Page 50 - Business Facts

Escalator, Zipper, and Heroin all started as trademark names!

There are many products that have become so common to consumers that we don’t think about their real meaning when we say them. For example, people often say Kleenex instead of tissue, or simply Coke instead of soda. The name for the process of an item becoming so colloquial it is referred to by a brand name is called proprietary eponym.

Some good examples of these are escalator, which was simply called “moving stairs” until Otis Elevators released their own product and named it escalator, which then stuck. Heroin got its name because the Bayer Company marketed it as an over the counter drug under the trademark Heroin. Their product was so popular that it just caught on, and today we don’t even think that there were once other brands of Heroin!

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A woman was stabbed to death in a Walmart. The store didn't close, they just roped off the crime scene.

The tragedy occurred in South Carolina. It was about 1pm on a weekend, when a man and a woman got into a fight that resulted in her being being critically stabbed. She was taken to the hospital, where she passed away from her injuries. The attacker fled, but crashed his car and got taken into custody soon after.

In water, a can of Diet Coke floats while regular Coke sinks!

The artificial sweetener in Diet Coke is hundreds of times sweeter per unit volume than regular sugar. However, the sugar in regular Coke is denser, which makes it sink. Regular Coke contains almost 11 teaspoons of sugar per can! On average, Americans ingest 10.8 pounds of sugar per person each year from drinking Coca-Cola alone. 

Here are some other interesting facts about Coca-Cola products: 

• The Coca-Cola brand is worth more than Budweiser, Pepsi, Starbucks and Redbull combined 
• If every drop of Coke ever produced were put into 8 ounce bottles and laid end to end, they’d reach the moon and back over 2,000 times 
• Coca-Cola spends more money on advertising than Microsoft and Apple combined 
• The average Mexican drinks more Coke than the average American, British, Indian, and Chinese combined 

Montpelier, VT is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.

Although it seems ubiquitous, McDonald's is not really everywhere. The state capital of Vermont, which is also the smallest by population, has the unique characteristic of being the only state capital in the United States that does not have a McDonald's franchise within city limits.

If you want your BigMac fix, you're going to have to drive 4.44 whole miles to the next town over and if you want the double decker.

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Bubblegum is traditionaly pink is because its creator only had pink food coloring!

For many of us it’s completely normal that traditional bubblegum is pink, yet have you ever thought why that was? It all goes back to 1928 when Walter Diemer, an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia, was attempting to create new gum recipes.

He discovered a recipe that was less sticky than regular chewing gum while also more stretchy, yet he didn’t like the color it was so he used the only coloring he had on hand, which was pink! When he began selling his new gum, which was and still is named Dubble Bubble, it was an instant success and the color just stuck 

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