24 Quotes by John Seabrook

Although the flagship brand, Pepsi-Cola, has always been second to Coca-Cola, the Frito-Lay division is ten times larger than its largest competitor, Diamond Foods, Inc., of San Francisco. Its products take up whole aisles at Walmart.

Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is a rock star of the tech world, but he is not long on charisma.

In the Twenties and Thirties, refrigerated railcars allowed growers to transport apples over great distances, and, thanks to cold-storage warehouses, wholesalers and retailers could keep them for long periods of time.

In the nineteen-eighties, rates of obesity started to rise sharply in the U.S. and around the world. By the nineteen-nineties, obesity reached epidemic proportions.

By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn't taste very good, and as a rule, people didn't eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider.

I do think that television, in its early years, played a significant role in that standard-setting, enforcing a certain decency among people. They took their role seriously, and the people behind the camera took their role seriously, too.

I don't think you can hold someone accountable for trampling someone else, because that person was probably pushed from behind. But if someone picks your pocket in a crowd, it's no different from any other act of that kind, in another situation.

Crowds of minds can be wise, but crowds of bodies just aren't.

We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions.