28.5m: People who watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC and Peacock, increasing viewership 6% YoY and setting a new record for the parade’s TV audience. Just 10k people caught the very first Macy’s parade (then a Christmas parade) in person in 1924. The first national broadcast occurred in 1947.
4 packets of mackerel fillets: The price prison consultant Bill Baroni paid for a haircut while in prison for his role in New Jersey’s Bridgegate scandal. Baroni revealed this in a Wall Street Journal article about how Sam Bankman-Fried, sans crypto, is using mackerel to pay other incarcerated people for goods and services while awaiting sentencing. Apparently, the shelf-stable fish — which costs $1.30 via one Brooklyn jail’s commissary — has become even more popular than cigarettes as prison currency.
~$11k/month: Potential ad earnings for Aitana López, a 25-year-old Spanish model who has 124k Instagram followers. That doesn’t sound all that odd until you find out that Aitana is an AI-generated influencer, created by Barcelona modeling agency The Clueless. Founder Rubeñ Cruz found real models and their egos were too much hassle, but not Aitana — who, once again, isn’t real, but is a “passionate Scorpio” who loves video games.
756,096,000: Number of $50 bills the US government printed in 2022, the highest number of the denomination printed in 40+ years. That’s $37.8B. The $50 bill is typically one of the less frequently ordered bills. During the pandemic, however, Americans began keeping more cash on hand, not to make purchases, but to save — and especially those bigger bills.