2 seasonal charts for you today:
To our American readers that are still digesting their Thanksgiving turkey — here's some data for you to bring up over today's leftovers: 60 years ago the average turkey weighed about 17 lbs, today it's almost double that (according to the latest data from the USDA).
Big bird
The tradition of eating Turkey for Thanksgiving goes back more than 150 years in the US, and farmers and producers have been honing their breeding techniques since pretty much day 1, in order to breed the biggest birds possible.
The techniques have gotten some help from scientific progress, but the strategy has remained surprisingly simple: breed the absolute largest males with as many hens as possible. Rinse and repeat every year and with a little help from artificial insemination — which helps spread the genetic material of the largest birds even further — the result is bigger and bigger turkeys. How long this trend can continue is unclear, but even in the last decade the average turkey has gained ~11% in weight, suggesting it is far from plateauing.
Peak turkey
Interestingly, although the turkeys have been getting bigger, American consumption of turkey has been coming down for quite some time. "Peak turkey" was actually back in 1996, as we wrote about last year.
At the end of last year Amazon reported that it employed almost 1.3 million people, with rougly 950,000 employees in the US alone. That means that roughly 1 in every 150 American workers get a paycheck from Jeff Bezos and co..
During the holiday period, that number goes up even more.
This year Amazon announced it would take on 150,000 seasonal employees to help fulfill the demand of the final few months of the year — something the company has pretty much always done.
That 150,000 may not be the biggest seasonal hiring Amazon has ever done, but for some context it's essentially the equivalent of hiring the entire workforce of Nike... twice.
Most of the roles are somewhere in Amazon's enormous supply chain; delivery, warehouse work and fulfillment — and it's not the only company hiring. Walmart plans to hire a similar number and Target needs 100,000. Hiring that number of people, at a time when the labor market is really hot (re: the great resignation) and supply chains are already creaking, might not be as easy as it used to be.
1) European stock markets fell almost 3% on Friday as concerns over a new COVID variant emerged.
2) YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson - AKA "MrBeast" - has recreated viral show Squid Game in real life, handing out $456,000 to one lucky winner, while racking up 60 million views in less than 48 hours.
3) Good animation from the FT of thousands of Chinese boats turning off their AIS transponders at the start of this week, adding to global supply chain woes.
4) The TSA revealed that it scanned more than 2.3 million people at airports across the country on Wednesday - which is only down 12% on the same time in 2019 (pre-pandemic).
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