Plus: The $14.1B deal for US Steel, an absurd price tag for “12 Days of Christmas” gifts, 2023’s best books, and more.
PNC’s annual Christmas Price Index tracks the prices of the gifts listed in “The 12 Days of Christmas” — and it’s reliably the most charming way to track how much inflation blows. This year, the total cost of all items from the song would be $202k; 2019’s cumulative total was $170k. (BTW, if you want to surprise your loved ones with a deeply impractical, painfully expensive, and all-around terrible gift, seven swans-a-swimming costs $13k+ on its own.)
In today’s email:
Googling recipes: Do your results suck? Here’s why.
Dropping a Tannenbaum: The economics of Christmas trees.
Around the web: Authors’ fave books of 2023, a headcount for space, a nutcracker-making legacy, and more.
👇 Listen: Deleting bad reviews on your food blog is annoying as hell — and likely very good for business.
The Big Idea
Are Google’s top recipes a grift?
Top search results favor positive ratings, but reliable reviews are hard to come by on the internet.
2023-12-19T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
You may be about to start some holiday baking, but can you trust Google’s recipe rankings?
That’s the question posed by Caitlin Dewey of the newsletterLinks I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends.
What’s cooking?
In June 2013, Google updated its “rich snippets” — Google search results with additional info like brief descriptions, prices, event locations, etc. — to let recipe sites include ratings.
Now, when you Google a recipe, top results appear in a carousel, each with an image and star rating (see the cookie results above).
The issue, Dewey asserts, is that it’s essentially meaningless, as the sites supply their own ratings and there’s no metric for what’s good or bad.
And?
Dewey noticed that smaller blogs are frequently rated and, thus, often outrank media outlets with whole recipe teams, like New York Times Cooking; she suspects that bloggers are gaming rankings by deleting bad reviews.
(Although, I do use one blog Dewey mentioned, Sally’s Baking Addiction, religiously. Her pie crust recipe is a hit.)
It’s a sad world when you can’t even trust a top-rated cookie recipe to be good, but this isn’t a new thing. In 2020, Dewey spoke with Meathead Goldwyn of AmazingRibs.com, who’s struggled with slipping in Google’s rankings since he failed to install new recipe code in 2010.
“If you’re trying to make a living on the internet, you have to worship Google,” Goldwyn said at the time.
BTW: The subreddit r/ididnthaveeggs is just bad reviews of recipes from people who made baffling changes, and it is hilarious.
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US Steel — once the world’s largest company, and the first ever valued at $1B+ — will be bought by Japan’s Nippon Steel for $14.1B. Originated by a financial all-star team including JP Morgan, Charles Schwab, and Andrew Carnegie, US Steel is now the world’s 27th biggest steelmaker, producing ~21m fewer metric tons of steel than it did in 1953.
SNIPPETS
Adobe and Figma called off their merger. Adobe was set to acquire Figma for $20B before regulators and designers cited it as a near-monopoly. Adobe still must pay Figma a $1B termination fee.
Nio, the Chinese EV maker and Tesla rival, got $2.2B from CYVN Holdings, an Abu Dhabi-backed investment firm. Nio’s big thing is quickly swapping out its cars’ batteries rather than plug-and-wait charging.
Southwest Airlines is still paying for its 2022 holiday mishap that left millions of travelers stranded. The airline now faces a $140m federal fine on top of the ~$600m it already paid to reimburse travelers.
Nikola founder Trevor Milton (AKA the Elizabeth Holmes of electric trucks)was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors. Meanwhile, Nikola (once valued at $30B; now worth ~$300m) is pressing on with battery- and hydrogen-powered alternatives to semi trucks.
Taking stock: More Americans than ever (~58% of households) owned stocks last year. That’s up from 53% in 2019, suggesting the pandemic-fueled personal investing trend — unlike making a Dalgona coffee every morning — is here to stay.
In the US,653.1k people were experiencing homelessness this year, up 12% YoY. A federal report attributes the rise to the end of pandemic eviction moratoria and rental aid.
WK Kellogg Co. will keep its cereal plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, for another 15 years and avoid 170 layoffs following a $5m grant from the state.
Flipboard will join the fediverse, allowing the news app to integrate with other fediverse apps (e.g., Mastodon).
VF Corp., which owns Vans and The North Face, says hackers have limited its ability to fulfill some holiday orders, denting the company’s stock but giving anyone showing up empty handed on Christmas a perfect excuse to fall back on.
Update: Apple will halt US sales of some Apple Watches this week, as it works through a patent dispute with medical tech giant Masimo. (Want to know more about the battle? We’ve got you.)
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Watch
The economics of the $2B Christmas tree industry
Every year, before we’re rockin’ around our Christmas trees at home, Christmas tree farmers are… waiting.
There are 15+ varieties of Christmas trees, ranging from the ever-popular Fraser fir to the eastern red cedar — but most of them follow the same general production cycle. And it’s a long cycle: one tree takes 8-10 years to reach a mature six feet.
During that time, it’s a bit of a financial black hole for farmers. For starters, investing in land, labor and equipment is expensive. And don’t even get us started on the existential threat that artificial trees pose to the industry.
So, how do tree farms make it work?
They’ve managed to find a way — 25m Christmas trees are sold in the US annually, at an average price of $78 — and this “Hustlenomics” video, in the holiday spirit of giving, will share it with you.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree... How profitable are thy branches?
