OK To Make A Font Out Of Your Own Writing

Why Is AriZona Iced Tea Cheaper Than Water?

The company's enormous vats of iced tea are cheaper than pure water. What kind of sorcery is this?

Despite being a bladder-shattering 23.5 ounces, cans of AriZona iced tea have never wavered from the 99-cent price point introduced shortly after the drink debuted in 1992. It’s even printed on the label as a way of warding off sugar-water price gouging by retailers.

The fact that AriZona has been able to resist inflation for nearly a quarter-century is impressive. The fact that the cans usually wind up being cheaper than smaller soft drinks is also impressive, until you begin to realize how strange it is that a vat of iced tea and its accompanying ingredients somehow manages to be less expensive than plain water.

In a recent interview with Thrillist, AriZona chief marketing officer and co-owner Spencer Vultaggio shed some light on this convenience store mystery.

Unlike water titans Coke (which distributes Dasani), Evian, or Fiji, AriZona has virtually no advertising dollars invested in their teas. “We feel like it’s more important to spend money on something that our customer really cares about, instead of buying billboards or putting our cans in the hands of some celebrity for a few minutes,” Vultaggio said.

Even with a frugal approach to ads, AriZona still has to deal with rising production costs. To help resist increasing prices to compensate, the company has pursued alternative manufacturing methods, using 40 percent less aluminum in cans and having enough factories dotting the country to make transportation more efficient. Bottled water, in contrast, is sometimes sourced from abroad, making for exorbitant shipping costs.

In the end, it’s not the iced tea that’s more economical than the water; it’s that the container it comes in is simply cheaper to produce and transport. And while AriZona isn’t above charging a premium for fancier drinks—like a tea brewed with oak chips that sells for twice the price—their branding depends heavily on those familiar rows of 99-cent cans and the loyal consumers who keep reaching for them.

Abbey and I fused our love for lettering and Harry Potter to create these new posters for the four Hogwarts houses. Just in time for Harry Potter’s & JK Rowling’s birthday, too! © Risa Rodil x Abbey Sy

What house are you sorted in? ❤️ 💙 💛 💚  

Everything movies taught me about archery is wrong. This is a complete mind-blower. 8D

If you are even remotely interested in archery or medieval combat, check this out, it’s just great!

seriously, tho, shelters and rescues are being slammed HARD by kitten season this year.  i mean, we always are, but this year seems extra bad.  shelters are in desperate need of:

Towels

Kitten Milk Replacer (kmr)

Baby kitten kibble (like with the teeny tiny kibbles like royal canin’s babycat formula)

Baby kitten soft food

Heating pads (kittens need SO MUCH HEAT)

Pine litter (baby kittens can’t use clumping litter because they try to eat it or it gets stuck to their bottoms and clumps up)

Unflavored pedialyte

little kitten pens (like the kind you keep kittens IN, not the kind you write with)

feeding syringes, bottles, and nipples

money

Fosters!!!  this is probably the thing we need more than anything else, tbh. 

Prince Rupert’s Drop

Did you guys ever hear about Prince Rupert’s Drop? The British Royal Society was really interested in these things back in the 1600s.

It’s basically a long, thin, practically snaky bit of glass that you get when you drop some molten glass into water. It solidifies into a shape like this:

The interesting and weird thing is, you can’t really break the bulb part. You can take a hammer to it but it won’t break. But the long tail is fragile and easily broken. And if you break any part of this thing, it explodes. Really, it just blows up into a million tiny little shards.

With modern high-speed cameras, they’ve managed to measure the speed of the fracture at slightly faster than one mile per second.

The reason why it breaks like this is because, when the molten glass rapidly cools, the surface hardens right up, but the inside still stays hot for a while. As the inside cools, it pulls in on itself really hard in all directions, leaving the entire drop in a constant state of high tension. When it’s entirely cooled, it only takes a tiny fracture to release that chain reaction of released tension that breaks all of it almost at once. 

People like that…corporations like that, they have all the money, they have all the power, and they use it to make people like you go away. Right now, you’re suffering under an enormous weight. We provide…Leverage.

~Nathan Ford from Leverage

🕊

terrifying monstrosity: who could possibly love me when I am a terrifying monstrosity  me, stretched out on the table in front of them with a rose between my teeth: well

so i’ve seen this around a lot and i always felt like the version i listened to just. didn’t have everything? sO! i edited together my three favourite versions of the tik tok sea shanty! enjoy!!

(listen with headphones if possible!)

(yes i know the ending is bad oKaY-)

Could somebody be a paramedic if they were missing a forearm?

Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.

My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.

So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?

(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)

Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.

They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.

Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.

So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.

Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

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