You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
4 percent
There were 1,223 directors on 1,100 films released from 2007 to 2017. Women accounted for only 4 percent of them. Only 5.2 percent of the directors were African-American. [Annenberg Inclusion Initiative]
7 stores
Macy’s announced it will shut down seven locations and cut 5,000 jobs, in keeping with its announced plan in August 2016 to close 100 stores. Of those 100 closures, 81 have been announced. The company actually had a strong holiday season — sales in stores rose 1.1 percent. [USA Today]
$25
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will make its admission fee of $25 mandatory beginning March 1 for visitors from outside New York State. The current $25 admission is suggested. FiveThirtyEight has previously covered what that $25 will get you. [The New York Times]
222 pounds
The USDA estimates Americans will consume an average of 222 pounds of red meat and poultry in 2018. Great job everybody, that’s a new high. [Quartz]
22 million
New Jersey is increasingly become the food capital of the United States, with nearly 2,000 food businesses set up there and 190 food companies’ corporate headquarters in the garden state. The reason why is location. There are 22 million consumers within a two-hour drive, on top of the biggest port in the world and multiple airports, and with something as time sensitive as food, that counts. [Public Radio International]
87 million
Number of rotisserie chickens sold by Costco in 2017. The business of prepared birds has been a booming one since the products introduction in the mid-nineties. Cheap birds (Costco sells a cooked rotisserie chicken for $4.99) mean customers shell out for sides that bring in higher margins. Indeed, the rotisserie concept kickstarted a whole bunch of prepared-food supermarket trends. [The Wall Street Journal]
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