Small Talk: The Eternal Happiness Meal, lying pants
TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: This final note for a Friday. Something not on the news but stories that didn’t quite make the headlines. Courtesy of Rico Gagliano, Brendan Newnam and the rest of the Marketplace staff.
Brendan Newnam: Stacey Vanek Smith, senior reporter for Marketplace. What story are you going to be talking about this weekend?
Stacey Vanek Smith: Well Brendan, we’re fatter than we think we are.
Stacey laughs.
Newnam: That’s not fat, that’s storage.
Vanek Smith: Right. There’s an article in Esquire magazine that looked at pants sizes. Everybody from Calvin Klein to Gap is basically putting smaller sizes on their pants than the pants actually are. And the worst was Old Navy, which said that a 41″ pant was a 36.
Newnam: Couldn’t they avoid this problem if they took a cue from Starbucks and instead of using numbers, they just name their sizes after just Italian words?
Vanek Smith: Venti pants! You could super-size them!
Newnam: A khaki-cino.
Rico Gagliano: Matt Berger, senior web producer. What story are you going to be talking about this weekend?
Matt Berger: Well, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the New York Times, admitted this week that the New York Times won’t be printed on paper at some point in the future.
Gagliano: Which is, as a journalist I’ve been actually following, that’s a big deal for the newspaper industry.
Berger: The irony is that I was riding the bus, reading the story on my Droid smartphone.
Gagliano: It’s like “No duh, Sulzberger.”
Berger: Though I will say, if they stop printing the paper, what are my kids going to do with all that Silly Putty?
Newnam: Adriene Hill, Marketplace’s sustainability reporter. What’s your story?
Adriene Hill: The McDonald’s Happy Meal that doesn’t mold.
Newnam: The Eternal Happiness Meal?
Hill: Absolutely! There’s a photographer in New York, bought a Happy Meal more than 150 days ago and she’s been taking pictures. And it looks exactly the same as it did when she got it.
Newnam: No mold, no nothing?
Hill: There’s fries, there’s a burger. It looks precisely the same as it did 150 days ago.
Newnam: So this is like good news. I could include some Happy Meals in my earthquake kit and I’ll have a little silly toy to play with when I’m in my shelter.
Hill: As long as you got enough water to counter to the sodium, you’ll be just fine.
Ryssdal: That’s Rico, Brendan and just a tiny taste of their podcast. It’s called Dinner Party Download.
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