Friday, June 24th. In the past, hot summer days meant that some enterprising youngsters in the neighborhood would set up a lemonade stand or the family would share a pitcher of iced tea on the front porch to cool off. In recent times, we usually resort to something in a bottle or can to slake our thirst year-round. The drink of choice is often a soft drink, usually carbonated. As a result, fizzy soft drink manufacturing is a $34 billion a year business. Bottled water has surged in popularity in recent decades, although there lately has been some pushback over the environmental threat posed by so many empty plastic bottles. The 309 water-bottling establishments in the nation ship more than $6.6 billion worth of product annually. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the ‘America’s Economy’ mobile application at <www.census.gov/mobile>.
Saturday, June 25th. Today is the anniversary of the first color television broadcast. In 1951, CBS transmitted the appropriately named program “Premiere” from New York City and through stations in Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. By the end of 1957, while nearly 39 million U.S. households had TV sets, only 150,000 were color units. Sales of color sets caught up with those of black and white sets around 1970. Shortly thereafter, American consumers began preferring foreign manufactured sets, and in 1995, the last major domestic brand was sold to a Korean firm. What little receiver manufacturing remains is a $52 million dollar a year business in the U.S. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the ‘America’s Economy’ mobile application at <www.census.gov/mobile>.
Sunday, June 26th. Whoever bought a pack of chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio on this date 42 years ago was making history. It was the first purchase of an item to be scanned into a cash register by using the Universal Product Code — much better known as the bar code. Realizing the significance of the event, the buyer returned the item. The 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit is now on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., along with one of the early scanners. The price-scanning concept actually dates from the early 1950s, employing a bull’s-eye type mark. But it proved cost prohibitive. Today, the bar code is part of everyday life for the $4.2 trillion worth of annual transactions in America’s nearly 1.1 million retail trade establishments, and the 14.7 million people who work in them.Profile America is in its 20th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.