.

When he started, he was almost a joke in town. Garlic was very much a niche crop, a niche vegetable. The kind of garlic that's popular in the U.S. today was brought over by Spanish explorers in the 1500s, but it wasn't until Italian immigrants came to California in the late 1800s that the crop found its home in Gilroy. Well, in the 1950s, it was mostly popular among immigrant communities that faced discrimination. Only niche markets carried the vegetable, and it stayed out of the mainstream for decades.

Things started to change in the late 80s when American scientists confirmed the ingredient was really good for you. It contains a natural antibiotic called allicin, which can help prevent blood clots. Garlic became newsworthy, and its popularity continued to grow. So, you take a whole garlic head like that, and you know it takes a long time to take each clove off and peel it.

America’s gotten a whole lot more diverse, so as America’s cultural palates become more diverse, garlic has moved from being a very side plate to being the center plate. In the 1990s, garlic finally became one of the most produced crops in America. The only problem was that the white skins stain easily, so a lot of it was hard to sell because Americans wouldn't buy bulbs that didn't look perfect.

That's where Ken’s grandfather, Don, saw an opportunity. Because garlic is so time- and labor-intensive to grow, we want to find a home for every single pound. Christopher Ranch was the first company in America to sell the crop peeled. They invented this machine that could peel hundreds of cloves in minutes, and produce garlic Americans were willing to pay 50% more for. It gave the ranch an edge over its American competitors. Within the first few years, peeled garlic accounted for 10% of Christopher Ranch’s revenue; today, their machines peel more than a million pounds of garlic every week.

First, the bruised-up bulbs go into these giant drums called crackers, which use rubber rollers to break them down into cloves. Then a 60-person crew sorts them again, chucking out the completely rotten ones and the pretty guys. They go into a special room; giant machines portion the cloves into cups and blast them with compressed air. Most peelers do that at around 116 lb per square inch—that's about 3 to 4 times the air pressure of a car tire. Machines whip the garlic around at 1200 revolutions per minute, and those stubborn shells fly right off.

They upgrade their machines every few years. Their newest one can peel 100,000 lb of garlic in an 8-hour shift. These computers can identify which cloves are going to be okay for our final pack. They’re going to identify where the gross defects are; they can identify sunburn. Using automation, we can fire small streams of air, kick out the bad cloves, and let the good ones go by, in effect saving a whole lot on labor costs.

Today, peeled garlic accounts for 40% of the company's revenue. But Ken says they've constantly looked for new ways to keep up with growing competition from China. The U.S. started to import cheap garlic from China shortly after the Cold War, but Chinese bulbs sold for almost 50% less than American ones. The U.S. government accused Chinese producers of trying to gain a monopoly by selling garlic for less than what it takes to grow it, also known as dumping. By the mid-90s, Christopher Ranch sales had fallen by half, and the company started laying off workers.

The U.S. government tried to control it with anti-dumping duties in 1994, but Chinese imports continued, and by 2004 the U.S. was importing over half of the garlic it consumed. Between 2001 and 2005, Christopher Ranch had slashed the land it farmed by 40%. During this period, the U.S. garlic industry was losing an estimated $600 million to Chinese imports. Meanwhile, in China, garlic was beating gold stocks, becoming the country's most lucrative asset. Before the 1990s nearly all the garlic consumed in America was grown in America; there used to be 12 commercial garlic growers in the country. Now we’re down to three.

Ken often spoke about it, even on TV, as seen in this clip. He's just back from Washington D.C. where he lobbied to help win a new 10% tariff on Chinese garlic. "One of the hardest things I've ever done was actually going to D.C. and testifying and offering evidence that the Chinese continue to impact and negatively hurt the domestic garlic industry."

In 2018, then U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 10% tariff on garlic coming from China. That tariff rose to 25% in 2019, and President Biden has kept them in place. In the past decade, Chinese imports dropped overall, but the country remains America's main foreign supplier. Tariffs are applied before it even enters the country, so we found that they were incredibly effective.

Keeping the company profitable has required constant innovation, though. Over the years, they've launched dozens of new products that Americans would pay more for, like minced, crushed, pickled, or chopped garlic. "We've really had to upgrade our skill set in that respect. You're not always going to get perfect bulbs like the one you see here. We try to use every piece that we can."

This facility churns out 100,000 lb of roasted garlic every week, accounting for 5% of the company's sales. "We’re going to have a two-sided convection oven heat up the garlic to about 250°." We kind of see through a layer of garlic; then they put it on these fans for 30 minutes. "Oh sorry, I didn’t think where we were going."

It goes into this cooler next; it gets the temperature down to about 40°F, which helps make the garlic shelf stable and ready to ship across the country. They pack some of it into these 30 lb boxes and send it off to their warehouse to store. Their robots can portion out and seal up to 500 packages every hour. In a single day, Christopher Ranch cranks out about 200,000 lb of garlic.

They also sell garlic skins to local farmers as animal feed. "Some of our garlic may not be perfect for restaurants, and so we’re going to find a new home for it." But Ken says to stay competitive, they also had to sell Chinese garlic, but not under the Christopher Ranch name, and the packaging doesn't say “grown in California” like these boxes do.

If you want to zoom on this, this is kind of the most important. In 2018, a Netflix documentary "Rotten" accused the company of selling Chinese garlic peeled by prisoners under its own name. Christopher Ranch has denied those allegations. "They made a critical mistake. This is a streaming and living thing that continues to impact our brand and our business. We are an ethical company; we’re a company that strives to be the best, and we only work with suppliers that bring it into this country, that have the same certifications and documentations that we’d expect of our garlic."

Today, Chinese garlic accounts for about 8 to 10% of the company's revenue, but American garlic is still the choice of all chefs who participate in the California Garlic Festival, one of the biggest garlic fairs in the U.S. Ooh, garlic! Julie Linburg has been the head chef of the event since 2022.

She bought 300 lb of garlic from Christopher Ranch to prepare food for 3 days. "California garlic is a bit sweeter. When you flip it over, if you see that brown hairy bottom, you know it's out of our ground—our beautiful soil. If it's nice and bleached and flat, you know it came from somewhere else, very, very far away."

Julie runs a team of 40 kitchen staff at the official festival tent. "Let's open it all the way." So when they get here, it’s a fast process. She got here at 6:30 in the morning to prep before thousands of festival goers start arriving at noon. "No frying; we have no customers; everything's got to be fresh, fresh, fresh." All day, they'll prepare nothing but the two signature dishes created by Julie herself: garlic fries and garlic bread.

It may sound simple, but she's thought of every detail carefully. "Our special concoction, and then they will put parm and/or bacon." Julie uses 200 lb of parmesan imported only from Italy. "Make sure we're getting some of this from the bottom, okay? How much garlic is in that? A lot! Can I say a lot?"

"So this is where the garlic bread happens. We're toasting it on a Char-broiler." In 3 days, they go through about 600 loaves of soft French bread from a local bakery and 300 lb of butter. "Once it gets nice and toasty, it comes over here and it gets dipped in this special concoction that smells just a little bit like garlic. It’s garlic and butter and some other things."

She uses pre-minced garlic she buys from Christopher Ranch as a base and adds some fresh ground on top, and "then we wrap it." And here is an order of garlic bread! "Smell-a-vision!" I don't know if the camera captures that, but then we will rent it by the box. Make sure it's the right size; one every new batch needs to be approved by Tony Noet, small, the organizer of the festival.

Little SP Tony is in charge of the garlic pesto pasta, a recipe he learned from his Italian grandmother. "This ain't McDonald's here; this is, you know, stuff back at the ranch in the old days. You know, I enjoy cooking, and that way, I get to eat at Tony Farms walnuts."

But everyone here knows him as the guy who saved the Garlic Festival in California. "We heard a few years ago that the Garlic Festival was going to close, and it's been the longest-running festival here in California. Well, that's when I stepped in and said, we're going to continue to keep the Garlic Festival alive."

The city of Gilroy used to run the largest Garlic Festival but decided to drop it in 2022. Three years earlier, a mass shooting at the festival caused insurance rates to spike, and the COVID-19 pandemic slashed turnout in 2020. A year after that, it was a legacy that we thought we couldn't let go. "I mean, it's just part of our life cycle here in California, and we believe in local business, local products—that’s very important—keeping our local economies going."

Though this is technically a different festival, Tony invested more than half a million dollars out of his own pocket to continue the tradition near its former home in Gilroy. "It's important for agriculture, the community, the people, that there are so many people involved in agriculture throughout California, throughout the world."

Julie waves to the camera. "Hey everybody!" Without her, this wouldn’t go. "She gives me orders, and I think I'm the boss now." She's the boss in the kitchen.

This year, nearly 16,000 people attended the festival, more than double the attendance in 2023. Cali Garlic Alley is open for business! "Follow the smell: garlic fries, garlic bread, and how about some garlic pasta?"

Garlic, garlic, garlic! "That's how what I—how I grew up as a Filipino family. My mom cooks everything with garlic, so—and it keeps the vampires away!"

About 150 vendors from all over the state signed up using California garlic on chicken. "Alright, here’s the magic: more garlic. Pork, our famous pork belly, and even honey and butter. Would you guys like to try a free sample?"

"You like it?" "It would be a sad, sad place to be without garlic." "Yes, well, I'm adding it right now." One vendor here even puts garlic in ice cream! "Ice cream, ice cream! It's different, yeah! He's Italian, so they eat a lot of garlic, and in my culture, which is Cambodian, we eat a lot of garlic too. But to infuse it into an ice cream, it's amazing! I love it!"

I'm not sure, but some festival goers told us it wasn't just about buying local. "It's amazing! It has healing properties; it's very good for your body—it acts like an antibiotic. I eat garlic in the morning, in the afternoon. So I have to be careful when I'm engaging with people, 'cause they'll smell—the'll smell the garlic before they see me!"

Ken says these are the customers who will keep the business going. "We're finding that Americans want the safest and healthiest product for them and their family."

Christopher Ranch has its own tent here selling minced, peeled, and organic bulbs. The company used to supply all the garlic for the original Festival back in Gilroy. Since co-founding it in 1979, nowadays other producers participate too, but Ken says organic only recently became a trend—about 10 years ago. "We started really investing in our organic program, and since then we scaled up. They started off with about a million pounds of organic garlic, which was grown without pesticides, fertilizers, or hormones.

That often means producing it takes more work and the garlic has a greater chance of rotting, which is part of what makes organic more expensive. But Americans have been buying more of it anyway. Today, Christopher Ranch grows 15 million pounds of organic garlic, about 20% of its annual crop. "We found that to be our best profit margin center. As inflation goes up, as the cost of labor goes up, as we have more scarcity for land and water, really pivoting towards organics and a more high-end heirloom program is going to be the path forward.”

As for the produce, Christopher Ranch doesn't sell during the harvest season. "Each one of the rooms behind me, we're going to store millions of pounds of garlic from our harvest. And as you can see, we have garlic that was harvested at the end of June of 2023."

So last week we just opened up the room behind me, and the garlic is as good as you could hope for. The garlic you see here essentially goes to sleep for 12 months. They can pull garlic from here all year. You can remove the oxygen from the room, lower the temperature, and keep your product safe.

But Ken says farming is always a gamble. Over the past decade, droughts in California have made it harder to grow in the area, and Silicon Valley is expanding, making land a lot more expensive than it used to be. Meanwhile, America's appetite for garlic is still growing. The country consumed over $4.5 billion worth in 2023, and Ken says regardless of how or where his ranch harvests it, he's confident homegrown garlic will never go away.

"How important is garlic to your family?" "Garlic means nothing to me." "No! Garlic is a part of our DNA; it's part of our culture; it's part of who we are. It's an inspiration for our whole family."

Shrimp is the most consumed seafood in the United States, and in Louisiana, it's big business. The wild crustaceans bring in about $1.3 billion for the state every year, but for the last few years, shrimpers have been hit with a perfect storm of rising fuel costs and rock-bottom prices.

"That's one of the toughest jobs you could ever do, and if you're not getting your dues for it, why do it?" Producers say a flood of cheaper, imported shrimp from India and Ecuador is sinking Louisiana's industry, but there's no way to feed America's skyrocketing demand without imports, which make up 90% of the shrimp the U.S. consumes.

Up against these headwinds, companies up and down Louisiana's supply chain are closing up shop. "If you worked hard and you did the right thing, you could become a millionaire in the '80s. And now, you can barely make a living. So how did the industry get this bad, and is it too late to save it?"

New Orleans chef Justin Kennedy insists on buying only wild shrimp caught by fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico. "We have never fried a foreign shrimp and ever served it to our customer. I'm never even looking at it as an option." He runs Parkway Bakery and Tavern, a New Orleans fixture since 1911, famous for these massive po'boys. "It's just one of those perfect little things that bring all walks of life together, and damn if it isn't a sandwich!"

He can go through 300,000 lbs of shrimp a week. "So what this is is a sink that we just have chilled water piped to. And it’s just a quick thaw to thaw out our seafood. If you look at them, they're peeled. We take that vein out because it’s a cleaner shrimp. It butterflies it a little bit more to kind of hold the batter and just make it a better bite."

"I'm going to scoop a heaping pile of it up, so we're going to dust this up." He coats them in only corn flour. "We just use the natural juices and moisture from the shrimp to pick up that flour. You lightly, lightly shake that off."

"350°—that’s pure vegetable oil. This one right here is getting that golden brown color. Right, looking like little baby fried chicken! Watch this; you break that open." Look at that! Look at that little coating! Look at that Louisiana white meat in there! You know, you can't, you can't get no better than that!"

That shrimp will eventually meet one of these giant loaves. "I think I'm almost, uh, I'm almost two breads tall. Let's see." The French people kind of laugh at it 'cause we call it French bread, but it's New Orleans French bread. "This ain't French bread!"

Justin hits the bread with some mayo, lettuce, and tomato, and then we start dealing the shrimp. "Two handfuls?" "Oh no, we put more in than that. Yeah, I mean, we do four handfuls. It's a big sandwich, but you'll notice when you see this thing laid out in front of you, you'll be like, ‘How am I going to eat all that?’ And then all of a sudden, it's gone."

"Go! We do one fold, tuck these in, wrapping. We're going—we're going to put one more on there. There you go; Parkway Bakery shrimp po'boy! Where's that going now?" "In my belly!" [Laughter]

About a thousand people line up every day for these sandwiches, and Justin credits local shrimp for his award-winning recipe. "You know, I’ve had people try to sample me foreign; the batter won’t stick on it. It’s translucent when you cook it; you never see this pretty white meat. It still looks clear; it still looks like this when you cook it, but this Louisiana shrimp's true and true every time. You can't beat 'em!"

Justin gets most of his shrimp from this factory right up the road. Kristen Bomber is one of the few processors left in the area who only works with Gulf shrimp, just like his family has for over 130 years. "We've definitely seen a lot of processors go out of business. It's become more of a volume game because the margins are so tight."

His company processes 30 million pounds of shrimp annually. "So what we’re doing is easy peeling shrimp. We’re hand-feeding it into a machine that splits the back of the shell, cuts the shell open, and then it allows, when you cook it, more flavor to get into the shrimp as well as making it easier to peel."

Kristen's team flash freezes all the crustaceans in this room; that’s how they're able to transport the shrimp all over the country. "So they're picking shrimp for the second time to make sure they get all the defects out of it before it goes up."

"This machine separates the pieces so they won't stick together when they're frozen. Then, they take a trip down this tunnel at -400°F. After the shrimp hits the liquid nitrogen, it forms a crust on the shrimp, and then it moves slowly through the belt to freeze from the outside in. Don't stick your finger unless you have a warrant that you want to burn."

"This machine portions the seafood into 5 lb bags of about 15 pieces. Each bag gets a traceability barcode linking it all the way back to the shrimp."

This processed product comes out to anywhere from $7 to $10 a pound, depending on the season. With inflation, everything is getting more and more expensive, and running these processing plants and all this moving equipment and avoiding breakdowns takes a lot of capital.

People have been fishing and processing this shrimp in Louisiana for centuries—from Cajun fishermen to the indigenous people of the United Houma Nation. In the 1800s, shrimp was a staple food of the poor, and sellers couldn't transport it far because shrimp spoiled so easily in the Louisiana heat. That was until the mid-1800s when several advancements brought shrimp beyond the local scene.

Chinese immigrants introduced traditional drying techniques that could preserve the shrimp, and the first canning factory in New Orleans opened up in 1875. But fresh shrimp transported on ice was expensive, so it took on a reputation as a luxury item tossed into shrimp salads and perched in cocktails. By the 1950s, techniques to freeze shrimp and new refrigerated trucks sealed the deal. They allowed for seafood delivery as far away as the East Coast and Chicago.

This was about the time that shrimp imports into the U.S. from Mexico and then India began to take off. By 1970, demand across the U.S. had nearly tripled, and domestic shrimpers caught more to keep up with Louisiana leading the pack. By the '90s, the state's shrimp and shellfish generated nearly $2 billion and supported 22,000 jobs, and come the turn of the century, shrimp became the most consumed seafood in America.

At the same time, new tech helped farms in Asia and South America raise a lot more shrimp. In less than a decade, farming production skyrocketed nearly 200%, overtaking global catches of wild shrimp. In 2023, the U.S. imported 1.7 billion pounds, nearly as much as its population consumes, and these imports are often cheaper than wild-caught U.S. shrimp. That's because labor costs are lower in big shrimp-farming countries like India and Ecuador, and their governments have subsidized these operations.

In the U.S., domestic shrimp prices have dropped to compete with the low import prices. Meanwhile, shrimpers like Captain Lonnie Mayu Jr. are facing skyrocketing costs of operating a boat. "You're wasting fuel and ice if you don't catch anything. Since the 1980s, a block of ice has gone from $14 to $26. Today, a set of new nets more than doubled, and a gallon of gas more than tripled in price."

At 82 years old, Lonnie, who goes by Knuckles, hasn't given up trolling these waters, even after six decades. Starting in May, he heads out to catch brown shrimp, usually around sunset. "You have to go do your homework and know where they're going to be at."

He works independently like most of the shrimpers here. "Right about there—little too far." During the day, brown shrimp may bury themselves in the sediment to hide from predators, but after dark, they often come out and roam in shallow water.

Knuckles and his deckhand Steve drop these nets that skim the top of the water. "We're not dragging anything on the bottom." He positions himself against the current, so the shrimp flow right into his nets. "The shrimp are not like fish; they can't really swim that great; they take a ride on a current."

Knuckles and Steve will pick out and keep just the shrimp; sea turtles have an escape hatch in the net, and other animals get thrown back into the sea, where some dolphins are waiting to chow down on them.

"If we don't pick up and that favor often enough, they'll take and bite out the net. They can literally rip a 4-foot hole in it, which is going to take a lot of time to fix."

Like this one, Knuckles pulls up the net so he can sew it closed. "You’re going to lose everything, you know. You’re going to be working for literally nothing." This work can be grueling; some shrimpers have big enough vessels they can stay out for weeks at a time.

Knuckles has a smaller boat, so he fishes just until morning. "But it keeps you in shape." But even after all this work, there’s a chance they could have a bad run tonight.

"Most of the nets were full of catfish." "Ooh, catfish! You see the belly? They’re full of shrimp, full of shrimp. They went in; they're the ones that ate all the shrimp. Ain’t got a pound of shrimp. It's all catfish. I'm going to try pushing up, going a little further up in the lake or something."

Knuckles spent $45,000 buying and fixing up his boat. It was meant to be his ticket to retirement, but now he’s unsure that plan will work. "For me to get out of the business, I got to sell it. I got no retirement, but I can't sell a boat. Can't give it away. Nobody wants it."

Most shrimpers agree it's getting harder to justify going out. "For this boat to leave the dock is going to cost me over $1,000. They're killing us; the farmers are killing us right now. Nobody wants to do it no more because they're struggling."

Melina Chie has been fishing for 8 years; like 60% of the state's shrimp boat owners, she and her husband are originally from Southeast Asia. "With our education, there's nothing else we could do besides fishermen. Especially like me and my husband—we're in our mid-50s. Melina and her husband weren't able to go to college, but they hoped shrimping would help their kids do the opposite.

"It's not enough to pay, especially when you have two kids in college; you're struggling." Dock owners are feeling the impact too, 'cause if we don’t bring no shrimp, they don’t make no money either, you know?

When the shrimp boats go out, they're going to kill the docks too."

That’s a pretty shrimp. Dean Bard's family has been buying and selling local shrimp for five generations. "I was born in a shrimp dock. When I was a baby, they used to put me in a shrimp box." His dock, two hours south of New Orleans, was once one of the biggest shrimp suppliers in the country.

But last year, he paid the lowest prices he ever has for the larger shrimp. "Thirty-something years ago, they went down from $5 to $1.30. That's because he's selling it for so little to the peeling factories. Right now, that is the cheapest I've ever seen in my life. I'm sick to my stomach. I ain't never seen nothing like this. Never. Never in my life seen it this bad."

After six decades in the industry, Dean is no stranger to financial challenges—from the 2010 BP oil spill to big storms. His dock had $2 million in damages after Hurricane Ida hit in 2021. "Where you’re standing right there wasn’t even there after the storm. I mean, I've rebuilt this building at least eight, nine times." He never fixed up this part of his marina. "Oh, it brings tears to your eyes. I mean, everything you work for all your life is gone."

But imports, he says, have done even more damage. "We're directly correlated with imports. If a completely processed product is coming in for just over $4 a pound, that means our dockside prices have to be lower. The processors’ prices are lower."

"So to be able to try to get that market share and keep it, so you're making the same amount of money that you would in 2000, but 22 years later, fewer boats can afford to go out, so less shrimp is landing on Dean's dock."

"We're down to right under 20% of what we normally are for this time of the year. On this day, we visited in May 2023—not a single shrimp boat pulled up to unload."

"It ain't gonna last too much longer like this. Thank God I'm almost 65 years old and I ain't got no kids in this business." Dean estimates that 96% of the docks operating when he started out have since closed down. "I feel bad for the people because I know once I'm gone they're going to have to drive 50, 60, 70 miles to go sell their product."

Just like Knuckles. When Dean retires, he doesn't think anyone will buy the company. "Nobody can afford to take it over." "The property is worth more into... [Music] business."

Louisiana still hauls in the most shrimp of any U.S. state over 70 million pounds in 2023, but that's a small fraction of the roughly 2 billion pounds the U.S. consumes. The American landings of shrimp cannot cover the overall consumption of shrimp; nearly 90% of the shrimp Americans eat is imported, and much of it is sourced using controversial practices.

In 2021, an International Trade Commission analysis indicated that shrimp might be the U.S. seafood market most affected by illegal fishing like this boat off the coast of Gambia. It had an illegal, undersized net, and although the shrimp was labeled sustainable, 99.9% of the seafood on board were other species like sharks and octopuses.

A lot of the time, that bycatch dies on the deck and just gets thrown back into the ocean. But the majority of the shrimp the U.S. imports is farm-raised. A lot of our shrimp comes from India, where there are huge environmental concerns as well as ongoing allegations of human rights abuses.

In a 2024 Associated Press report, women in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh were peeling frozen shrimp without protective gear, which can lead to frostbite. "It's kept incredibly cold to keep bacteria from proliferating. I don't know about you, but I don't want to hold ice cubes in my hand all day while I'm also trying to do very nimble work with my fingers."

One of the huge issues is that these shrimp farms are isolated; they're far out on the coast. "You know, there's no OSHA; there's no one protecting and making sure that the conditions are safe. But they have few other options for work. A lot of times, when these aquaculture facilities are built, other economic resources in these areas [Music] disappear."

For Arugula, baby is still trying to pay off an $8,500 loan she took out when her son was dying of liver disease. Since he passed, she's been raising her grandchildren alone. To get to the peeling shed, she has to pay for transportation and 25 cents to a recruiter. She earns below $4 every day, $2 under the country's minimum wage. "A lot of times, we will see a woman being threatened for her own safety or her family’s safety unless she works—unless she meets certain quotas."

Beyond the human cost, there’s also an environmental one. In India, most of the farms are along coastlines where water is plentiful, and mangrove forests thrive. Those mangroves go through deforestation; they're pulled out, they're blown up with dynamite, so we lose that nursery habitat for other sea creatures, and we lose our coastline protection when that happens. Shrimp can have 10 times the carbon footprint of beef.

Next, these really big ponds are dug into the land. The shrimp live in these ponds; chemicals and excrement from shrimp pens can leach out into surrounding environments. They can cause algae blooms and dead zones, disrupt ecosystems, and contaminate water. Shrimp farms around the world have been criticized for using antibiotics to treat illness in their ponds.

“If you've ever ridden the subway home at rush hour, you know how it is. You're in tight; you're squeezed in tight. There are great opportunities for sickness to spread, and it's that exact same situation in these ponds, which is why antibiotic use is so incredibly high.”

That overexposure can lead to antimicrobial-resistant superbugs—a health concern that's estimated to have caused nearly 1.3 million deaths around the world in 2019. Some antibiotics, like nitrofurans, have been linked to liver damage and cancer. In the U.S. and European Union, almost all of these kinds of drugs are banned. So, you could end up eating something that’s illegal here.

In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration turned away 51 shipments of shrimp because of banned antibiotics, but the organization checks just about 2% of imports. So what happens with that other 96 to 98% of seafood that's coming in? The major health concern here is the lack of testing of imported shrimp—the amount of banned substances that may be carried in the shrimp.

A 2017 LSU study found that 30 out of 42 samples tested from stores around Baton Rouge had antibiotics or antimicrobials, and that's largely due to the fact that the FDA is responsible for more than 50 million imports annually, and there's just not enough workforce to inspect everything coming in.

In the last year, the U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed duties on shrimp from India, Vietnam, and Ecuador, but these efforts, Louisiana shrimpers tell us, haven't been enough to help their incomes. Imported shrimp is still flooding the market. That’s why locals like Kristen have been advocating for more regulation.

He's a part of the Louisiana shrimp task force, which works with the state government on long-term solutions. "We need country of origin labeling on restaurant menus so at least when people buy, they’re buying and making a choice." In 2019, the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring restaurants to disclose if their shrimp is imported, but some restaurants still passed off imported as domestic.

The state's health department has handed down 2,600 violations since the law went into effect, but no restaurants were ever fined. In May 2024, the governor signed a bill for heavier fines on restaurants that mislabel seafood. If they're busted, they could be fined up to $2,000.

While Justin says he’ll never touch imported shrimp, he can understand why restaurants turn to it when the local stuff gets expensive. "They're looking for a good product that will get the register to ring, and you can't blame them either." With dock prices so low, he paid $4 a pound in 2023—almost half of what he was paying 2 years ago.

"I understand that when I get a cheap price, I know the shrimpers out there in the boats are probably getting hammered. But if it went back to $7 a pound, I’d still buy it. I just had to go up on my price."

A pricey price says he’s lucky; his customers would probably pay. "You're talking to one of the busiest po'boy shops in the city. What about the corner stores who are just living from day to day? There has to be some kind of medium. I just hope it'll work itself out."

"This has been little small holes pecking away for 30, 40, 50, 60 years. You know, and it’s, yeah, it’s coming, where, uh-oh, it's starting to take water; we're going down, you know, in this seafood industry."

The fact is, the U.S. eats so much shrimp that the stuff caught in the Gulf could never cover it all, so farm crustaceans will probably always fill that gap. "You got to quote on it; it has to come down from Washington; it has to be some work done up there with like regulating the import."

Dean wants federal assistance for shrimpers. "Yeah, there wouldn’t be a farmer left in business if they had to live like we live." They being subsidized for it. Shrimpers should be considered farmers of the sea, but we’re not. More inspections of seafood at U.S. ports and better traceability of shrimp from boat to plate would also help.

But some experts say it comes down to better consumer awareness of the health benefits of wild-caught shrimp over farms, like how the salmon industry got people to pay more for wild. "If people would know exactly what they're buying and they know exactly what they're feeding their kids, they wouldn't mind paying a couple of cents more for a product that doesn't have antibiotics in the grocery store aisle."

Don't be fooled by tricky labeling like "product of USA" or "prepared in the USA." That could be referring to where the shrimp was last processed, not necessarily where it was caught. Flip to the back of the package and look for the phrase "farm-raised" or "wild caught" followed by a country name—that should tell you where it's from. Purchase U.S.-farmed or U.S. wild shrimp. In the U.S., farmed shrimp are held to very strict regulations regarding what antibiotics they can use and how much and when.

"When you're at a restaurant, I always ask, where is that shrimp from? And if that restaurant can't answer that, then I don't order it. Or maybe we should just eat a little less shrimp and take it back to being a special occasion item, backed by consumer awareness. Maybe then shrimpers can save their sinking ship."

"We have to have it, and we will always have it. Parkway Bakery will always have Louisiana shrimp! I'll get on a boat, my damn self!"

You know this is the kitchen behind America's largest buffet, Shady Maple in Pennsylvania, which serves about 1.2 million people a year. There's 20 trays. Every piece has to be laid out individually. Customers travel from all over the country to chow down on this 200-t buffet. "You come here, you eat until you start laughing!"

"Oh my God, I don't even have HANDS!"

"It will set you back just $16 on a Saturday morning."

"I feel like it just sums up American culture so well; lots of cheap food!"

"Come on into Old Country Buffet; all-you-can-eats like this used to be all the rage across the U.S. Even big chains like Pizza Hut and KFC got in on the trend. But especially in the last decade, buffets have stumbled."

Their U.S. market size is down roughly 30% since 2012, but this place, Shady Maple, has thrived. "On average, 4,000 people come here every day to eat."

So what happened to the All-American “all-you-can-eat,” and why, against all odds, has Shady Maple kept the big business of buffets alive? Now that’s crispy!

I met with Summers Smith, Shady Maple's food quality manager, bright and early on a Saturday morning. "Good morning!" "Morning! Sunny to get to!"

"You got a little maze [Music]."

Yeah, the cooks start prep at 4:00 a.m. "We’ll go through about 7 to 750 lbs of bacon. Saturdays are their busiest days as they race to prep for 8,000 people that are going to be going that one."

"Oh, the energy is high; it’s like our Super Bowl."

The chefs cook a ton of different dishes, from American to Pennsylvania Dutch fare, honoring the Mennonite and Amish traditions of the area, like this local delicacy called scrapple.

"Liver, and it's ground up."

At the fryer station, they crisp up sausage patties and links on the griddles. Chefs drop hundreds of pancakes. This line is for egg dishes; Summer and her team go through over 700 eggs for a Saturday breakfast.

On the other side of the kitchen, this team starts cutting veggies for lunch. "They’ll set up this chopper, the broccoli, cauliflower; they chop by hand; it's a lot of prep." By 8:00 a.m., the line wrapped around the lobby, and I was getting a little hungry, so it was time to check out the buffet myself.

"Hi, just one?" "Just one."

"Today, that is going to be $16.79, okay? Gotcha!"

"Is there a time limit?" "There is not a time limit; you can stay as long as you’d like. Just if you want to stay past 11:00, that’s when we switch over to our lunch buffet."

"There you go; your chicken head down there; you can get seated by a hostess, and they’ll let you know how everything works. Thank you so much! Didn't can I get an omelet with everything on it? One chocolate chip? Thank you!"

"Oh yeah, this is like childhood right here. Jiggle, scrapple! She said this was a Pennsylvania favorite!"

"You’ve never had too much bacon fries; you need a little lime bacon to hold you over for the table!"

"Bacon, you know I have no shame; let's go!"

"Alright, got the first round!"

[Music]. The cinnamon syrup was too much!

"That is the thickest omelet! I'm going to crush it in like 30 seconds flat."

I'm going to try the Pennsylvania Dutch scrapple. "It's just like, it's literally just a patty of pork." She said there’s liver in it, all that stuff! Baked French toast?

"Okay, that’s good! I'm going to try this whoopie pie. Oh man, I'm covered in chocolate!"

"Flip the slip over when you're finished dining. And no tipping, please!"

I mean, look at this spread! If you wanted to try everything, you’re inevitably not going to be able to finish it all. What's really mind-boggling, all of this was just $16! And those affordable prices are why Americans fell in love with buffets to begin with.

Buffets can be traced back to 18th century Sweden, where elites feasted on large spreads called smorgasbord. Around the same time, the French laid out fancy meals of their own. That's actually where we got the name for buffet—from the French word for sideboard where the food was served.

But it was a Las Vegas casino manager who brought the idea to the American masses in 1946 with a 24-hour buffet that cost just a dollar. And that was something that didn’t make him a lot of money. "Herb’s buffet was meant to attract people there, and then they would stay and eat and then eventually gamble, and that's where the casino made its money."

In the 1970s, buffet chains started to spread across the U.S. Golden Corral, delightful at Old Country Buffet. Kids always get what they want. The restaurants could keep meal prices affordable because they had heavy foot traffic and low labor costs.

“It doesn’t take very many people to run a Golden Corral compared to a fancy restaurant. There weren’t as many servers, and a smaller kitchen staff cooked in big batches. While a chef at a sit-down restaurant can cook for 25 people in an hour, a buffet chef can serve 200. The profit margins at these places were razor thin."

"But it is definitely something that gets consumers in the door, and for a lot of restaurants, that’s challenge number one."

By the 1980s, these buffets were roaring successes. "A key part of the American dream is having excess, right? Having lots of stuff. And in a way, an all-you-can-eat buffet fits perfectly in with that. You know, Wendy super bar is great for families because there’s something for everyone."

The concept was so successful that big brands like KFC and Wendy’s hopped in on the trend. "I went to Pizza Hut regularly in high school for the buffet, because it was cool as a high school kid to gorge yourself with pizza."

Maple's founders started the buffet at the height of all-you-can-eats in 1985, from a small roadside veggie stand in the 60s. Their new 300-seat buffet concept was a quick hit; 1.5-hour waits were common.

But soon, all-you-can-eat stumbled across the country. In the era of fad diets, customers opted for healthier options, then into the '90s. "Especially, there are a number of fairly high-profile incidents involving kind of mass food poisoning at these places."

In 2000, a Milwaukee Sizzler was responsible for hundreds of probable E. coli cases. In 2003, a Chi-Chi in Pittsburgh was the site of, at the time, the largest hepatitis A outbreak in U.S. history. Bad green onions infected 660 people and killed four.

In 2010, a man got salmonella from an Old Country Buffet in Wyoming. The court ordered the chain to pay him million in damages. "When you have enough stories in the news about people getting food poisoning from these places, that affects public perception, and people will go elsewhere."

It’s been downhill ever since. Between 1998 and 2017, more than 1,300 all-you-can-eat restaurants in the U.S. closed down. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. "It's hard to imagine a more lethal blow to all-you-can-eat buffets than COVID. Everyone takes from the same trays and puts it on their plate. There's a bunch of silverware sitting out; it's all communal in a sense; and I don't want to eat food that maybe other people have sneezed on; that’s just gross."

Sizzler, one of the biggest buffet chains in the U.S., announced bankruptcy in September 2020. The following year, the parent company of Old Country Buffet did the same. The pandemic shook Shady Maple too. "We had to close here for over 5 months. We reopened, and then we had to close again between Thanksgiving and Christmas."

They started doing takeout, but what really kept the company afloat, Summer says, was the Shady Maple grocery store behind the buffet, which brought in thousands of customers every day. But since 2021, Shady Maple's buffet business has come back with roaring success.

"The last two years have been our best years ever, and we’re continuing to thrive." Shady Maple’s reputation for making fresh food has kept people coming back. "There is this notion that everything is fresh or homemade."

That's a different kind of proposition than a CC's or Golden [Music] Corral. Instead of using pre-made mixes, Chef Brian Nagley whips up the béchamel sauce for the mac and cheese from scratch, using milk and shredded cheddar. He also makes the stuffing, or filling, as the Pennsylvania Dutch call it, by hand, following the founder's original recipe.

He mixes 10 lb of butter with red cubes. "You can feel it. What I mean, you feel it with your hands." To keep food fresh, the staff monitors the buffet closely and orders more when a tray is close to running out.

"This is our ordering system that we order the food here that goes back to the fryer aisle in the cooks department. The fryers get the ticket. This one is for fried shrimp and fills the order as quickly as possible. That ticket stays with the batch back through the order window."

But while an order of fried shrimp might take chefs 2 minutes to fill, the fried chicken takes 30 minutes. "He’s putting a load of chicken in. His name is Tungsten, and then after he puts it in, we have them programmed in 18 minutes. It takes for fried chicken."

"What's your nickname, son?" "Handsome man, 'cause he thinks he’s handsome." "He calls me boss lady." Tungsten dunks and breads every piece by hand, so each order has 60 pieces. He’s always juggling multiple batches at once. "And some chicken!"

"Yes me! Cook! John cooks the veggies they chopped earlier."

"What did you just put in?" "Cabbage 20!" "Yes ma'am!"

"When it comes out, we throw some of our brown butter and cornflake mixture on top of it."

Summer: "This one’s just froze again." Most restaurants have a shut down, and we don’t; we keep going from the moment we open at 7:00 a.m. till we close at 7:30.

"So the equipment sometimes gets tired like everybody else does." Down the aisle, John jumps in to make potatoes.

"We mix our mashed potatoes for 5 minutes. If you do it under, they don't turn out; if you do it over, they don't turn out. There is a science to it."

At the end of the aisle, chefs pull the briskets out of the smoker. "So on a Saturday, we’ll go through 42. We have it down to a science where it’s hickory-smoked and cooked 12 to 14 hours."

"Here are they grilling rows of pierogi and kielbasa sausages!"

"Hi! It's me again!" If you're like me and want to stay for both breakfast and lunch, you just have to go back to the front and pay the $13 difference. "It's not actually an advertised thing, so you only hear it by word of mouth. It's a fun little perk from being here!"

"Um, if you have the stomach for two meals in a row?"

"Yes, round two!"

The only thing Summer said I needed to eat was this brisket. "How long have you been working here?" "For a long time—I've been the one always on this grill."

"There you go, thank you so much!"

"Some people say it's expensive, but it's actually really cheap, you know, when you think about it!"

"Hey, love it! I need to get the fried chicken; that’s what everyone told me was the best thing here."

"Handsome man! He’s the one that made that!"

"Okay got the goods, and I think that’s the stuffing that Mr. Brian made for us. Can I get a burger with cheese, please?"

"Oh my God, we haven't seen any of these foods yet."

"Oh my [Music] Lord, oh my God!"

"Okay, so the plan of getting a little bit of everything does not work when there are 700s of everything." Finally, I got to dig in, starting with these bright pink pickled eggs, a traditional Amish eat.

"Look at that! It’s not as bad as some of the people I've watched on YouTube expressed."

"It’s very vinegary, but I think it's just the color, man! Like to see an egg that's literally as pink as flesh—it's a little jarring, and I don't know if I can get past that."

"Okay, so the fried chicken, look at that!"

"Now that crispy! God, that's good!"

"Best thing I've eaten all day, bar none—best thing! Wow!"

"No wonder he knows he’s handsome!"

"We're going to try this pulled pork."

The barbecue pork and Cajun catfish were decent. The mac and cheese—"That's actually really good!"

"The brisket, seven people said this brisket was like the only thing to get here!"

"Alright, not to say my expectations are like to the moon, but they're high!"

"No, it's a little dry. Good chicken wings. Good chicken wings! Good fried chicken. Good fried shrimp!"

"Oh, the mashed potatoes! So it’s like a creamier version of what you would get out of a box, I think! I mean, for the amount of food that you can get, like, I feel like the quantity alone is worth [Music] it!"

"We tried a Chinese buffet; we tried Golden Corral, and we were comparing both of them, and we realized how bad the actual food is at both of them [Music]. And then when you come over here though, this place is actually decent! It tastes more like real food!"

"I'll definitely come back."

"Yeah, this is my third time in the past two months. We came one time and that was it; yeah, that was it, and now we look forward to coming every week. I love this place!"

By 5:30 p.m., the line has wrapped around the lobby and out the door. Like all buffets, Shady Maple works on thin margins, but this volume has kept it afloat.

"It sees three times more traffic than a Golden Corral in the area and 15 times that of a local CC's, and because of that giant line, each platter of food is turned over quickly—within 20 minutes! That does alleviate some of the food safety issues because you're turning things over so quickly; nothing sits around for too long. But when we look at the decay of the American buffet, I feel like this doesn’t even sit in the same category."

Shady Maple has found its niche. "It's not only the largest buffet in America; it's also leaned into the allure of the Amish countryside around it, focusing on home-style Pennsylvania Dutch food and touting local eats like that scrapple and mush."

"I think the reason this place has endured—it’s like food aside; it's the experience, with a gift shop and grocery store looming behind the buffet."

Shady Maple has become a... "They become rare enough to be novel again, right? And people will go to Amish country and say, 'Oh, let's go to Shady Maple,' because who the hell has one of these in their neighborhood anymore?"

Macy's has shaped our culture in more ways than we realize—from the way we shop to the way we celebrate holidays to even the invention of the retail Santa. At its peak, it was a symbol of retail innovation and cultural significance, but sales have been slipping for decades, and Macy's has been closing stores and letting go of hundreds of people, making us wonder if the department store will fade in prominence like Sears, Kmart, and other titans.

So what went wrong, and can Macy's make a comeback? Macy's started as a small dry goods store in New York City back in 1858; it was called R.H. Macy and Co. and it was the fourth business attempt by founder Rowland Hussy Macy. On its opening day, the store only made $116, but sales quickly increased, and after a year, they reached $85,000.

In the following years, Macy's expanded into 11 buildings around 14th Street in Manhattan. That was the store's first location. With his new business, Macy implemented a series of business practices that we’ve never seen before in the retail industry.

For example, at that time, bargaining and bidding were the norm; discounts were frequent, and it was common for customers to buy now and pay later. But Macy added labeled prices to all goods and stuck to it with no negotiation. He also insisted on immediate payment in cash.

The American entrepreneur started the custom of pricing goods in odd figures instead of round numbers like $4.95 instead of $5. He thought this strategy would force his staff to be more diligent with how sales were accounted for, making it more difficult for them to pocket money without being caught.

Macy was also the first to advertise prices in newspapers and offer money back if customers weren’t happy. His new stores included a made-to-measure clothing service that launched the idea of tailoring at big department stores. In the 1860s, Macy's became the first retail store to get a liquor license to serve alcohol. By 1862, it created the concept of the retail Santa, and just 2 years later, the company established the tradition of holiday windows, giving birth to window shopping and spawning an entire industry dedicated to designing elaborate store window displays.

Rowland Hussy Macy died in 1877, but his family kept running the store until another one took over: the Strauss family. Nathan and Isidor Strauss were familiar with the store because they were already doing business there; they were selling imported china and glassware to R.H. Macy and had started renting retail space to establish a china department.

In 1896, the Strauss family officially bought the company, and in 1902, the Strauss family moved Macy's uptown to Herald Square. The move was a meticulously planned operation; it included a procession of 250 delivery wagons all going up 6th Avenue. The New York Times reported that it was the greatest moving that ever happened in New York. That nine-story store would become an iconic location in pop culture; it had 33 elevators and four wooden escalators, one of the first to be used in an American store.

It initially consisted of just one building and was about 1 million square feet, but the store soon expanded through new construction, eventually taking up almost the whole block, making it a little over 2 million square feet. The department store had everything except for one corner: this tiny slice of Manhattan is known as the million-dollar corner because Macy's has never been able to buy it. With all this new construction, Macy's eventually became the world’s largest store in 1924—the same year they hosted their first Thanksgiving Day Parade, which included animals from the Central Park Zoo.

10,000 people gathered to watch this amazing event. After a few additions, elaborate floats were introduced and became an essential part of this iconic parade. In 1947, Macy's was really making a name for itself in pop culture, especially with its role in the movie "Miracle on 34th Street." What do you want for Christmas, Peter? "I want a fun, just like the big one! Spying got me! Nobody's got me!"

In 1976, it started its annual Fourth of July fireworks show, which continues to this day. Over the years, Macy's continued to scale up, opening regional stores all around the U.S., from San Francisco to Atlanta. Macy's was capitalizing on growth and taking risks by stocking up on lots of inventory, while other stores were being cautious and controlling how much product sat on their shelves.

Macy's stores always had product to sell, while competitors were reducing the number of buyers who chose what to sell and started relying more on suppliers. Well, Macy's did the opposite; they hired more specialized buyers so that each could focus on specific sections of the store. That helped them identify products that customers would love and even uncover new business opportunities.

And while other retailers were investing in research and strategic planning, setting firm targets for return on investment and other benchmarks, Macy’s didn't. They didn’t really believe in having strict returns on financial goals, so in the mid-1980s, the iconic department store started seeing the first signs of trouble.

The whole retail industry was experiencing an economic slowdown, but for Macy's, the downturn was worse because they had already high internal costs. The company was spending a lot of money rolling out more private labeled products and on ads to attract upscale customers. Their $500 million expansion across the American South also didn't help.

Reports suggest they overestimated demand, which led to stockpiling way beyond anticipated sales. They also had to slash prices to clear out their excess stock. All of that made it very hard for Macy's to pay its bills. Crushed by a $6 billion debt, Macy's filed for bankruptcy in 1992.

By 1994, Macy's was acquired by Federated Department Stores, a company that already owned its rivals like Bloomingdale's and Abraham & Strauss. With this purchase, it became the largest department store retailer in America. In the 2000s, the company tried a few different strategies to revitalize its business.

It launched new brands and smaller stores; it also started some major collaborations with celebrities like Kate Moss and Sarah Jessica Parker. It beefed up its rewards card to attract shoppers and opened its off-price store Macy's Backstage. But Macy's has been slow to adapt to online shopping and new consumer trends at a time when many customers were already walking away from department stores.

On top of that, Macy's has been facing stronger competition from discount retailers like TJ Maxx and Burlington, and more recently, from fast fashion giants like Zara, H&M, and newcomers like Shein and Temu. So Macy's has not been able to slow down this retail apocalypse. Sales dropped, and Macy's began closing stores around the U.S.

In February 2020, Macy's announced a massive restructuring that would close 125 stores and cut 2,000 jobs. The goal of the plan was to generate savings of about $1.5 billion a year. By 2022, the plan involved experimenting with concept stores that operate outside of traditional malls. In 2021, Macy's also joined the crypto craze, auctioning off NFTs depicting its most iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade floats.

But in 2023, Macy's closed another wave of stores. Behind the scenes, the company also underwent a series of executive shakeups. By February 2023, Macy's CEO Jeff Gennette retired after working at the company for 40 years. He was replaced by Tony Spring, the CEO of Bloomingdale's.

Today, Macy's runs 502 stores under its own banner. An investor group offered $5.8 billion to buy Macy's; the company declined though, citing a lack of compelling value. Shortly after, Macy's announced it would close another 150 stores in the next 3 years. The closures will leave the company with about 350 full-size Macy's department stores—that's less than half of what they had a decade ago.

But in March, the same investors returned to Macy's and upped their takeover offer to $6.6 billion. That offer is still under consideration. The fate of the retail giant remains unknown, but no matter what happens next, Macy's will always hold a significant part of our culture, life, and history.

Craft cheese has been a staple in American kitchens for over a century, but in recent years, people have been reaching for healthier options. So how did the craze for processed cheese start, and will Kraft survive?

The Kraft story began in 1903 when Canadian-born businessman James L. Kraft moved to Chicago and started selling cheese out of a wagon. Business was so successful that in 1909, Kraft and his brothers formed their own cheese company. A few years later, they opened a factory in the small town of Stockton, Illinois.

It was here that Kraft took on the challenge to turn leftover scraps of cheddar cheese into a longer-lasting product with a consistent taste. "Now look, J.L.; you know it'll never work; when you heat cheese hard enough to make it keep, it's going to separate." But it did work—Kraft discovered that if he heated the cheddar with an emulsifier, it would create a smooth cheese that would have a much longer shelf life. He was making what we now call American cheese, and in 1916, Kraft became the first person to patent this process.

His invention couldn't have come at a better time; when the U.S. military deployed over 4 million soldiers in World War I, it needed a huge supply of non-perishable food. The Army bought 6 million pounds of cheese from Kraft—over a pound and a half per soldier. By 1921, Kraft was selling 1,000 tons of cheese per month.

Kraft built on this success by acquiring competitors like the Vita Cheese Company in 1927 and merging with the Fenix Cheese Company the following year. In 1929, Kraft's annual sales surpassed $86 million. The 1930s would see another masterstroke: a box of elbow macaroni with a foil package of Kraft cheese.

Macaroni and cheese makes a hit! "And it's simple! With Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner, only a nickel is a serving, too!" And once again, the timing couldn't have been better. The United States was in the late stages of the Great Depression, and a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese could feed a family of four for only 19 cents, or roughly $35 today! It was an instant hit; Kraft sold 8 million boxes in the first year.

Sales continued to rise during World War II when ration coupons could be traded in for Kraft's macaroni and cheese dinners. And just as it had in the First World War, Kraft supplied tins of cheese to the U.S. military. The next game-changer came in 1950 when Kraft invented a way to slice processed cheese.

"Fabulous flavors, and so quick! Mom said it took him no time at all to make enough for the party!"

The trouble with Kraft cheese slices is they’re so good, there’s no such thing as enough! Fifteen years later, it launched the now ubiquitous individually wrapped slices. "Singles are individually wrapped, so every single one stays fresh even if it’s the last one in the package!"

Luckily for Kraft, Americans' appetite for cheese was skyrocketing. By 1980, Americans were consuming 172 lb of cheese per capita—more than twice as much as in 1950. Kraft wasn’t afraid to tell consumers to put cheese on just about anything—"Arrange on greens with chicken, tomato and avocado, too, with sprouts and bacon!"

By the mid-90s, Kraft controlled over 50% of the processed cheese market, and when Kraft Foods went public in 2001, it was the second-largest IPO in U.S. history. America's seemingly endless appetite for processed foods had fueled Kraft’s growth for nearly a century, but all that was about to change.

Over time, what really happened was a kind of cultural awakening to what the heck was all that stuff that we were adding to food and then putting in our bodies. In late 2002, the Food and Drug Administration accused Kraft of violating its labeling standards. The company was making its singles with milk protein concentrate, an ingredient the FDA does not allow in products labeled "pasteurized processed cheese food."

Rather than change the recipe, Kraft just relabeled its singles as "pasteurized prepared cheese product." But Americans were waking up to the potential negative health impacts of ultra-processed foods, and Kraft began to worry. The company listed consumer concerns about food safety, quality, and health as one of its major challenges.

In 2004, Kraft responded by removing trans fats from some products and offering low-fat cheese slices. Still, in 2006, the company reported a 2% decline in the processed cheese market. Awareness of healthier eating only grew when influential figures like Michelle Obama launched a national campaign to fight childhood obesity in 2010.

"Today, we know that we can no longer let our kids eat whatever they want." A 2013 petition to remove artificial dyes from Kraft macaroni and cheese gained over 360,000 signatures, and a report at the time said that more than half of consumers were concerned with the nutrition of processed cheese.

Kraft did remove synthetic dyes from its macaroni and cheese, and also ditched the artificial preservatives in its singles, but revenue from cheese products hadn't increased much since 2008. Warren Buffett took a gamble on the company in 2015, partnering with Brazilian private equity firm 3G Capital to finance a merger between Kraft and Heinz.

The move aimed to turn Kraft's fortunes around by slashing expenses and cutting 2,500 jobs. "In focusing so much on cutting costs, did Kraft Heinz miss out on some opportunities to act to do things that actually grow the top line?" But 2018 brought more bad news.

Kraft Heinz announced the market value of its brand portfolio had declined by a whopping $15.4 billion. They were respectively saying that these brands are not, you know, as powerful as they thought they were. The Kraft brand itself was responsible for a loss of $4.1 billion because the company anticipated less growth in the processed cheese category.

The whole debacle even led Warren Buffett to admit, "We paid too much money for Kraft." To some extent, our own actions had driven up the prices. Since the merger, Kraft Heinz's stock has sunk about 45%!

But Kraft tends to thrive when disasters strike. In 2020, when the pandemic drove consumers to stock up on non-perishable goods, Kraft products were suddenly in high demand. Sales of its macaroni and cheese were up 27% during the first quarter compared to the same period in 2019.

But Kraft continued to be plagued by concerns over its ingredients. "I'm not hungry; you're having one more bite—one more bite!" Critics also accused Kraft of showing healthy food in a bad light in commercials targeted at children.

Kraft for the win-win? In 2021, Kraft Heinz sold off its natural cheese division to French dairy company Lactalis Group, but processed cheese is something the company is still holding on to. That same year, the average American ate over 8 lbs of processed cheese—the highest amount since 2003—and Kraft remains one of the most powerful companies in the food industry.

Jell-O was once a beloved dessert for the American upper and middle class, but after its peak in the 1960s, sales plummeted. So what happened, and can they win over the next generation of customers with new packaging and ingredients? Before the pre-packaged boxes and colorful jiggling cups, we’ve come to recognize as Jell-O, gelatin was served in the Middle Ages.

Gelatin is made of collagen, and early recipes involved melting and filtering pigs' ears and feet. It eventually became a status symbol because you needed to have access to a lot of meat, to have enough bones to boil. You also needed a large staff to do it and some were cool to sort gelatin so it could set properly. The jiggling dish was served to European royalty, and it eventually made its way across the Atlantic to the United States.

Soon, people were looking for an easier and faster way to make gelatin, but early attempts just didn't taste that great. However, one instant gelatin product would quickly become a staple in American households: Jell-O, invented in the tiny town of Le Roy, New York, by struggling cough syrup maker Pearl Wait and his wife May.

Jell-O combined gelatin with sugary fruit syrups, which made it sweeter than other instant gelatin products. But the small-town couple didn't know how to market Jell-O, so in 1899, they sold the patent for $450—the equivalent of almost $144,000 today—to orator Frank Woodward of the Genesee Pure Food Company.

Just three years later, Jell-O sales rose to $250,000, or 7.4 million today. Jell-O founded success in a series of highly strategic and successful advertising campaigns. It printed its own recipes showing and teaching consumers all the different ways they could serve Jell-O in a meal, which generated demand for the product.

The company commissioned cookbooks and advertisements from American artist Norman Rockwell, who created colorful drawings of Jell-O in family-friendly settings. This helped to establish the company's wholesome reputation. In 1923, the Genesee Pure Food Company changed its name to the Jell-O Company.

Two years later, the Jell-O Company became part of a larger food empire, which would eventually become General Foods Corporation. When the Great Depression hit, recipe books promoted Jell-O as an affordable food option, highlighting its ability to preserve foods and transform just a few ingredients into a satisfying meal.

During World War II, Jell-O salads became a creative way to put meals together with rationed goods. Convenience also began to play a bigger role in the meals people prepared in World War II, when you had many more women mobilized in the workforce, and people were looking for something easy.

"It was probably much easier to just make some Jell-O and stick it in the fridge for the next day than to try and bake a cake or make a pie when fat was rationed." In the post-war era, elaborate Jell-O salads became a popular choice for home events like dinner parties.

These were sort of public events in a private space, so it was important that you impressed your guests. But the qualities that once made Jell-O a staple in American homes started to backfire. While Jell-O's low price point made it accessible during hard times like the Great Depression, its cheapness also degraded gelatin's once glamorous reputation.

Not to mention Jell-O's association with wartime rations made it less than appealing to consumers who no longer had to stretch out ingredients. By the '50s, gelatin was seen as something to stick leftovers in or serve to kids. And by the '70s, Jell-O sales began to decline.

In response to its slipping sales, Jell-O hired comedian and actor Bill Cosby as a spokesperson in 1974. The partnership is one of the longest celebrity endorsements in American advertising history, lasting 29 years. At the time, Cosby's endorsement helped boost sales, but Jell-O took a hit as it ramped up production of its pre-packaged single serve cups.

It was seen as snack food for children—something served in a school cafeteria or in a hospital, not a filling meal for a family. Tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris bought General Foods in 1985 and in 1989 merged it with Kraft, incorporating it into Kraft General Foods.

When the low-fat diet trend emerged in the '80s and '90s, Kraft tried to market Jell-O as a diet food with

Line with smaller pack sizes and mini Twinkies, those products really didn't get the residence in the marketplace. So then we just jumped wholeheartedly to embrace the brand. Embrace what you are, which is indulgence. The team had to make all these changes in a matter of months.

In July 2013, the undead Twinkies returned to shelves to tons of fanfare. The world is a better place tonight because Twinkies are back. The tagline was “the sweetest comeback in the history of ever.” It all went viral. It was really kind of unbelievable. A lot of that, frankly, that excitement and buzz, ironically, could have never come about if Twinkies had never come off the shelf. The saying is, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

Twinkies quickly sold out in stores across America. During our first year, we had $555 million in revenues from nothing, with profit margins of 27% in a company that lost money and had to go bankrupt twice. By 2015, Hostess was making a million Twinkies a day, 400 million a year, and $180 million in profit. At the time, Twinkies made up 80% of the company's product output, and the success just kept rising.

In 2016, Apollo and Metropolis took Hostess public. The IPO valued the company at $2.3 billion, nearly five times what Andy and Dean had paid for it. Apollo and Metropolis’ gamble that Americans still love Twinkies had paid off. But was the blood snack revived for good?

The coronavirus pandemic helped Hostess as people stayed indoors more; they bought more processed foods at the grocery store. By the end of 2020, the company's net revenue had reached a billion dollars. In September 2023, the jelly giant Smucker's secured a takeover of Hostess Brands for $5.6 billion. Having come back from the brink, it seems America isn't ready for a life in a post-Twinky world just yet.

This is what many of America's malls look like today: empty, eerie, dead. While the pandemic has most people avoiding indoor gathering spaces, social distancing is not what emptied out the mall. This footage is from 2018. For decades, the mall was both an economic and social hub and, for many, a way of life. Now, many malls in the United States have either collapsed or are on the verge.

So how did we go from this to this? The story of the mall begins in the 1950s when America was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. The middle class had more money to spend than ever before, and they were spending it on houses and cars. Along with this came Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act, which meant that people could drive to their jobs in the cities while living in a new kind of development: the suburbs.

Suburban populations rose astronomically, but they lacked what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places.” Under this model, home is the first place where you live, the second place is the workplace, and third places are the vital spaces where people go to exchange ideas, form relationships, and create communities. This could be a park, a bar, or, in today's times, social media platforms. In other words, the third place is a place to hang out.

Enter Victor Gruen, a man who would later become the king of retail for the era. Gruen, who ironically was a staunch socialist, had already made a name for himself in America designing boutique shops and storefronts, but now wanted to create something far more ambitious: an indoor downtown and what would prove to be his boldest and most enduring project yet.

Gruen set about designing the mall. On October 8th, 1956, America's first indoor mall, the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, opened its doors. Like no building ever constructed before, the Southdale Center not only had shops, but fountains, art installations, a bird sanctuary, and a sprawling courtyard—all within a single indoor complex. The mall received mostly rave reviews, deeming it an attraction on par with Disneyland, which had just opened a year earlier in 1955.

Walt Disney himself even cited Gruen as his main influence for the ideas behind Epcot. With Southdale all over the news, everyone wanted to go to the mall. Malls began springing up in every American suburb, along with large shopping center-mall hybrids and everything in between. By 1960, just four years after Gruen's first mall, there were 4,500 large shopping complexes in the United States, which averages to at least three new shopping centers opening every day.

By 1975, malls and shopping centers accounted for 33% of all retail sales in America. But Gruen's utopian vision for the mall had not been realized. Cheap food courts were installed where courtyards were supposed to be. Instead of cosmopolitan communities, developers often surrounded malls with enormous parking lots and suburban housing projects.

Exactly what Gruen was trying to thwart. Whereas the mall was designed to be the communal remedy for suburban individualism, it instead became its most potent catalyst.

Car, it's mall madness! The “shop till you drop” game that really took off in the 1980s began the mall's golden age. I hate work in theatre; all the action is on the other side of the mall. Shopping complexes continued to build at a rate of over 1,000 per year, and in 1986, Consumer Reports named the shopping mall, alongside the birth control pill, antibiotics, and the personal computer, one of the top 50 wonders that have revolutionized the lives of consumers.

Movies, board games, and even concert tours all centered around the mall. Ed's teenagers even looked at the mall as a place to which they could escape and socialize, as was epitomized in the cult classic movie “Mallrats.” I love the smell of commerce in the morning. The American mall would reach its peak in 1992 with its final evolution: the mega mall. Fittingly, in the same state as America's first mall, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, spans a whopping 5.6 million square feet, with over 500 stores, a theme park with 27 rides, an aquarium, a wedding chapel, and a movie theater.

The mega mall was immensely profitable. Reports showed that consumers were 50% more likely to buy something at an attraction-filled mega mall than at a regular mall, leading to several more mega malls being built across the 50 states. But mega malls’ gargantuan size, coupled with an unsustainable rate of construction, would lead to the collapse of the mall itself.

Although thousands of malls of all different shapes and sizes were built in the latter half of the 20th century, the basic mall layout had remained the same since 1956: two large department stores at either end connected by smaller shops in between. The bookending department stores are known as anchor stores and serve as the main attractions for the rest of the mall.

With so many malls being built in close proximity to one another, the newer malls would often poach the department stores from the older ones nearby. Stores like Macy’s or Sears would relocate to bigger, more popular roller coaster-riding mall locations, and the older malls, without their anchors, would be left to drift away and drown.

As the 2000s progressed, consumer habits shifted away from the department store altogether. Macy’s, for instance, has been steadily closing stores since 2005, most of them in malls. Department store-side vacancies are difficult to refill, and with other better malls often nearby, there is little that can be done to save a failing mall, which is why hundreds of malls have already been pronounced dead.

The dead mall has even become its own aesthetic, capturing the imaginations of several internet photographers and filmmakers. The 2017 Credits Report estimated that one in four U.S. malls would close by 2022. As foot traffic declined, developers believed the future of the mall to be less about shopping and more about the extravagant experiences offered by the biggest mega malls: bowling alleys, laser tag, go-karts, and other activities that could only be found outside the house.

Investors were hopeful that this would be achieved with the creation of the American Dream mega mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which opened in 2019. This behemoth houses not only a theme park but also a water park, an ice rink, and an indoor skiing complex. But in a world of social distancing, even America’s most spectacular malls are floundering.

As of June 2020, the Mall of America was unable to meet its billion-dollar mortgage payments for the second straight month, and the American Dream had laid off 100 employees. Will malls ever recover their mainstay status in American culture, or will we look to new types of third places in our post-pandemic future? Only time will tell. But one thing is certain: there is plenty of space for something new.

We reached out to the Mall of America and the American Dream mega mall but received no response.

Red Lobster used to be the place to be. The home of endless shrimp and cheddar bay biscuits, the place you kind of went to be fancy. But in May 2024, Red Lobster declared bankruptcy. It’s obviously more than mediocre seafood going out of style. It also has to do with private equity, and there’s talk of a shrimp mafia involved.

In some ways, it’s a perfect example of how to kill a business. I’m Emily Stewart, and I’m a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

So, the first Red Lobster opened in 1968 in Lakeland, Florida. The goal of Red Lobster was sort of to bring seafood to the masses, especially in places that were landlocked. Right? You’re not on a coast; you probably don’t have fresh seafood. It also wanted to have family prices and, you know, something that regular people could afford.

30 of them? I mean, it’s terrific. 30 shrimp for under $10! Now, at Red Lobster, it grew from 1 to 5 locations within a couple of years. In 1970, it was acquired by General Mills, a food conglomerate, and it grew more from there—across the Southeast at first, and then across the U.S. By 1978, it had grown to 236 restaurants and had sales of almost $300 million. It opened up in Canada for the first time in 1983, and then over the years it just kind of grew, grew, grew. By 1991, it had grown to 568 restaurants and had sales of $1.5 billion.

In 1995, General Mills spun off Red Lobster as part of Darden Restaurants. Red Lobster grew pretty steadily in the early 2000s, but it had some hiccups. In 2003, it launched an endless crab promotion, which is what it sounds like—you could eat all the crab that your heart desired. Turns out a lot of people really wanted to do that, and so the company lost a lot of money and their president eventually stepped down.

They also made other updates to their restaurants, like adding in wood-fire grills or updating their designs. But things eventually started to go awry. Darden stopped investing as much in Red Lobster, instead opting to put money into Olive Garden, which it also owns, and sales at Red Lobster started to flag.

In 2013, Darden came under pressure from activist investors who were unhappy with the company's strategy and direction and wanted some changes. Darden sort of panicked at this and sold off Red Lobster. That wasn’t what the activists had wanted, but there really wasn’t anything that they could do about it; the deal was done.

It got bought by Golden Gate Capital, which is a private equity firm based in San Francisco, for $2.1 billion. So, in order to finance the deal and raise cash for the deal, what Golden Gate did was a sale-leaseback transaction. What that means is that they sold off the real estate; they sold off Red Lobster restaurants and then they immediately leased them back.

So, suddenly, all of these Red Lobster stores that didn’t have rent to pay before had rent now. This maybe would have been fine, but as Red Lobster’s business started to struggle in the years to come, those rents really became a problem.

It’s a pretty common private equity move. I think it’s important to remember these people are there to make money, not often to revive the business. And so they’re going to strip assets and monetize assets in any way that they can, including through strategies like this.

So, in 2016, Golden Gate sold 25% of Red Lobster to Thai Union, which is a Thai seafood conglomerate. Then in 2020, they sold the rest of the company off to the Seafood Alliance, which is a group of investors that Thai Union is also a part of.

So, obviously, in 2020, COVID hit, and a lot of restaurants were in a pickle. Red Lobster is not an exception here; there are shutdowns, people stop going to restaurants, traffic falls. So this is a bad time for a lot of restaurants. But a lot of restaurants really did weather the storm.

But Red Lobster does have some pretty unique problems for itself. It’s hard to run a seafood restaurant in the United States. If it were easy, there would probably be more of them. And, you know, if you think about it, if you’re going out to eat in a group and one person doesn’t like seafood, you’re not going to Red Lobster.

Also, nowadays, if you’re super in the mood for fish, you can probably get it at a steakhouse. And so, again, you’re not going to Red Lobster for that. Red Lobster’s long-time CEO retired in 2021, and it really hasn’t been able to find its footing in terms of leadership since then.

And that’s made it really hard to execute a turnaround plan, right? If you don’t know who’s in charge, you also don’t know what direction you’re going in. Some experts have said that a lot of the problem here is that Thai Union just had no idea how to run a restaurant business.

They came in really wanting to cut costs, cut staffing, and not necessarily on reviving Red Lobster. They didn’t really land on a good plan for what to do to kind of turn it around.

Finally, in the middle of 2023, what Red Lobster decided to do was to make its endless shrimp promotion permanent.

“I’ve had 24 shrimps!”

“And I ate 51 shrimp!”

“I ate 50 shrimp!”

Someone had the bright idea, “Let’s do this all the time!” And so, what that means is that for $20-$25, you walk into Red Lobster and eat as much shrimp as you want. And a lot of people, again, took advantage of this.

So what happened is that Red Lobster started to lose a lot of money for the gentlemen. “All you can eat, all you can eat!”

“All right, when you’re ready, take this plate over, please!”

“Don’t take the steam tray, sir!”

Red Lobster lost $1 million on the endless promotion in the third quarter of 2023, and it lost even more money in the fourth quarter. But obviously, endless shrimp isn't the thing that killed Red Lobster. A couple of quarters of a silly promotion isn't going to take an entire business down.

So there are a few reasons why. First, it was struggling with high labor costs. You know, labor is expensive right now, and Red Lobster doesn't have some special scheme to escape that. It also had those leases that Golden Gate Capital had saddled it with a decade ago. So suddenly, all of these restaurants cannot pay their rent, and they need out of those leases.

Analysts also say that unstable leadership is to blame because if you don’t have stable leadership, it’s really hard to execute some sort of consistent turnaround vision. Years of changing tastes, poor brand management, and tough conditions have all contributed to Red Lobster’s demise.

A lot of restaurants have been able to weather these storms, but Red Lobster hasn’t. What sets Red Lobster apart is a decade of private equity and investor interference. Thai Union is a supplier of shrimp for Red Lobster. If I’m Red Lobster, maybe it’s not a great idea for me to be buying all of the shrimp, but if I’m Thai Union and I’m selling the shrimp, that’s kind of a great deal for me.

And so the new CEO is saying that Thai Union had outsized influence at Red Lobster. It’s basically saying, “Looks like something a little funky was going on.” Thai Union was pushing out other suppliers and charging Red Lobster a lot of money for this shrimp that apparently was costing Red Lobster to lose a lot of money.

Now, Thai Union says this is meritless; this is not what has happened. But still, some people are joking about the Thai shrimp mafia, basically the implication there being that something was a little untoward going on and that Thai Union was throwing around a little bit of weight at Red Lobster to line its own pockets.

So, Red Lobster did declare bankruptcy in May of 2024, and it right now is trying to figure out a path forward—what to do with its debt, who’s going to own the company. It’s talking to its creditors, who are private equity. Thai Union wants out of its Red Lobster investment and it says it’s going to take a $530 million loss on it.

It’s also closing down dozens of stores. In the meantime, according to the restaurant chain's website, more than 80 locations in at least 27 states were listed as temporarily closed. So that means a lot of workers are out of work, suppliers are in trouble, and, you know, a lot of these businesses are just gone.

So, if you love Red Lobster, the good news is it's probably not going away forever. Plenty of companies survive bankruptcy in some way, shape, or form. On a broader level, this is sort of a textbook example of how to kill a business. Investors sucked money out of Red Lobster and made money in the short term without setting it up for long-term success. This is what Wall Street does a lot of the time: it swoops in, takes money out, and walks away.

This is the last printing press in the U.S. where books are handmade from start to finish. Every letter of an Arion Press book is created one by one. Together, they make up a book that can take years to produce and cost up to $10,000 to buy. That's because this San Francisco institution uses machines and techniques that date back to the 1800s.

Printing presses like Arion used to be common, but with the advent of faster and cheaper printing, this traditional method is fading away. “So now we’re having to, like, learn as much as we can before it goes away. It is a huge responsibility. I think it kind of weighs on all of us.”

But at Arion Press, the team devotes their days to preserving this historic trade, even in one of the tech capitals of the world. We visited this 101-year-old press to learn how and why it’s still standing. Each book begins in the foundry, where Brian Fret spends his day at a monotype machine from the 1890s, making individual letters.

“It can be very, very difficult. There could be days where nothing goes right. There could be weeks where nothing goes right. When I have three casters running and nothing’s going wrong, that makes me just ridiculously happy!”

He lights a fire under the machine, melting the lead, tin, and antimony solution that is used to create the lead. “We have a pump here and a nozzle, and the pump draws up the lead and then we’ll shoot the lead out the nozzle. From there, the lead goes into a mold, then a mat case with the chosen lettering pushes down on it.”

He sends the finished type down the hall to the print room. “By the end of the day, particularly when we're printing, we’re covered with ink, and it’s just fantastic. It’s kind of like a good little kid again, getting messy and getting dirty.”

At this stage of the process, the foundry has sent us galleys of type. They come out about two pages per galley. When we get those galleys, we take a proof print of that. Jeff Raymond arranges the type into a page layout, letter by letter. “So on this one, this is page 53. To keep the page together, Jeff wraps it in string. Then he brings it to the proofing press to check for any mistakes.”

Once the proof looks good, it goes for the final print run on one of the larger presses. The final stage of the book-making process is in the binder. This is where everything gets made into the book from scratch. Megan Gibb is folds, sews, and glues each piece of the book together by hand.

“The final product is a work of art. I think there’s nothing that can compare to physically holding a book in your hands, feeling the piece of paper, running your finger over it, and feeling how the type is impressed into the page.”

However, modern technology has made this kind of letterpress printing nearly obsolete. Today, top U.S. printers use offset printing presses that can produce 120,000 pages per hour. Before working at Arion, Brian spent three years at one of these commercial factories. “I had been working printing big runs of magazines, 24-hour-a-day type of place, 12-hour shifts. There were so many people I couldn't even count how many people were there.”

Letterpress printing just can’t compete with that kind of efficiency. “I mean, there’s a reason why this line of work isn’t fiscally viable anymore. Because it is very time-intensive; that all adds up.”

While many other traditional presses have closed, Arion has stayed in business thanks to a group of loyal subscribers, like book collectors, institutions, and libraries. This broadside sheet of the Preamble to the Constitution is one of the most recent projects to come through the print room. Making only 350 copies, this limited edition print sells for $50.

Arion also sells cases of type to order, gives public tours, and holds workshops. Brian is one of a dwindling number of people who make a living as a type caster, and with fewer people practicing this historic craft, staff feel a personal responsibility to keep the knowledge alive.

“When it comes to the casting part, there are very few people who can do it. There are so few machines around anymore. And even when you do find them, the knowledge that’s out there is disappearing.”

To pass on the knowledge to the next generation, Brian takes every chance he can get to share his skills. He mentors apprentices during the four-year program at Arion. “The first few weeks I was here, I just felt I’m surrounded by these people who are making this stuff, and they knew exactly what they were doing. It’s like, oh my God! You know, it’s almost impossible to find a place where you can learn these skills.”

Brian also shares the craft with his six-year-old daughter at his garage at home.

“Happy Valentine's Day to you, see? Papa!”

“That can I do that, Papa? Okay, go!”

“Yeah, normally you do little dots.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day to you!”

“It does feel different than newer books. You know, a mass-produced book. There’s a different touch to it.”

That handmade touch is striking a chord even in the tech hub of San Francisco. “You have all these tech people, and they’ve been sitting at their computer all day, doing non-tactile things, and they come here and they’re always crazily impressed.”

This gives Arion hope that their business and this craft will continue to live on in an increasingly digital world. “You can get a book from 500 years ago, and you can still open it, and you can still enjoy that book. I have files on my computer from 20 years ago that are gone because I have no idea how to open that anymore. So I think it does really last a whole lot longer than the things that we have now. The era that it was made in adds to its character and its beauty.”

If you were in college over the last 20 years or so, you might have some memories of Mega Bus: the big blue double-decker bus with a giant yellow mascot painted on the sides. Maybe you went on a neat little weekend getaway with friends. Other times, you probably got stuck in traffic or the bus broke down on the trip.

For all of its flaws, Mega Bus was a decent and affordable way to get around for years. But now it's in trouble. The parent company, Coach USA, has filed for bankruptcy, and Mega Bus is handing over some of its routes to other operators and discounting others altogether.

Business Insider's Emily Stewart looked into what's happened to Mega Bus and whether the double-decker icon can or should survive. “These buses are actually pretty important to get people from point A to point B, especially people who maybe can’t afford a train ticket or who can’t afford a plane ticket.”

Stagecoach Group, which is based in the UK, first launched Mega Bus there in 2003. It offered seats for one pound, or a quid, which is where the mascot, Sid the Quid, gets his name. They brought Mega Bus to the U.S. in 2006.

Mega Bus was kind of a hit. It had outlets that worked kind of most of the time, if not all of the time, so you could plug your phone in; it had Wi-Fi that worked kind of none of the time. But like, you could pretend like it was going to work. You could also buy the tickets online, which was kind of novel, and so Mega Bus felt like kind of cooler than Greyhound, and it was cheap.

Mega Bus could lure people in with $1 tickets. Now, to be clear, maybe there was like a seat on the bus that was a dollar, and that wasn’t going to be your seat. Millennials loved it!

Along with Greyhound, Mega Bus became one of the two main intercity bus carriers in the U.S. But in the mid-2010s, the tide started to turn. Gas prices fell in 2015 and in 2016, which made other forms of transportation that customers might prefer—like driving and flying—cheaper.

Then FlixBus, an operator out of Germany, launched in the U.S. in 2018, which meant more competition. While Mega Bus was ahead with the power outlets and Wi-Fi, everybody else caught up. Some high-profile accidents may have left some with safety concerns too.

Then in 2019, Stagecoach sold Coach USA to a variant equity advisers for $71.40. In 2020, the pandemic hits, and the bus industry, like a lot of travel, just completely grinds to a halt. And so if they’re not bringing any money in, there’s no way to service those debt payments.

A lot of that debt is still outstanding, and so Coach USA filed for bankruptcy in the middle of 2024. Mega Bus is sort of a microcosm of what’s happening in the intercity bus industry, which has been struggling.

“I was trying to take a bus from New York City to Atlantic City over the summer, and I was kind of shocked at how few buses there were. I could still get them, but it wasn’t like I at least felt like it was five years ago when there were a bunch of options at all times.”

According to one insider, there were about 3,000 licensed bus and motor coach companies before the pandemic. Now it is about half the size. The industry has had a hard time recovering, in part because it didn't get the government assistance the airlines did during COVID.

Policymakers tend to treat it as an afterthought. There are also problems on the operational side, like rising costs for parts and the shortage of both drivers and mechanics. Bus terminals are becoming a problem too. Some localities are pushing back against them because they sometimes have an unsavory reputation.

“I’ve taken a bus before, and I think sometimes it is nice to be in a terminal and not just waiting on the side of the road, like wondering if this magical bus is going to appear or not.”

Making the issue even worse is that 33 of Greyhound’s terminals have been sold to a commercial real estate investor, and they have other plans for the space that can make them more money.

One thing that hasn’t really helped the bus industry is the involvement of finance. “They don’t really care if the public has a great place to pick up the local bus.”

In other words, the intercity bus industry is facing a lot of headwinds. Of course, if you want to hop on a bus from Boston to New York for the weekend, you still can. It just might not be a Mega Bus. It’ll probably be a Peter Pan or Greyhound or Flix or something else. But your options might be more limited than they were before and more expensive.

“I think it’s tough to think about a solution. I did find that there was kind of mention of trying to lobby a little bit more in public policy spaces to try and kind of get across to policymakers, to lawmakers, that buses do matter—whether it be providing more funding so that they can get to rural areas or that they can get to underserved areas. You want a bus terminal in your city, and you don’t want it to be 20 miles out of town where nobody can get to it.”

Still, travel in America may never be what it once was, and the days of dollar-re seats and Sid the Quid rolling down the highway could soon be gone for good.

This factory has made hats the same way for 166 years. It takes at least two months to turn raw rabbit fur into a high-end hat, which is why each one can cost up to $2,500. In fact, Borsalino made the fedora world famous. Today, just 90 employees make 70,000 hats per year. Now, that might seem like a lot, but it's a small fraction of the two million hats the factory used to crank out back in the 1920s, when almost every man wore a hat outside.

Nowadays, it seems like the only people still wearing the hats are Johnny Depp and Hasidic Jews. Nearly every man in the tight-knit Lubavitch community wears a fedora, and many splurge on a Borsalino. The market is definitely growing. So, what made the fedora so iconic? Why do thousands of religious Jews wear it, and how do the companies that make these hats plan to bring them back in style while still making them the old-fashioned way?

At the Borsalino factory in Alessandria, Italy, everything starts with scraps of rabbit fur. Most modern hat makers skip this step, opting to purchase pre-made felt. Some say it’s the custom-made rabbit fur felt that makes a true Borsalino. Some of the felting machines have been around since the late 1800s.

Every hat goes through at least 52 steps to meet Borsalino's high standards, and it’s checked for quality at every turn. These wooden machines rain down the treated fur onto a perforated metallic cone. It spins so quickly that the fur perfectly lines up to the surface. A jet of boiling water keeps the felt fixed throughout the process.

The company’s co-founder, Gippi Borsalino, learned this craft in France before moving back to Italy to start his own business in 1857. He refined the process they still use today. The hair from the rabbit is treated, felted into a cone, then washed and pressed multiple times until it shrinks down to the shape of a hat. In its heyday, Borsalino employed 6,000 people; about half of them were women.

The female workers were mostly involved in the finishing stages, especially checking for quality. The hat's popularity soon spread across the world. From the late 1800s to the 1920s, most men headed to work wearing a hat, and the factory made fedoras for iconic Hollywood movies like Casablanca.

But hat-wearing eventually grew out of fashion, especially after World War II. One reason behind that—the hats used to remind men of their time in uniform. The popularity of hats may have changed over time, but Borsalino tries to make a product of timeless quality. “We build and we manufacture, pack the head with the same process, with the same machine, with all the passage.”

Once the raw shape for the hat is created, it’s still very fragile. A worker carefully peels it off the cone, then the fabric heads to a smaller roller and cast iron. These machines help lock the fibers together.

Then the fabric goes through the first of three quality inspections. In a dark room, an artisan checks that the surface of the felt is uniform, but the felt pieces are still too big. These machines use boiling water to shrink them down and repeatedly stamp the felt. That’s where it transforms from a cone to resembling an actual hat.

Later on, the stiffening machine’s large claw breaks down the weave of the felt. It creates the division between the crown and the brim. Then it’s time for Scotty steam shaping—a process named after the Borsalino craftsman who invented it. The felt capline is placed in a machine that uses pressure and steam to press it down with an aluminum block.

Now there’s a well-defined crown in the hat. Workers remove any excess hair fibers, and the hat heads to the finishing station. Giovanni Zamiri has worked here since 1989. He helps create the shape of the hat’s brim. Giovanni says, “Everything requires close attention.”

Back in the 1920s, workers watched over the dying of the felts—they used sticks to keep them submerged—but today, machines dye the felts with steam pressure and boiling water. They soak here for at least 90 minutes. The hats are just now beginning to take on the classic fedora shape.

The accessories department sews in the lining, internal leather belt, and external cotton band—and the final flourish that’s also stood the test of time: the Borsalino logo stamped in 24-karat gold leaf. It takes nearly two months to make a hat through this painstaking process, all using the same machinery and methods the company first became famous for.

Borsalino was built on handcrafted fedoras. Today, the company is branching out into all kinds of luxury accessories. But for some, wearing a hat isn’t a fashion statement; it’s a matter of faith.

Hasidic Jews wear a variety of headwear. How you cover your head can tell others which specific community you’re a member of. Some fur hats, known as Shtreimels, can sell for thousands of dollars. The Chabad Lubavitch community adopted the fedora after World War II. That’s when Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Rebbe, fled Europe for Crown Heights, Brooklyn. After he assumed leadership of the Chabad movement in 1951, he continued wearing the layman’s hat.

“The rabbi is wearing this kind of hat, and it’s a cool hat,” says Reuain Ketki, who operates Borsalino boutiques in Jewish neighborhoods. “It’s not exactly a Stal; then it’s a no-brainer.”

Reuain thinks it’s too small; he thinks it looks good. “We let the crowd decide, basically. The smaller the brim, the nicer; the more in style it is.” But he’s a little nervous to wear, like, such an in-style hat.

Basically, returning customers can give their hats a tune-up. “This area with all these funky tools—this is basically where we take care of both new and old hats, and so we’re reshaping it and making it look like brand new.”

Demand in Jewish areas is so high that it’s created an opportunity for other hat makers to enter the market. “We start wearing hats at 13, at our bar mitzvah. So we kind of knew what it’s supposed to feel like, what a good quality hat’s supposed to feel like.”

Brooklyn brothers Ley and Yosi Chio co-founded Balisimo, which competes with Borsalino for this religious market. “So we knew what people wanted, being that we were the consumer as well.” They started their hat business back in 2017. After Ley went shopping, the prices went up, and he thought, “You know, I think we can make a better hat.”

The brothers started making hats by hand. “We put together $1,000, we got a hold of 10 sample hats, and we popped up a tent on the street. We said, ‘We’re going to start with 10 hats and try to just show it to people—not even give it to them.’”

“Everything works with steam; steam can do anything! This one actually looks pretty good. I’m not going to mess with it.”

Now they manufacture at a factory in Montreal. Right now, she’s smoothing out the sweatband and making sure it looks perfect. But just like Borsalino, this company is also relying on equipment that’s over a hundred years old. “So the equipment we’re using is so old because they don’t make that equipment anymore. The companies that used to make that equipment closed down, but you can’t buy this stuff even if you want them to.”

The machinery at Bimoso might be antiquated, but the company’s not shy about using one modern tool: social media. The company has extended its reach through celebrity endorsements from Jeremy Piven, Snoop Dogg, Cedric the Entertainer, and someone bought Jamie Foxx’s hat.

“We were told recently that, you know, he got it over 5 years ago, and he keeps it in a special place and says it’s his favorite hat from the two Sid guys in Brooklyn.”

“But we got the Bialimo hat! Look at that! Ah! Gangsta!”

I asked him if he minded giving us a shout-out. He happily did that for us! “Which really helped get us on the map!”

That brought a lot of new customers. Bimoso surpassed its goal of $1.5 million in sales last year. “A lot of people find the brand through Instagram and buy their hats through their website, where they can customize their own funky fedoras. But for their own community, the brother’s approach remains face-to-face.”

“Every day, you got to figure out a new way to reach your customers, and thank God we’re going with the old-fashioned way: where it’s word of mouth.”

“A lot of customers were skeptical; they only trusted one famous brand. So they didn’t really want to give us a try and be like, ‘Oh, let me buy this $200 hat from you guys. We never heard of you!’”

So the brothers ran a promotion at a gigantic conference for rabbis. “We had the biggest line at this convention, and all the other businesses were like, ‘What is going on at that line?’ They couldn’t even see what we were selling. We’re doing like, you know, $100 off the hat. So people just started grabbing the hats and trying them on, barely looking in a little handheld mirror.”

While Balisimo was trying to grow, Borsalino is recovering from financial struggles. Back in 2017, the brand almost went under but was bought out by a group of investors the next year. The company has shifted strategy to attract fashion-forward buyers with more than just fedoras.

“We are working to make that our brand become much more contemporary, much more fresh,” managing director Mauro Bito says. “The company’s toughest challenge is attracting younger buyers. We are really working to make that the brand much more younger because we really believe that the new generation is the future of the customer.”

A new team of fashion experts joined the company, including the former CEO of Gucci, Giacomo Sanui. The company aims to sell more hats in the U.S. and Asia, and it says the number of women buying their hats has doubled in the past 10 years.

Even with plans to expand, Borsalino won’t compromise on tradition. “We want that our customer always finds a luxury product. But for luxury, that means quality.”

And competition for the Jewish market hasn't slowed things down. “It’s an incredible thing that you see newer brands. I think it’s a positive sign. It shows that the market is dynamic and it’s growing. We don’t see any reduction in sales; we see growth.”

For Balisimo, some of its best customers are family. Dozens of members of the Chaim clan gathered in Montreal for a traditional hair-cutting ceremony for Ley’s son. “I think he is doing a very good job, and he’s creating a whole new fashion in hats—not only because it’s a custom for us to wear it, but it’s becoming a fashionable item.”

Beanie Babies were once one of the most sought-after toys in the world. “We could be millionaires! Yeah! Could be our college money!” A trading frenzy in the '90s saw $5 toys resell for thousands.

“You just have to have a lot of patience and money!” But the bubble, inflated by their mysterious inventor, burst in spectacular fashion, leaving collectors with piles of almost worthless animals.

So what happened? How did a cute bean bag go from internet sensation to neglected keepsake? This is Ty Warner, who back in the '90s was the Willy Wonka of toys. He founded Ty Inc. in 1986 just outside of Chicago, and his first creation was a lifelike cat stuffed with beans.

Joanie Hirsh Blackman was one of the only journalists to ever interview Warner, as she recalls, “His sales methods were quite eccentric. He would walk in holding this cat in his arms, and when people thought it was real, then he knew he had done what he hoped to do.”

Ty then experimented with smaller animals, less lifelike but with plush material, vibrant colors, and loosely stuffed to make them easy to handle. In '93, Warner released his first nine Beanie Babies.

Lena Trevitti joined the company in 1992. “It would often give Warner creative input. He was sort of trying to contemplate in his own design and creative process, you know, ‘Should these eyes be green or should they be blue? What do you think?’”

With a price tag of just $5, Warner hoped that the toys would have wide appeal, but Beanie Babies were far from an instant hit. “There were a lot of people that were just like, ‘No, no, I don’t want those. Those won’t work in my store.’”

That didn’t stop Warner from innovating, though. He would constantly tweak designs, colors, and names, even after animals were already in circulation. By creating variations and even halting production of some animals altogether, what Ty was actually doing was laying the groundwork for a market of rare collectibles.

Only a few thousand of the original Peanut the Elephant were made before the updated version hit the shelves. Then all of a sudden, those dark blue elephants are worth thousands and thousands of dollars because they’re not available, and there’s only a handful of them that are in the marketplace.

“He’s just taken off, and he’s over $5,000! Now, isn’t that cute? Would you rather have a new car or Peanut the Elephant?” Ty’s financial records have never been made public, but according to author Zach Binette’s book, “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble,” in 1995, the company generated sales of around $28 million.

By then, there were over 50 different Beanie Babies: zoo animals, farm animals, cats, dogs, bears—they’re very, very cute! And thanks to a new innovation in computer networks, the Beanie Baby craze was about to go digital. Lucky for Warner, Trevitti and her brother, who also worked at Ty, had taken an early interest in the internet and convinced him to go online.

The website creation process took a little time because at the same time, I was learning what the internet was. Trevitti is credited with developing the first business-to-consumer website at a time when only 14% of U.S. adults had internet access.

The internet turned Beanie Babies into the hot commodity trade of the late '90s. To prepare for high Easter demand in 1995, Ty filled three 747s with stuffed toys from Korea, where they were manufactured. Later that holiday season, the company’s warehouse in Illinois shipped 15,000 orders daily to retailers across the U.S.

Warner became a master at manipulating the market. Every six months, he would retire Beanies from the product line. Sometimes he chose to discontinue the lowest selling animals to boost interest and then get rid of inventory, or he targeted one with an already scarce supply to create a buying scramble.

A lot of times, it would be hours and hours that people would spend driving around looking for a specific Beanie Baby. Shop owners referred to shipment days as mob scenes, where customers would buy more than 50 Beanies at a time.

Warner achieved all this without needing to pay for advertising or selling Beanie Babies in big chains like Toys ‘R’ Us and Walmart. The strategy of mystery and scarcity was intentional. People became eager to cash in on the craze, with some even creating copycat versions.

“These are all counterfeit Beanie Babies, and some of them are so well made.” Self-confessed super fans Leon and Sandra have a collection of over 8,000 Beanie Bs in their North Carolina home.

“It got to the point where we had so many we thought, ‘Why don’t we just collect them all?’” Leon Schlossberg’s fascination for Ty products didn’t take off until the early 2000s, but he remembers the Midwest as the epicenter of the frenzy.

“You had a dedicated group of fans, mostly based in Chicago or Wisconsin, that thought they were onto something, and they started hoarding Beanie Babies.” By 1996, Forbes estimated Ty’s revenue jumped to $250 million.

Then came another innovation that would push demand for Beanie Babies even higher. After Trevitti pitched the idea, Warner added poems and birthdays to each animal's tag. “It was just a matter of, how do we make these special, and how do we make them even more collectible?”

Warner liked the idea so much he asked if she could write a poem for every animal in the collection—86 in three days. “If you read the poem for Siggy the zebra, he’s a soccer referee. So then if you’re trying to buy a gift for someone who plays soccer, then all of a sudden, this zebra is the thing to get!”

In 1997, Ty secured a deal worth over $100 million with McDonald's featuring a new Beanie spin-off: teeny Beanie Babies. “Real Ty Beanie Babies in a mini size to toss, tuck, or just plain love!”

The promotion was supposed to last five weeks, but the supply of 81 million was gone in just one. “We would go to McDonald's; we’d take turns, and we’d buy the limit, which was five.”

McDonald's estimated that one in every three Americans had a teeny Beanie Baby inside their house. It got to the point where kids couldn’t get them anymore—it was all part of the adult collecting and making money.

When McDonald's repeated the promotion a year later, one employee even went to jail for stealing $6,000 worth of teeny Beanies. By now, the internet was exploding. Trading on eBay was taking off, and suddenly there were millions of highly sought-after Beanie Baby toys being traded globally. Listings range from $5 to $112,000.

Fans would obsessively surf the site for clues about the next discontinued animal that would inevitably skyrocket in value. “What you need to do is get lucky! Which ones do you think are going to retire?” Kiwi the toucan’s retirement announcement increased site traffic by 300%.

“It was mind-boggling some of the things we had to do to keep the site up and running!” Within the secondary market of trading between collectors, Warner was no longer in charge. In May 1997, eBay auctioned off $500 million worth of the plush toys, accounting for more than 6% of the site’s total sales.

Later that year, Warner released a purple bear honoring the late Princess Diana. The combination of a limited edition with the death of a beloved princess caused mayhem. Retailers could only order 12 princess Beanies each. Demand was so high; fans were paying up to $2,000 at auctions.

Trade shows began cropping up across America, and collectors even began publishing Beanie Baby catalogs. The media hype just lent more credibility to the value guides, and guess who was putting out all the value guides? People that were selling Beanie Babies, for the most part.

Beanie Baby fever then spread into the sports world. “Beanie Babies over there in 1998!” Fans were lured to stadiums with giveaways from nearly 20 of the 30 major league baseball teams. By the end of the year, Ty’s sales surpassed $1.4 billion.

“He came out with this bear, which was made exclusively for Ty employees to celebrate the first year that he exceeded a billion dollars in sales.” In a USA weekend poll, it was estimated that 64% of Americans owned at least one Beanie Baby.

One divorcing couple had so many they needed a judge to fairly split their collection worth up to $5,000 at the time. That same year, Warner made the Forbes 400 list with an estimated net worth of $5 billion.

But it was becoming clear that the fuel driving the Beanie Babies craze was running out. Then Warner decided on his biggest gamble yet: announcing that the production of Beanie Babies would cease on Millennium Eve, but not before they’d released a final bear named “The End.”

For the first time, the retirement announcement didn’t lead to inflated values in the secondary market.

After teasing the end of Beanie Babies, Warner continued to put out new product lines. “They’re just so famous! Why would you get rid of something that is your namesake, basically?”

But by then, the plush animals had become ubiquitous, and kids were beginning to turn their attention to the next must-haves, like Furby and Pokémon. Sales declined by more than 90% in the early 2000s, forcing Warner to put his own money into Ty Inc., and by 2004 he claimed losses of more than $39 million.

Suddenly, investors and collectors who had hoped to make a living out of trading plush animals found themselves with inventory that was not worth what they once paid. Then, in 2009, came Beanie Boos, a modern redesigned version of its predecessor with bigger eyes and bolder colors.

But some believe it wasn’t the Beanie Babies that went down in popularity; it was the interest in trading them. “We coined a new phrase: the rise and fall of the Beanie gamblers, because the speculative craze just bottomed out and crashed.”

Now the father-daughter duo hopes to preserve the memory of Beanie Bs for future generations by opening a museum. “I mean, they’re all so cute! These things are cute; they’re adorable.”

“It used to not be proper for a guy to say this, but it hasn’t been cheap. We’ve probably put in close to about $175,000.”

Does that number include shipping and handling? “No, that number does not include shipping and handling.”

This is a natural sea sponge getting trimmed, and it was harvested here in Tarpon Springs, Florida—the sponge capital of the world. No sponge is no tarp sponge!

By some estimates, about 70% of the natural sea sponges collected globally come from this stretch of Florida’s coastline. Generations of residents, many Greek, have built their lives around this foamy sea creature.

“I don’t know how to do anything else.” Sponge divers here have harvested these animals—yes, they’re animals—since the 1900s. But the industry has been struggling recently. Increasingly frequent hurricanes have prevented fishermen from heading out to sea. Some of those storms even killed the sponges, and high fuel costs over the last year have turned some away from working in the industry at all.

But sponge diving has faced challenges in the past and has bounced back before. Sponge sales still bring in a couple of million dollars a year, but Tarpon Springs has found another way to leverage its storied history. “It supports probably close to $20 million worth of tourism.”

We head to Florida’s Gulf Coast to find out how sea sponges became such a big business and why divers are fighting to keep their trade alive.

Anastasio Skos arrived here from Greece in the early 1970s. The 70-year-old now goes by Captain Toso. “My ocean is, uh, I feel like my house, home—for me, Tarpon Springs, Greek town, Greek music, Greek restaurants—so I fit in.”

Sponge diving dates back to ancient Greece. In fact, both Homer and Aristotle wrote about the creatures back then. People used them for bathing, cleaning, painting, and decorating—the same as today.

When settlers found natural sponge beds in Florida in the 1800s, Greeks began making their way to America, bringing their trade with them. “In the olden days, they wore suits like this, but nowadays divers wear wetsuits in the summer and insulating dry suits in the winter. And they strap on scuba masks and shoes.”

“I’ve worn anywhere from football cleats to try to basically grip the bottom to run a little faster, to construction boots—the jack boots, the scuba boots. I use no tools; the only thing I got is a knife to cut it off—that's it: a knife.” They plunge as low as 60 feet deep to find the sponges.

“Hardly ever will go over 45, 50, 60 feet. Maybe they walk along the bottom for as long as it takes to fill up one bag. I just keep looking. I just make a lot of dives. I go down and I look.”

In the old days, they used a hook to tear sponges from the bottom, but now, by law, a diver has to cut the sponge with a knife to promote regeneration.

One study shows cut sponges have a much better chance of surviving—roughly 30% higher than hooked ones. “It’s kind of like shearing a sheep or cutting a branch off a tree.” Sponges actually show the highest regenerative ability of any animal.

Still, Captain Toso doesn’t harvest the smaller ones; he leaves them behind so they can keep growing. “They have to be five inches and up.”

They haul their full net up to the boat and make their way back to shore. On the docks, Toso and his team get to work separating and cleaning the sponges. The price of the sponges depends on the size and the quality. Wool sponges are the most valuable, going for about $15 each. They're the softest, and they hold a lot of water.

Yellows are more coarse; they’re also the cheapest. As the fishermen sort the sponges, they give them the first of many cleanings. Then they trim them to get rid of any discolorations and to shape them.

“That's the reason—not wearing the gloves. Because sponges are like fine sandpaper; they wear you out. You know the fingerprints disappear. See? Just like glass. If I almost did my coffee cup this morning overnight…”

Captain Toso leaves his clean sponges out to dry. Some people stop by to ask questions or buy straight from the harvesters on the docks, but Taso says the best option is finding a wholesale buyer.

The sponges find themselves—or rather, a piece of themselves—at a processing plant like this one, about a mile and a half from the docks. Sponges get soaked in the wetting area and pushed down into a bath with a wooden paddle. Then they’re drained in this net and transferred to a water extractor, where they’re spun to remove excess water, leaving the sponges damp and ready for the next stage: cutting.

The worker protects his fingers from this sharp wire with gloves. “These are sponges that are netted up for processing. We’ll put them in the bath tonight, and they’ll sit there overnight and then be processed from there.”

Harry Barber manages the plant at Armaly Sponge Company. The Armaly family founded the company in the Bahamas in 1908 and expanded into Florida about 50 years ago. They opened their Tarpon Springs processing plant in 2018.

“Into the washing machine they go. Next, time to dry and get sorted by size. They box the sponges and prepare them for shipment.” Bath sponges have taken off tremendously because people want to use something on their children that’s sustainable and, you know, clean and natural.

Despite the sponge’s near-magical ability to regenerate, it was almost wiped out here in the late 1930s by a mysterious disease, and then again in the '40s and '50s, out of control algae called red tides killed many local sponge beds. The population survived against all odds and thrived during the industry’s heyday in the 1980s, when around 30 sponge boats and 50 divers docked here every day.

“It was a blight of sponges in the Mediterranean, and we were able to harvest here locally at higher prices and ship stuff over to the Mediterranean. But when the Mediterranean fisheries recovered, the demand and the price went down again in Tarpon Springs. Many fishermen went out of business. But some, like Captain Toso, stuck it out.”

“I don’t know how to do anything else.”

2022 hasn’t proven much easier, with record inflation and fuel prices. Maintaining and gassing up a boat is expensive. And the industry is facing another problem: hurricanes are happening more and more because of the climate crisis, so bad years are becoming the norm. Divers can’t go out during storms, but there’s something else.

Even though sponges are technically animals, they survive by attaching themselves to the ocean floor. During a hurricane, many get smothered by sand or hit by tumbling rocks and die. Lately, only a handful of sponge boats and about a dozen divers go out any given day.

“You just have to look harder because it’s not everywhere.”

“Generally, I used to be a red tide killer, but some survivors here.”

Captain Toso works long days. “I woke, all my life, I grew up in a family of 12 kids. My father took me at 4:00 in the morning, working all day long. I can walk 24 hours nonstop!”

Handling his sponges the whole time—from the time you pick the sponge to the bottom—that’s the first time you touch it. By the time you sell it, you have the same sponge at least 20 more times. Armaly mostly buys from independent contractors like Toso.

“We purchase from them based on what they bring in and the conditions and sizes of what they have. So the income isn’t guaranteed.”

Sponge diver Mip goes on these long fishing trips year-round; he makes about $46,000 a year. “It could be a good year. You don’t bring in no good year sometimes; hurricanes, you know, time you don’t work. Some years you work more and you make more. Some years less and you make less. Depends on how much time you’re going out there. That’s all.”

In addition to the financial uncertainty, diving can be dangerous. If your hose gets cut or you dive too deep, that’s why Mip and Toso aren’t trying to pass down a family business. “I cut my hose a couple of times, and out of air, and I have to swim up. That’s dangerous stuff. I don’t want my kids or my grandkids to do this job; they can do better, you know what I mean? There’s not much money in it.”

“Nobody wants to go get beat up out there for $20 a day.”

People prefer to be landowners rather than sponge divers. “I ain't going to push my grandkids to this job; I don’t want them to do that. They're doing good in school.”

“It is sad to see so few fishing, but I certainly understand it. The markets right now won’t bear really high prices to offset the cost of fuel. Maintenance on boats is expensive. We're looking at a country and a world that's trying to look at natural products. So until the industry can rejuvenate itself, Tarpon Springs will have to rely on its tourism.”

Visitors pour tens of millions of dollars into the community every year, eating authentic Greek food and taking boat tours. They also shop for sponge souvenirs to take home. But many locals wonder if tourism will be the long-term solution, and if it’s not, what’s next for the upcoming generation of spongers?

Pan Am was once the largest international airline in the U.S. In 1970 alone, it carried 11 million passengers to 86 countries worldwide. Pan Am is also known as the pioneer of multiple features of modern air travel, and it also holds cult status for its iconic aviation style. But after 60 years of flight and decades of financial turbulence, Pan Am went bust.

So what happened? Pan American Airways was founded by two U.S. Air Force majors. It began as an airmail service between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba in 1927, and was the United States' first scheduled international flight. Within a year, aviation visionary Juan Trippe took the controls, and Pan Am introduced its first passenger services to Havana.

An ad campaign co-sponsored by Pan Am and Bacardi successfully encouraged Americans to fly away from alcohol prohibition in the U.S. to drink rum in the sun in Cuba. And Trippe quickly expanded Pan Am's network. By 1930, Pan Am was flying routes through most of Central and South America.

Crucially, it used a fleet of flying boats, or Clippers, to land aircraft on the water at destinations that didn’t have concrete runways for traditional planes. Since they flew seaplanes, Pan Am pilots wore captain's uniforms—a decision that still influences aviation uniforms today.

And there were far more important innovations that Pan Am developed in its early days of flight. Everything from things that we take for granted today, like air traffic control and different flight procedures, different ways of forecasting the weather, of flight planning. Pan Am was the first airline to fly around the world; they actually set a few different records about that.

They were the first to fly from the U.S. across the Pacific. It was really a lot. They launched this international service that really helped define what we have today as just regular air travel. By 1958, Pan Am offered regular flights to every continent on the planet except Antarctica, giving itself the title of the world’s most experienced airline.

Pan Am’s modern fleet of pressurized aircraft could fly smoothly above turbulent weather, which provided a comfortable experience for passengers. Its lavish cabins were staffed by a multilingual, college-educated flight crew who served luxurious meals like steak, champagne, and caviar.

On October 26th, 1958, Pan Am became the first American airline to fly jet aircraft. A Pan Am Boeing 707 streaked from New York to Paris in 8 hours. The world entered the jet age. The powerful new jet engines, which could fly non-stop over long distances, allowed Pan Am to introduce daily flights to London and Paris.

With the introduction of economy class, Pan Am opened the world of air travel to tourists—not just to the rich and famous. In 1970, Pan Am carried 11 million customers over 20 billion miles. Thinking that air travel would only continue to grow, Pan Am invested half a billion dollars in a large fleet of Boeing 747 jetliners.

But this would turn out to be a big mistake. In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries declared an oil embargo against nations, including the U.S., that were supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. By the end of the embargo, in March 1974, the price of oil had risen by more than 400%.

This hit Pan Am harder than other airlines because of its exclusively long-haul flights, which required more fuel. “They were the launch customer for the Boeing 747. At the time, that was a great airplane for them to buy. That was the right choice. But the oil crisis really changed things for Pan Am; it was all of the sudden the wrong plane to have.”

It wasn’t the most efficient; it was flying routes that really weren’t selling that well because demand for travel was going down, and that was a very difficult time. But when they made the decision to buy the planes, who would have known?

While Pan Am's operating costs skyrocketed, the economy slowed, and America’s appetite for international air travel greatly reduced, leaving Pan Am dangerously overcapacitated with huge half-empty jets taking to the skies.

As a result, between 1969 and 1976, Pan Am lost about $364 million and was estimated to be $1 billion in debt. Pan Am had long hoped to add domestic flights within the U.S. to its operations and even talked to a number of domestic operators, including American and United Airlines, to propose a merger.

But rival airlines convinced the U.S. Congress that Pan Am threatened to monopolize U.S. aviation, and the Civil Aeronautics Board repeatedly denied Pan Am permission to operate domestically. But in 1978, the Airline Deregulation Act was passed into United States federal law, meaning the government could no longer control airline routes.

Pan Am was now allowed to acquire a domestic system, and it hastily purchased National Airlines for $437 million. “It cost a tremendous amount of money to acquire this particular airline to get the routes. They obviously made a choice; they couldn’t build from scratch; they needed to go out and buy something. You basically have two cultures going on: Pan Am, very worldly, sophisticated, international. Then you had National Airlines—they were sort of puddle jumpers. They were considered country pilots. So there was a mix of culture that didn’t work there.”

Then you had different kinds of aircraft, and some mechanics had never worked on certain airplanes. “I think there was a mismatch there too. Different airports, just in general. It was really a small Southern airline that was matching up with an international airline. Within a year of the National Airlines purchase, Pan Am lost $18.9 million.

Even after selling its iconic Manhattan head office for $400 million, Pan Am continued to self-liquidate to offset its losses. In addition to trading its hotel chains, it sold its entire Pacific Division to United Airlines.

But Pan Am still had a global reputation as the flagship U.S. airline. However, this claim to fame would attract a devastating terrorist attack above the skies of Lockerbie, Scotland.

On the 21st of December, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow; it was bound for New York. It was never scheduled to either touch down or land in Scotland. A bomb that had been placed on board exploded over a small town in the southwest of Scotland called Lockerbie.

259 people aboard the plane were killed—passengers and crew—and 11 citizens in the small community of Lockerbie were also killed. Pan Am was held culpable and negligent in failing to have adequate security measures.

You can have some sympathy for Pan Am because their defense, if it was a defense at the time, was simply that they had carried out the normal security measures that the entire aviation industry did. But the courts took the view that that was inadequate. They had failed to properly secure their plane, and as a consequence, a bag had gotten on board that shouldn’t have been on board in the first place.

But Pan Am, you can say, took the hit metaphorically as well as literally for an industry where security standards had not gotten up to speed. The Lockerbie bombing cost Pan Am more than $350 million and proved to be the final blow to the once giant airline.

Just two years later, on January 8th, 1991, Pan Am filed for bankruptcy. After a bidding war, Delta Airlines purchased the majority of Pan Am for $1.4 billion, acquiring its European routes, its Northeastern shuttle routes, 45 jets, its mini hub in Frankfurt, Germany, and its flagship Pan Am Worldport terminal at JFK International Airport.

Pan Am hoped to emerge from bankruptcy, but after realizing it was losing $3 million per day, Delta stopped its cash advances after failing to raise money from other sources. A phone call was made to Pan Am’s head office on December 4th, 1991. The message was: shut it down.

Pan American Airways went bankrupt, and they shut down services. “It broke people’s hearts, really; not just the people that worked for the airline, but for many other people that flew it and knew it. It was the flagship airline of America—Pan Am. This legendary airline, with its legendary logo, was the second most recognized trademark in the world at the time.”

A group of friends of mine actually bought those trademarks, and in fact, I was one of the investors in that group. We bought those trademarks. Unfortunately, Charles Cobb, who was the largest investor, wanted to start the airline again, and we said, “But it didn’t work last time.” We parted ways; he bought us out.

“He slapped the Pan Am globe on this airline, which is sort of like putting the Pan Am globe on a Greyhound bus! It lasted a couple of months, and it crashed.” All the other attempts to do something else with the trademark have failed, but Pan Am’s legacy continues to be felt almost 30 years after its collapse. Its innovations remain the pillars of modern air travel.

Its brand style has survived throughout the decades as an iconic mid-century fashion statement, with products featuring its sleek retro logo still being sold. And the Pan Am lifestyle is still romanticized in TV and movies, but the airline itself remains grounded.

At its peak in the late '90s, Blockbuster owned over 9,000 video rental stores in the United States, employed 84,000 people worldwide, and had 65 million registered customers. Once valued as a $3 billion company, in just one year, Blockbuster earned $800 million in late fees alone.

Blockbuster Video! Wow! But fast forward a decade, and Blockbuster ceased to exist, having filed for bankruptcy with over $900 million in debt.

So what happened? Blockbuster was founded by David Cook, a software supplier in the oil and gas industry. After studying the potential of a video store business for a friend, he realized that a well-franchised chain could grow to 1,500 units. And so the first Blockbuster store opened in Dallas on October 19th, 1985.

According to David Cook, the opening night of that first Blockbuster store was a huge success. The story goes that they actually had to lock the doors because of overcrowding. The thing that really set Blockbuster apart at that time was their huge range of titles.

Other independent video stores could only keep track of 100 or so movies. Blockbuster had an innovative new barcode system, which meant that they could track up to 10,000 VHS tapes per store per registered customer, which also meant that they could keep an eye on those lucrative late fees.

Off the back of this success, Cook built a $6 million distribution center—not only so that new stores could pop up quickly but also to house a huge range of titles so that each store's inventory could be tailored to local demographics.

In 1987, Blockbuster received $18.5 million from a trio of investors, including Waste Management founder Wayne Huizenga, in return for voting control. But after two months of intense disagreements, Cook left Blockbuster, and Huizenga assumed control.

Under Huizenga, Blockbuster embarked on an aggressive expansion plan. Buying out existing video rental chains while opening new stores at a rate of one per day, by 1988, just three years after the first store opened, Blockbuster was America’s number one video chain with over 400 stores nationwide.

But as Blockbuster became a multi-billion dollar company in the early '90s, adding music and video game rentals to its stores, Huizenga was worried about how emerging technology like cable television could hurt Blockbuster's video store model.

After briefly considering buying a cable company and even receiving approval from the Florida legislature to build a Blockbuster amusement park in Miami, Huizenga offloaded Blockbuster to media giant Viacom for $8 billion in 1994.

In only two years under Viacom, Blockbuster lost half of its value—one of two ways. While Blockbuster and its new boss, John Antioco, focused on brick-and-mortar video stores, technological innovations meant that competition was on the rise.

In 1997, Reed Hastings founded Netflix, a DVD-by-mail rental service at the time, in part after being frustrated with a $40 late fee from Blockbuster. Two years later, having passed on an opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million, Blockbuster teamed up with Enron to create a video-on-demand service in a deal that saw Enron do most of the work.

“A robust video-on-demand platform was successfully built and tested with customers, but it soon became clear to Enron that Blockbuster was so focused on its lucrative video stores that it had little time or commitment for the video-on-demand business.”

As a result, in 2001, Blockbuster walked away from the first major development of widescale movie streaming. Within a few years, Netflix and other competitors began to eat into Blockbuster’s profits—not by undercutting it, but by reimagining video rental in the digital age.

“There’s a better way to rent movies. Go to Netflix.com, make a list of the movies you want to see, and in about one business day, you’ll get three DVDs. Keep them as long as you want—without late fees! Then, when you’re done, look! Prepaid envelopes! Return one, and they'll send you another movie from your list. Netflix! All the movies you want—$20 a month, and no late fees.”

It took Blockbuster almost five years to introduce its own DVD-by-mail service and even longer to scrap late fees. “More late fees? No more late fees! No more late fees!” By that time, Netflix had amassed almost 3 million customers, had no store overheads, and was preparing to launch its revolutionary streaming service.

Blockbuster's troubles continued through the mid-2000s after parting from Viacom and experimenting with innovative concepts such as DVD and game trading. Blockbuster was in the midst of an identity crisis.

In 2009, Netflix posted earnings of $116 million. Meanwhile, Blockbuster, with its continuing business problems and legal battles, lost $518 million. On July 1st, 2010, Blockbuster was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.

Its fate into video-on-demand streaming came too late, and over the next three years, Blockbuster died a slow and painful death. DVD-by-mail services stopped, its various partnerships folded, and stores worldwide were rapidly plunged into administration.

“We're closing early!” Its 9,000-strong chain had been reduced to one single franchise in Bend, Oregon. As a result of Blockbuster’s complete shutdown, one can only speculate about what could have been for the once-home movie giant.

“They were too busy making money in their video stores to imagine a time when people would no longer want or need them. And in a bid to rescue their business, their answer at the time was to fight fire with fire.”

At one point, they even opened up rental kiosks—little bit like a vending machine—but all of these attempts were based on either outdated technology or outdated business models. Meanwhile, Netflix, at the time, did the opposite. They streamlined; they were able to see the future of video rentals and then innovate for that future.

Blockbuster didn’t seem to understand how the next generation, particularly millennials, who grew up in a world without hard copy media like DVDs and CDs, would react to video on demand as technology improved. And that’s why Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Hulu are still all in business, whilst Blockbuster got left behind.

According to Netflix’s former chief financial officer, Barry McCarthy, as part of the failed 2000 Blockbuster-Neflix buyout, Reed Hastings proposed that Netflix would run the Blockbuster brand online. If that deal had been successful and Hastings had replicated Netflix’s innovations for Blockbuster, the face of home video would likely still be blue and yellow.

The last ever Blockbuster movie was rented on November 9th, 2013. Fittingly, the film in question was “This Is The End.”

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