Everytime you think you’ve found something Costco doesn’t have, it turns around and makes you look like a fool. The retail behemoth has added 1-oz., 24-karat gold bars to its repertoire; members can buy them online for ~$1.9k. (That’s great, but we’re still picking its lemon poppy seed muffins as the top draw for membership.)
In today’s email:
The world’s your office: The rush to add airport coworking space.
Rugby: A global powerhouse meets American indifference.
Digits: Four Seasons’ big boat, ghosts included, and more wild numbers.
Around the web: Weird sports photos, visualizing AI, a cool fish tank, and more.
👇 Listen: Doing on-the-go work is getting easy, unfortunately.
The Big Idea
Airports are joining the work-from-anywhere party
2023-10-02T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
If you’ve ever tried to take a work call while trapped at an airport, you know it’s the absolute worst.
Constant overhead announcements, screaming children (and adults), and general chaos make it nearly impossible to get quality work done on the go.
Plus, as more people gain access to airport lounges with credit card perks and post-pandemic travel booms, lounges are getting less exclusive.
To solve for this, coworking companies are moving into airports to give flyers more space to concentrate. And they’re moving quickly — the number of airport workspaces has nearly doubled in the last year.
Minute Suites has spaces in 10 US airports that can be used as offices or private rooms for a quick nap.
Jabbrrbox makes compact pods complete with desks, charging stations, speakers, and mood lighting.
Coworking company Beehive operates spaces around Germany, including one — with entire conference rooms — in the Hamburg Airport.
And the trend is just getting started: Workspace company JustCo recently partnered with Singapore’s Changi Airport to open Asia’s first pay-per-minute airport coworking space.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport opened a second Spaces facility, a coworking lounge complete with cubicles.
Airports might be the latest to the coworking craze…
… but they certainly won’t be the last.
While WeWork’s business is most often referenced as a cautionary tale, the idea behind creating functional spaces outside of our homes has stuck.
And other businesses are racing to make sure you can work from absolutely anywhere:
Coworking operator Convene brings flex spaces to empty office buildings, department stores, and apartments.
Members-only social club Soho House launched a workspace membership called Soho Works.
Equinox teamed up with coworking company Industrious to open a workspace in New York’s Hudson Yards.
With the global coworking market estimated to be worth $50.1B by 2028, we’re guessing this is just the beginning.
The only downside? Now travel days aren’t a valid excuse for missing Slack messages from your boss.
Free Resource
15 hard-hitting value prop templates
Value props = clear, concise pitches for buyers and stakeholders.
AKA the key branding language no business can afford to flub.
Before you get flustered on the framework, we’ve got you covered. Here are 15 clean-cut copy and design templates to help you tie it all together.
Bummer: A 16-year-old boy and a man in his 60s were arrested for allegedly chopping down the 300-year-old Sycamore Gap tree in England’s Northumberland National Park. Located next to the ~1.9k-year-old Hadrian’s Wall, it was named Woodland Trust’s 2016 Tree of the Year and appeared in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
SNIPPETS
Congrats to the US economy: Congress passed a last-minute spending bill Saturday to avert a financially disastrous government shutdown — an extension that’ll last all of 45 days. Another cliff now looms in November.
SCOTUS will hear two cases regarding online speech. Texas and Florida passed laws requiring social platforms to allow content that might violate their policies; tech groups argue it’s unconstitutional to force private companies to host hate speech, spam, or other unwanted content.
Kia and Hyundai, facing a lawsuit from 17 cities over an increase in car theft, blame TikTok and Instagram. Their vehicles lack the anti-theft tech other cars have, but they argue that the issue is people posting instructions on how to steal them on social media.
California will raise its minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour beginning April 1, the highest guaranteed base salary in the industry.
More strikes: 75k+ Kaiser Permanente workers could strike this week if their unions do not reach a deal with the health care provider. The understaffed workforce wants better pay and conditions to attract new staff and retain employees.
RIP, Google Jamboard: Google will shut down its 55-inch touch-screen whiteboard after eight years. Marketed to schools and businesses, Jamboard wasn’t cheap, costing $5k with a $600/year fee.
Not guilty: Alan Colie, who shot YouTube prankster Tanner Cook in what he claimed was self-defense, was acquitted of aggravated malicious wounding.
Toys “R” Us is making a comeback. The company announced its “air, land, and sea” expansion, which includes 24 new stores, with some locations in airports and cruise ships. The move comes six years after the company filed for bankruptcy and closed all its stores.
Blue Apron will be acquired by restaurant company Wonder Group. The deal gives shareholders $13 per share, valuing the meal-kit company at $103m, a far cry from its ~$2B valuation in 2017.
Movie review platform Letterboxd will sell to Canadian company Tiny for a reported $50m+. Founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow will stick around and the app won’t change much, though reviews for TV shows are in the works.
FROM THE BLOG
Our referral program is the ultimate win-win — we get your friends reading The Hustle and you get to fuel your insatiable desire for free stuff. Pretty ideal, right? Scroll down to keep that party rolling. (P.S. The more referrals you send, the sooner we’ll unlock new prizes.)
Chart
Olivia Heller
‘The Rugby World Cup is on!’ says basically nobody in America
2023-10-02T00:00:00Z
Ben Berkley
OK, let’s get this straight:
A field. A ball.
Running and kicking.
Aggression.
So. Much. Aggression.
Ripped dudes wearing mouth guards.
That all sounds like American catnip, yet many US sports fanatics won’t even realize the Rugby World Cup, which contains all of the above and is ongoing in France this month, even happened.
Kinda weird, right?
The Rugby World Cup, held every four years, self-identifies as the world’s third-largest sports event, following the Olympics and FIFA World Cup.
Its powerhouse 2019 edition showed why, perBloomberg:
~1.8m tickets were sold.
800m+ global TV viewers tuned in.
It generated ~$5B in economic activity.
Sport and spectacle are pillars of American culture (we’ve covered just how NFL-crazy this country is), and yet… crickets.
Making the RWC’s lack of draw stranger? Rugby isn’t unpopular in the US:
100k+ Americans play across 2.5k+ clubs, per USA Rugby.
Worldwide, 44.9m fans watched the 2019 RWC final. Stateside, NBC Sports was thrilled to pull in 659k of them. For context:
The audience for the average regular-season NFL game last season was 25x larger.
Soccer has also struggled for relevance in the US, yet 25.8m Americans tuned in to the 2022 FIFA World Cup final.
And the ratings may get worse before they get better — in a first since 1995, the US team didn’t qualify for the current tournament.
Here’s the rub…
… The US will soon host the Rugby World Cup — both the 2031 men’s tournament and the 2033 women’s tournament. It’ll be awfully awkward if US stadiums sit empty while global fans clamber to partake in the games.
The hail mary: A youth governing body wants to “inspire a rugby revolution” by 2031 and get 1m American kids out on the… field? Pitch? (Look, we’re guilty here, too.)
Digits
Big boats, lots of wine, a spooky find
2023-10-02T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
25k:Bottles of wine being auctioned off by Taiwanese billionaire and Yageo Corp. founder Pierre Chen. Though the haul, worth ~$50m, is the biggest, most-expensive wine collection to ever hit the auction block, Chen has been collecting bottles for 40+ years and has even more. He’ll serve some when he opens his first restaurant in Paris, where he’ll act as chief sommelier.
679 feet: The length of Four Seasons’ new superyacht, which will accommodate 195 guests and 210 crew when complete. It’ll feature a 66-foot-long pool and a four-deck private suite with its own kitchen for the wealthy elite who are not too scared to go on a cruise after watching 2022’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness.
237: The median number of notifications US teens receive on an average day, per a study from Common Sense Media and the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. They only engage with a median of 46 per day, thanks to blocking, filtering, or prioritizing apps. It’s worth noting, however, that the max number was a whopping 4.5k+ notifications delivered with 1.2k+ seen.
$769k: The asking price for the Turgeon Funeral Home in Millsbury, Massachusetts, where a sign reads, “Probably haunted.” It was built as a single-family home in 1850, but has operated as a funeral home since 1948. It features three bedrooms, two kitchens, and both an attic and a basement to maximize its spooky ghost potential.
AROUND THE WEB
🐇 On this day: In 1902, Beatrix Potter published the popular children’s story The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
📸 That’s interesting: Photographer Sol Neelman captures weird sports, like instant mashed potato wrestling, llama racing, and Japanese log riding.
📈 Video: Creator and social media consultant Jade Beason discusses the good, the bad, and the ugly of growing on social media.
👀 Art: Thirteen artists explore how they visualize AI.
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