Despite what the song “It’s a Small World” tells us, the world is pretty big. We’ve managed to fit eight billion people on it, and that’s impressive — bordering on unsettling. There’s a lot to know about that population as well, in terms of where they’re all located, how they’re spread out, and where else you could fit them if you wanted to get creative. If you’ve never looked into the fun you can have with population density facts, get ready for it!

10. Loch Ness Could Hold the Entire World’s Population Several Times

Scotland is famous for kilts, haggis, and a lake monster. Loch Ness is not just the potential home to a prehistoric monster that only appears in blurry photos, however. In fact, it could be home to everyone.

One of the supposed problems with finding the monster is the fact the loch is just so big. To put that in more appreciable terms, the loch contains 268 billion cubic feet of water. It’s about 800 feet deep and 22 square miles in area. That means, in the space taken up by the loch, you could fit every single person in the world. And then you could do it nine more times. Back when the population was a modest 7.3 billion you could have fit them in 15 times over.

Now, if you’re ever unsure about whether or not there’s a monster in the lake, just remember how much room you’re dealing with.

9. Kowloon Walled City Had the Densest Population in the World 

We’ll get into densely populated cities shortly, but we don’t want to overlook the most densely populated city in history that existed all the way up until 1994, when it was finally destroyed. You have to assume people were annoyed.

Kowloon Walled City existed inside of Hong Kong and, as the name suggests, it was a city within a wall. Buildings were stacked on buildings until a bizarre sci-fi-level dystopian society was created. There were 33,000 people in the space of one city block in Kowloon. The density was 1.2 million per square kilometer or 3.2 million per square mile. Compare that to New York City’s density of just over 25,000 per square mile. 

Kowloon, once a fortress, never came under British rule in Hong Kong. The result was a sort of lawless land where residents could build whatever they wanted, however, they wanted. With no regulations, people attached houses to their neighbor’s houses, removed walls as necessary and continued up and out. People inevitably ended up cut off from the outside world and trapped in the middle of a patchwork of structures with a maze of ramshackle halls and stairs to get out into the open air.

When Britain and China finally agreed on what to do with the place, some residents had to be removed by force before everything was destroyed and replaced with public spaces, such as gardens and parks to help beautify the area.

8. Switzerland Has Nuclear Shelters for its Entire Population

It’s a safe bet no one wants to endure a nuclear war, but if one does happen, you hope there’s a way to survive it. Back in the day people sometimes built their own fallout shelters, and governments have some of these on standby in case the world goes to hell. But what about the rest of us?

If you live in Switzerland, worry not. The entire population can fit into the country’s fallout shelters because the Swiss are very prepared. By Swiss law, building owners are required to have a fallout shelter available to house all residents. That’s for private homes and apartment buildings, so no one gets left out.

By 2006 there were 300,000 shelters in Swiss homes, plus an additional 5,100 public shelters. That’s enough to allow 8.6 million people, or 114% of the population, to safely duck and cover. Their next closest competitors, Sweden, only have room for 81% of the population.

Since everyone has them and no one has needed to use them yet, a lot of fallout shelters are now wine cellars. But they can still be used for their intended purpose if the time comes and the entire population can be safely stored away to endure a nuclear winter.

7. The Population of Whittier, Alaska Live in the Same Building

Alaska is a beautiful part of the world, but it’s also not the most hospitable place at certain times of year. Go far enough north and you can be stuck in freezing temperatures where the sun doesn’t shine for days at a time. People still find a way to get by though, like in Whittier.

The tiny town of Whittier only has one access road, which is often inaccessible in winter thanks to its 22 feet of annual snow. The tunnel is only one lane and they close it at night, leaving the sea the only way in. Weather can also make that impossible. The townspeople manage by living almost exclusively in the same building. 

Nearly 200 people all live in the same 14-story building that was once a military barracks. In addition to homes, it features the town post office, a bed and breakfast, a grocery store, and a police station. Kids can access the local school through an underground tunnel.

6. Everyone in Finland Could Pair Up and Take a Sauna at the Same Time 

Finland is full of saunas. They love saunas there. Fins have saunas like Canadians have donut shops. Can’t get enough of them. The entire country has a population of about 5.5 million and there are three million saunas to go around. 

If you aren’t sure or think it means something else in Finland, a sauna is a very hot, steamy room where you get naked except for a towel or swimsuit and sit down and then that’s it. You can be alone, with friends, and often with strangers. Just sweaty, mostly naked, in a hot, steamy room. Maybe you’ll scrub a stranger’s back if they ask. 

Some Fins like to shake it up by leaving a hot sauna and running out into the snow on a winter’s day, or even plunging in ice water, but that’s not really part of the sauna proper. 

Apartment buildings come with saunas and even large businesses will have them on site. By the numbers, there are enough available that everyone in the country could grab a friend and have a sauna for two at the same time with plenty of room left over for people from abroad.

5. If Manhattan Had the Same Population Density as Alaska, 29 People Would Live There

To get a better idea of how population densities vary within a country, we can compare two places in a goofy way like we’re about to do. Manhattan, in New York, has a very high population density of around 70,000 per square mile for the 1.6 million people who live there. That means Manhattan covers an area of about 22.83 square miles. 

On the other hand, the state of Alaska has a population density of 1.28 residents per square mile. That means if Manhattan had the same density as the state of Alaska, about 29 people in total would live there. And they would each have a lot of really prime real estate.

4. Le Lignon is an Apartment Building with a Population Density Similar to Manhattan

Speaking of Manhattan, there’s a building in Switzerland called La Lignon that shares something in common with New York’s famous borough. They both have about the same population density. 

Built in the late 1960s, Le Lignon is not a particularly attractive structure, but it does have a strange, Euro-dystopian flare to what turned out to be one of the biggest housing projects ever constructed. It consists of a kilometer-long behemoth that houses 6,800 tenants in 2,780 apartments. 

Built in response to a housing crisis, some residents love the building while outsiders consider the 10 million square foot beast an eyesore. And while it may look ugly from the outside, inside some of the residents are happy with the pleasant views and spacious homes, as well as the feeling of community that comes from living in a building the size of a town.

The immense building is bookended by identical towers and the design allowed for many facilities to be included inside including schools, shops, a medical center, and a rooftop pool. A four-room apartment, if you can find one available, costs about 2000 Swiss francs per month, or around $2,300 US.

3. Canada’s Territory of Nunavut Has the Lowest Population Density of Any State or Province in the World

We already know Alaska has a very low population density but it by no means takes the crown. When it comes to sparse, and for these purposes we the population of any accepted subdivision of a country such as a province or state, then Nunavut in Canada wins that award. It’s even less densely populated than Greenland.

Located in Northern Canada, the territory of Nunavut with its capital city of Iqaluit has a population density of 0.02 people per square kilometer (0.05 per square mile mile) which is often rounded down to 0. Greenland is up at 0.14.

The capital of Nunavut has just 7,740 people. The entire territory clocks in at just under 37,000. That’s despite the fact it covers 808,000 square miles which makes it bigger than Alaska, more than three times bigger than Texas, and almost five times the size of California.

2. Friendship Heights Village in Maryland Is the Most Densely Populated US City

If you had to guess what the most densely populated place in the United States was, you’d probably be inclined to guess one of the big cities like New York or Los Angeles. But those are deceptive because, while the population is large, so is the space. The density, therefore, is not that high overall. 

The true winner of the population density crown goes to the unassuming town of Friendship Heights Village in Maryland. In 2020 it had a population of 5,360 residents. Not impressive, right? But the town is so small, geographically speaking, the density is 90,847.5 per square mile thanks to the fact the town covers a mere 0.06 square miles. 

The population went down a little in 2021 so the density is getting a little better but, overall, the town still leaves every other place in America in the dust. 

1. Dhaka, Bangladesh Slums May Have a Population Density of Over 2 Million Per Square Mile

We saw the incredible density of Kowloon Walled City’s population but there may still be places today that come close to matching it. Not whole cities, but at least parts, like the Dhaka slums in Bangladesh where population density has been estimated to maybe reach as many as 2.7 million per square mile. 

Even lower-end estimates have it at 115,000 per square mile which makes it higher than places like Tokyo, Manila, and Mumbai. Others have calculated it at 569,000 per square mile or 220,000 per square kilometer. Part of the problem getting consistent numbers is due to the fact these are slums and not evenly distributed or open to census taking. There’s no real way to calculate how many people live in such a place since many of the dwellings barely qualify as homes and the residents often don’t want to be questioned.

Over the last several years, summers have been increasingly brutal in many parts of the world. Cities in the Southwest United States have had to plan for droughts and water conservation initiatives. Nearly all parts of the United States have experienced at least some drought since the year 2000 and it’s a trend that is replicated all over the world. 

You would think that, given the prevalence of worldwide droughts, we might be more careful with water. You’d think that if you hadn’t experienced humans and their tendency to shoot themselves in the foot, at least. In reality, we waste water in ways that are almost hard to imagine. 

10. One Farming Family Uses More Water Than All of Las Vegas

Farms need water and most of us would accept this as a reasonable course of business. No matter what the farm produces, from lettuce to apples to beef, water has to be used to make that happen, and we place more value on the farmed product than the water itself. But can there be a point when a farm uses too much water? Is there a limit there?

A single family, who owns large amounts of farmland, was found to use more water than the entire Las Vegas Valley during a 2023 investigation. The Abbati family, whose farming empire is worth millions, used 260,000 acre-feet of water. That number is beyond anything you can imagine if you aren’t familiar with acre-feet.

One acre-foot, just one, is 326,000 gallons. So 260,000 acre-feet is 84,721,371,429 gallons. In contrast, the Las Vegas Valley used 200,000 acre-feet. 

Most of the water in that part of the world is used in the Imperial Irrigation District where 20 farming families use more water than a combined 300 others, totaling about 387 billion gallons in 2022. That district has the largest claim to water from the Colorado River, and one in seven drops goes to these farmers, many of whom don’t actually grow vegetables for human consumption. 

The bulk of their land is used to grow hay for livestock. Some of the hay is even sold to other countries in what critics have likened to essentially selling water abroad since the farmers only pay $20 per acre-foot.

Because water rights were guaranteed to local farmers nearly a century ago, and the current farmers are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those farmers, they still get to operate under the old agreements guaranteeing them all the water they want, even as reservoirs reach historically low levels. 

9. It Takes 3 Gallons of Water to Produce a Single Almond

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. But if you do, think long and hard about what that nut costs. Some of our favorite crops absolutely lay waste to water. A single almond requires over three gallons of water to grow. How does the math on that play out? 

One pound of almonds is about 400 nuts, give or take. A single tree can produce between 50 and 65 lbs of nuts. So, at 50 lbs, we’re looking at 20,000 nuts. So that’s 60,000 gallons per tree. If an orchard can produce 4,500 lbs of nuts, then it’s using 5.4 million gallons of water to do so. If there are 7,600 almond farms in California each growing about that much then that requires 41,040,000,000 gallons. This is all for almonds, 70% of which are exported. 

The amount of water used to grow all the almonds that California exports in a year could ensure water for everyone in Los Angeles for three years. Almonds use 10% of all of California’s water, more than Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. 

This may make you look at almonds negatively but remember that even corn uses a lot of water. It takes 110 gallons of water to make one pound of corn. America produced 346 million tons of corn in 2022-2023.

8. Golf Courses Use Billions of Gallons Per Day

If you’re a golfer, you may already be aware of the staggering water usage at most golf courses around the world. But there’s a good chance if you know they use a lot of water, you still don’t know what a lot means. It’s two billion gallons. And while that’s a huge number, it gets so much worse. That’s per day.

There are over 16,000 golf courses in America, more than half the world total, in fact. The average course will use 312,000 gallons per day but desert courses, like those in Palm Springs, can use a million all by themselves. 

7. Reverse Osmosis Systems Can Waste Gallons of Water For Every One They Clean

Everyone prefers drinking clean water to sloppy filth so, for some, a reverse osmosis system is the way to go. In your home, these systems force water through a membrane that separates H2O from other molecules and gives you snazzy, clean water in the end. They work as advertised and you will get the clean water you want. The problem is the waste. 

Different systems will have greater or lesser success but even the best systems can waste as much as 5 gallons of water for every clean gallon they produce. Some studies have shown that a reverse osmosis system can waste 20 times as much water as it can produce. Newer models claim to offer 1:1 technology but they are harder to find and definitely cost more.

6. Up to 37 Gallons Go Into Making a Single Roll of Toilet Paper

Toilet paper is one of the most bizarre products in the world. You pay good money for it, and these days you pay a lot, knowing full well exactly what’s going to happen to it sooner or later. While TP is king in North America, many places elsewhere choose bidets. Some Americans argue that’s a waste of water, but is it? Is there an upside to toilet paper?

Toilet paper use in America is the equivalent of pulping 15 million trees. Worse, it requires 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to make that paper, or about 37 gallons per roll. A bidet would not, in fact, take up 37 gallons to reach the equivalent cleaning power of one roll of toilet paper. 

You use about one-eighth of a gallon with a single bidet use, meaning 296 squirts before you reach the water used to make one roll of toilet paper. And, keep in mind you still need to flush the toilet paper which, even with a low-flow toilet is 1.6 gallons. You’ve just added 473 gallons to your toilet paper waste if you’re matching those 296 bidet uses. 

5. It Takes 17 Million Barrels of Oil To Make Bottled Water Bottles

The numbers behind how wasteful bottled water is are pretty remarkable. For people who have no access to clean water, bottled water is a literal lifesaver. But for the rest of us, it’s hard to make sense of the obsession when you break it down.

About 25% of bottled water is tap water, the company just bottles its own municipal supply. That doesn’t mean it’s poor quality, but it does mean you can save a lot of money just by drinking tap water. Coke and Pepsi both bottle tap water that has gone through some filters but there’s never been a study suggesting bottled water is healthier, safer, or even cleaner than most tap water. In fact, the filtering to make bottled water removes minerals like calcium and magnesium, making bottled water less healthy. 

Despite the fact it offers little, Americans bought nearly 16 billion gallons of bottled water in 2022. Ignoring the other facts, making bottles for water also uses 17 million barrels of oil per year. That figure was from back in 2006, too, and consumption has increased dramatically since that time so oil use likely has as well. 

4. Chocolate Requires More Water Than Nearly Any Other Crop

We touched on the water needed to grow almonds and corn and even make toilet paper, but what about chocolate? Surely chocolate hides no terrible, wasteful secrets. Alas. This one’s going to be ugly.

Everyone has heard that raising cattle is wasteful in terms of resources. It takes 1,910 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. But chocolate? That requires 17,196 liters to produce a kilogram. That’s about 4,542 gallons per kilogram which works out to just over 2,000 gallons per pound. So a cow and a Hershey bar take roughly the same investment in terms of water.  One single chocolate bar is going to require up to 2,000 liters or 528 gallons.

3. Hand Washing Dishes Wastes More Than 5 Times The Water of a Dishwasher

How do you do your dishes? Your options are basically limited to handwashing in a sink or using a dishwasher. If you have a dishwasher, you’ll be happy to know it’s the far better option if you have an eye to water conservation. If you load it properly and make sure it’s full, your dishwasher uses 5 to 7 times less water than hand washing.

When you wash in the sink, you could be using up to 20 gallons. A good, energy-efficient dishwasher will only use four gallons. Other sources suggest hand washing can use as much as 27 gallons while a new model dishwasher may use as little as three. Obviously, there’s a lot of wiggle room here based on how you wash dishes and what kind of dishwasher you have. That said, over the course of a year, a good dishwasher can save 5,000 gallons.

2. Starbucks Used to Waste 6 Million Gallons a Day For No Reason

If you’re the type of person who already doesn’t like Starbucks then this one will hit home for you. Back in 2008, it was discovered that Starbucks was wasting six million gallons of water every day because they forced employees to keep a sink running non-stop as a time saver. 

The sink, called a dipper well, was the one employees used to rinse off utensils. The infinite wisdom of Starbucks management was that, if the sink never stopped running, it couldn’t build germs and was, therefore, more sanitary. Staff was literally forbidden from turning the water off. 

When a UK paper learned of the running tap, they started contacting various Starbucks branches to ask about it and many of them didn’t know what the sink was for and never even used it, but they all kept it running as per company policy. 

Experts were also quick to point out that keeping a sink running would have no impact on sanitation and there are countless ways to keep a place clean that don’t require wasting 6 million gallons of water. 

1. Cruise Ships Dump 150,000 Gallons of Sewage into the Ocean Daily

Who doesn’t love a cruise ship? Aside from the people who have had to poop in bags, or been stranded, or endured a viral outbreak? They have all the amenities of a hotel but they’re on the water and, you know, they also dump massive amounts of sewage into the ocean.

It’s been estimated that a 3,000-person ship will dump around 150,000 gallons of sewage into the ocean every week. One vessel managed to drop 74,000 gallons in a day. 

Governments often ban the dumping of waste, including sewage, in coastal waters but that’s just in coastal waters. These are cruise ships. They wait until they hit international waters and then the toilet gets flushed. It’s not just sewage, either. The vessels produce much larger amounts of gray water from showers and laundry facilities, as well as oily bilge water, all of which gets dumped into the sea.

You get paid royalties if you own the rights to something, whether that’s a physical asset, a song, even a name, and someone else wants to use it commercially. If someone else is making money off of something that’s yours, you are probably owed money for it. But it’s not as cut and dry as it sounds and sometimes there are some very bizarre rules over what does and doesn’t qualify for royalties. There are many people out there paying or get paid for very unexpected reasons.

10. Finnish Cabbies Have to Pay Royalties for Songs on Their Radios

Cab drivers exist in just about every city in the world. If a place is big enough people will always need to get around so someone can always make a living by driving them. But there are plenty of rules and regulations about how this has to work and those rules can vary from one place to another.

Finland has one of the most obscure and unusual rules that cabbies have to abide by. They are required to pay royalties for the songs that play in their cabs because, strictly speaking, they make money while music is playing in the car. 

A court ruling in 2002 applied to all cabbies in the country. If they turn on the radio in the presence of a customer, then they need to pay for the music that plays. Music in a cab is a public performance at that point, and subject to such fees.

It wasn’t a ton of money and it wasn’t like the cabbies had to write down what song played when. Instead, they were tasked with paying a yearly fee of just £14 to the Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society. Cabbies are, of course, free to keep the radio off and not pay anything.

9. Alice Cooper Pays His Band Royalties to Use The Name

Alice Cooper spent decades as an icon of rock. One of the earliest performers to blend horror esthetic and showmanship with his music he’s something of a founder of the whole “shock rock” genre which led to acts like Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Gwar among many others. He’s a trailblazer is what he is. He also pays for his name.

Cooper was born Vincent Damon Furnier though he legally changed his name to Alice Cooper in 1975. The story of the name was shared by Cooper in a book in which he claimed the story of a medium using a Ouija board to spell it out, which is the popular myth, was untrue. Instead, it was just a random name that popped into his head that he felt would conjure confusing imagery for fans because the band was all men. The name was not his; it was the band’s.

As the frontman, he became known as Alice Cooper even though that wasn’t precisely the intent. But he went with it and, as a result, pays yearly royalties to the rest of the band to use the name because it belonged to all of them. 

8. Everyone Who Uses HDMI Pays Royalties for the Technology

When it comes to plugging in video peripherals these days, you need to use an HDMI cable. It’s what DVD, Blu-ray, video game consoles and everything else use and it gives you some high-quality video and audio. It’s also proprietary, and that means people pay royalties to one company to use it. 

The name HDMI stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface, which is trademarked. Anyone who wants to use HDMI has to pay a yearly fee to HDMI for adopting it. That was a $10,000 base fee plus $0.15 per unit sold unless they clearly use the HDMI logo, then the price drops to a nickel. 

If a company makes less than 10,000 units of whatever they’re selling, they can opt for a different plan to save some money. But whatever the case, if it’s your Xbox or just a cable you pick up loose, if it says HDMI on it, that company paid a royalty fee.  

7. Climbers Have to Pay Royalties to Nepal to Climb Everest

If you’re the adventurous type, you may have an incline to one day live the ultimate adventure and climb Mount Everest. And why not, it’s a big accomplishment. It’s also not very cheap.

If you’re not a Nepalese citizen, the government of Nepal is going to need you to pay royalties to climb their mountain. This varies by season but if you decide to go up in the Spring, as most climbers do, then you’re looking at an $11,000 royalty payment. You’ll also be asked to provide a $4,000 garbage management fee which you can have refunded if you bring enough trash back down with you.

In 2023, that fee faced a proposed increase to $15,000 in an effort to control the numbers because people keep going up there and dying. The new fee will go into effect in 2025.

6. DC Pays Much Bigger Royalties to Comics Creators Than Marvel

If you follow comic book news, this one may not be a surprise to you but it might be to the casual movie fan. It’s no secret comic book movies are huge business and they make literal billions of dollars. Many of those movies are based on whole storylines that were first printed in the comics. All the characters are, of course, from the comics as well. So do the writers or artists behind Deadpool and Thanos and Joker get their piece of the pie? Not as much as you’d think. 

Jim Starlin, for instance, is credited with creating Thanos, the huge villain from the MCU’s long and elaborate film series. He also created Gamora and Drax. Starlin never said what Disney paid him for putting his creations in so many films but it has been confirmed by several sources that Marvel/Disney give the comics creators $5000 and a ticket to the movie premier. 

Contrast that with Starlin’s admission that DC also paid him for the use of the character KGBeast in the Batman v Superman movie and they paid him substantially more. If you don’t remember KGBeast it’s because in the movie he was just a regular guy and they never called him by that name. But DC still paid for him, meaning DC pays significantly higher royalties for even minor characters that Marvel does for major ones.  How much more? According to Starlin, more than all the Marvel movies combined. 

5. Marvel Got Paid Royalties Every Time Hulk Hogan Wrestled

Speaking of comic book royalties, let’s look at the Hulk. The Incredible Hulk debuted in 1962, one of Marvel comics’ oldest characters appearing before the X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and many others. The name Hulk became synonymous with the big green monster forever afterwards. But there was another pop culture hulk most of us remember, too. Hulk Hogan.

Although hulk is a perfectly normal noun that refers to anything large and unwieldy you can’t just call yourself Hulk and be a big, muscular dude at the same time. Marvel comics owns the big, muscley Hulk. So, for 20 years, Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, paid royalties to Marvel comics to use his stage name. 

Hogan had appeared in a promotional photo with Lou Ferrigno back in the 70s when Ferrigno played the Incredible Hulk on TV. Someone made the joke that Hogan, taller and more muscular, was the real Hulk. The nickname stuck, and he carried it through a few wrestling promotions until the WWE (then WWF) signed him. 

Hogan was an instant star, and the WWF was just becoming the biggest, and only, name in wrestling for most people. They kept introducing him as the Incredible Hulk Hogan and by the time they were drawing crowds to Madison Square Garden, Marvel stepped in.

Hogan had to drop “incredible” and, from then on, Marvel got $100 for every match he wrestled. For 20 years. They also got a small portion of all Hulk merchandise. The deal likely made Marvel millions.

4. Warner Paid Royalties to John Hinckley for a Devo Song

Sometimes paying royalties makes perfect sense, like if a musician uses a sample of someone else’s work in a song. That happened to the band Devo and Warner, their label, had to pay when the band used a sample of poetry in a song. But it’s the “who” that makes it a little more off-putting in this case. They used the words of John Hinckley, the man most famous for trying to assassinate Ronald Reagan. And Warner had to pay.

The song I Desire came out in 1982, a year after Hinckley tried to kill the President. He had also infamously written love poems to Jodie Foster, and it was one of those poems Devo sampled for their song. The band asked him if they could use it and he said yes. Thus, he was a co-writer of the song. But Warner didn’t know until it was too late. 

In 2021, Hickley said on Twitter that he hadn’t been paid in decades. 

3. The Seattle Space Needle is Trademarked And You Need To Pay to Use It

A lot of cities have something that stands out on the skyline to make them easily identifiable. For Seattle, it’s the Space Needle. But you can’t go off and use the image of the Space Needle all willy-nilly if you’re trying to promote something in the city. The building is a trademark and you need to pay royalties for its likeness. 

In 2022, a coffee chain was sued by the company that owns the Space Needle for trademark infringement but the two companies came to a settlement. 

If you want to use an image of the Seattle skyline for anything commercial, Getty Images points out that you cannot do so if the key feature is the Space Needle. Even the name “Space Needle” is protected and the company will ask anyone using it commercially to change it when it comes to their attention. You can go to the Space Needle website and fill out a form if you wish to use the image, however.

2. Alaskan Residents Get a Yearly Oil Royalty Check 

If you like free money, but not a lot of free money, consider moving to Alaska. Residents of the state are given a yearly royalty check just for living in a state that’s full of oil. In 2023, Alaskans were issued a $1,312 check as their portion of the state’s oil fund.  The year before it was over $3,000.

The money changes from year to year and apparently it’s an absolute nightmare of political red tape as the government has to decide how to allocate the funds through the year to cover all kinds of unrelated things like education or transportation when there are shortfalls in those budgets. But all of that aside, there’s always something for the people of Alaska, whatever the politicians end up deciding, and it’s unique to the state. 

1. The US Had to Pay Royalties to Germany for the Springfield Rifle 

There’s a lot of business that goes into war and many people make money off of it. That’s more of a modern realization and not something everyone was concerned with back in the day. But maybe they should have been. After all, it looks like the US was paying royalties to Germany for rifles based on the German Mauser. And they were paying them during WWI.

The Mauser 98 is arguably the most famous rifle ever made. Between 91 and 125 million have been made and countries around the world copied the design for their own. This included the United States. Because of this, governments were paying royalties to Germany for the design.

The US had worked out an agreement in 1905 to pay $0.75 per rifle plus $0.50 per thousand clips to a maximum of $200,000. Later, the Springfield M1903 would try to duplicate the Mauser design but tweak a few elements to avoid royalties, which failed in the long run. The US ended up paying a number of penalties and fees to Germany even after the First World War began, while the US was still neutral.

When someone refers to something as the cost of doing business these days, they generally refer to something that sounds out of line or unfair. It’s an indictment of how we view business in general that this has become a turn of phrase that can be used in everyday life. We recognize that business, no matter what kind of business it may be, is going to cost you. How much it costs can be surprising.

10. Item Returns Cost US Retailers Over $816 Billion 

When was the last time you returned something to a store? Maybe it was broken, food that had gone bad, or something you just didn’t like once you got it home and looked at it. Have you ever considered what that means to the business that accepts the return? Most of us don’t, but the cost of retail returns to businesses is an almost baffling $816 billion per year. That works out to more than what the US government spends on education training and employment programs in a year.

In many cases, there are multiple levels to how a return item costs a company money. For instance, if you return your Amazon order, Amazon pays the postage to take it back. A number of things can’t be restocked and sold to somebody else for various safety reasons. Other items are so inconvenient to restock that they’ll throw them out instead. 

About 16.5% of all retail sales are returned by consumers. Holiday returns alone account for $171 billion in losses. Fraudulent returns make up around $84 billion in yearly losses. 

9. The Original Xbox Cost Microsoft $4 to $7 billion 

The console gaming market was worth $37.9 billion in 2022, and it’s only expected to grow year over year. The market would be nowhere near as big as it is without the Xbox versus PlayStation battle that has fueled for decades now. 

Microsoft’s decision to join the console Wars and create the Xbox looked completely foolish when it started back in 2001, but it began to make a lot more sense. This is all because Microsoft lost between $4 billion and $7 billion on the original Xbox. 

Microsoft worked quickly to push out the original Xbox. It wasn’t designed to be cost-effective or efficient; they just wanted it done as soon as possible. Every piece of hardware they sold was a loss for the company. The idea was that they could make up money later on the software, which is clearly what they did as the Xbox gave way to the 360 and later generations that have all been huge money-makers. 

8. Friday the 13th Costs Businesses Hundreds of Millions

Paraskevidekatriaphobia is possibly the most costly fear for business in America. The fear of Friday the 13th may sound silly, but when you get to the bottom line, it’s no joke. People take this so seriously that it has a multi-million dollar impact on the economy every single time the 13th falls on a Friday.

An estimated $700 million to $800 million in productivity or revenue is lost every Friday the 13th due to people refusing to go to work or shopping. One survey in Britain showed that one in 20 people won’t leave their house on the unlucky day. 

Considering that there could be up to three Fridays the 13th on the calendar in any given year, the potential business loss could be over $2 billion in total.

7. CVS Lost $2 Billion in Annual Sales by Dropping Cigarettes

For many years doctors would endorse the smoking of cigarettes. TV commercials would feature someone in a nice white coat smoking their Marlboro and explaining how it helped relax you and take you to flavor country, or whatever the medical reason might be for smoking a cigarette in the 1950s. Later, this advertising method was dropped, but cigarettes were still not far removed from the world of healthcare. For decades you could buy cigarettes at a drugstore.

CVS drug stores stopped selling tobacco products in 2014. Remarkably, this did a great service to the world at large. 38% of CVS customers who were smokers stopped smoking altogether rather than inconveniencing themselves by going to another store to buy cigarettes. 

On the financial side, the company took a massive hit of around $2 billion by dropping tobacco. Their overall sales were $139 billion at the time, but a $2 billion loss is nothing to sneeze at. 

6. Sunny Delight Saw Its Sales Cut in Half by a Scandal

Sunny Delight was a childhood staple for many people of a certain age. It wasn’t exactly orange juice, but it was orange. That has to count for something. It became a huge hit when it made its way to the United Kingdom. Sunny Delight was the third best-selling soft drink in the UK in the ’90s, right after Coke and Pepsi. It was also the 12th best-selling grocery product of any kind in the country. However, that didn’t last long.

Though it sounds like an urban legend, there was a story in 1999 about a 4-year-old girl who drank so much Sunny Delight she turned yellow. This was true because of the amount of beta carotene added to Sunny Delight to give it the bright yellow color it was famous for. Although it was harmless, it faded soon after, and the girl had to drink 1.5 liters a day to achieve it; once the story hit the news, the damage was done.

Sales of the beverage were cut in half in the aftermath of the yellow girl scandal. This led the company to attempt rebranding in 2003, then a reformulation in 2009, and another tweak in 2010. Sales never fully recovered.

5. The Movie Sideways Cost Merlot Wine Makers $400 Million

Sideways was a 2004 comedy-drama about a trip through wine country. It was nominated for several Academy Awards and was generally well-liked by audiences. Most audiences, at least. But probably not the people who make Merlot wine.

The lead character in the film is something of a wine snob. At one point, he angrily exclaims that he has no intention of drinking merlot and insults the wine. You’d think a character in a movie doing that wouldn’t be a big deal, but you’d be wrong. This had a devastating effect on the real-world Merlot market. 

Sales of Merlot began to tank immediately after the film was released. Ten years on, the estimated loss was $400 million. Farmers lost about 7,650 acres of merlot grapes in favor of something else, in many cases pinot noir, which saw a huge boost after the film.

4. Tropicana Lost 20% of Their Sales After a Package Redesign

Have you ever wondered how important branding is for a product? Tropicana can tell you. In 2009, Tropicana decided to redesign its orange juice cartons. The juice stayed the same, all they did was change the package, which backfired miserably. 

For whatever reason, Tropicana felt the old look, which was just an orange with a straw in it under the product name, was not good enough. They spent $35 million on a rebranding campaign complete with a new design that was a close-up image of half a glass of juice. Not very complex stuff, right?

The company had about $700 million in annual sales before the redesign. Sales dropped by 20% after customers began to criticize the new look. That worked out to around $30 million on top of the $35 million they spent on the campaign in the first place.

The failure was blamed, at least in part, on Tropicana losing its connection with its customer base. Their old logo, which they went back to, was famous and iconic. It also has some personality. But they switched it to an incredibly generic redesign with little appeal, and customers rejected it very strongly. 

3. Halo 3 Was Blamed for a  27% Drop in Box Office Returns 

The box office success of movies is something that people find endlessly fascinating. Whether or movie does incredibly well or incredibly poorly, you can count on a hundred articles about it on entertainment websites for weeks to come. What’s far less common is when you find an outside reason for a drop in box office for all movies. But that happened in 2007 with the release of Halo 3.

Box office returns had plummeted 27% in October 2007 following Halo 3’s release, and it was the only thing analysts could think to blame for the massive slump. It was the worst October since 1999.

Analysts are often wrong, so you can take this all with a grain of salt, but the numbers were still awful. The Heartbreak Kid, a movie that reunited Ben Stiller with There’s Something About Mary directors the Farrelly Brothers, was expected to make as much as $25 million on its opening weekend. Instead, it took in $14 million. 

The link to Halo was established with Xbox Live numbers. 2.7 million people played the game in its first week, more than a third of everyone who was an Xbox Live member at the time. The game logged 40 million hours of play in its first week. Both Halo 3 and The Heartbreak Kid were looking to appeal to the same 18-34 demographic. Still, Master Chief seemed to win the battle handily. 

2. SC Johnson Lost a Huge Market Share by Changing Saran Wrap

Sometimes doing the right thing is a one-way trip to financial loss, something SC Johnson learned when they removed a dangerous chemical from Saran Wrap. Saran Warp famously contained something called polyvinylidene chloride. This compound was chiefly responsible for the cling quality of the plastic wrap that allowed it to stretch and stick over bowls ad plates to keep all your leftovers fresh.

It was actually news when the formula changed because people complained that their Saran Wrap didn’t cling like it used to. Clinging was the only thing people wanted Saran Wrap to do, so if it failed at that, it was a waste of money. The problem was that PDVC is very toxic and carcinogenic. 

SC Johnson dropped the chemical from the formulation, and their control of the market dropped from 18% to 11%,

1. Beavis and Butthead Destroyed Album Sales for the Band Winger

Beavis and Butthead started as a short cartoon before they got their own series on MTV in 1993. While the show mostly focused on Beavis and Butthead themselves, there were a couple of supporting characters who became memorable. One of these characters is Stewart, a nerdy kid from the neighborhood that Beavis and Butthead often mock. Like the two main characters, Stewart is always seen wearing a band shirt. That band was Winger. Winger believes Beavis and Butthead ruined their careers.

Winger guitarist Reb Beach once said the band had just released what he considered to be their best album. They were on tour to promote it when someone showed them an episode of Beavis and Butthead where they hung up Stewart by his underwear. They go to Stewart’s house, and all of his family, even the dog, are losers. And they’re all wearing Winger shirts.

The band’s tour sank immediately. People stopped buying tickets, and album sales went into the toilet. Radio stations stopped playing the band’s latest single because they were embarrassed. One stupid cartoon ruined them, costing Reb an expected $200,000 publishing advance.

In 2011, Kip Winger made amends with Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge and admitted the show had hurt them a lot, but they had buried the hatchet and moved on.