A Chicago Newspaper That Bought a Bar | Hacker News Reader

A Chicago Newspaper That Bought a Bar

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220 pointspetethomas32 comments

Newsrooms and bars are like twin brothers. You pick any newspaper, and there is always THE watering hole for it, usually the very nearest one.

For the Baltimore Sun, that was the "Midtown Yacht Club" and the joke was in its name, in that it was nowhere near the water. Anyhow, about a decade or so, the guy owning it decides to sell the bar and finds a buyer quickly. He starts liquidating some of the non-related assets and then finds a ream of papers in the basement he had forgotten about.

The managing editor, who was helping him close the bar that night (though not in a working capacity) asks him about the ream. Turns out, it was a block of UPC barcodes the barowner had purchased a decade prior, as a sort of investment, and forgotten about.

When he bought them, they were a moment's whim to a pushy salesman, and a few pennies. By the time he was selling the bar, the UPC barcode ecosystem had gone through a huge growth and the allocated numbers were used up. Prices and renewals shot up through the roof to where it was prohibitively expensive to add new products to the market. And he was sitting on a whole block of addresses.

He ended up selling that contiguous barcode block for far more than the bar was worth, and retired.

Yep, the gathering place for the Sacramento Bee when I was there was Benny's/Q Street Bar, even though the Press Club was just about 100 feet further down the street

Source? I can't find a single mention of UPC codes and the Midtown Yacht Club online. [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?dcr=0&q="Midtown+Yacht+Club"+u...

It never made it as a story.

The first ever product sold at a retail checkout using a UPC barcode is on display at the Smithsonian!

A 10 pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum.

The first UPC marked item ever scanned at a retail checkout was at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio at 8:01 a.m. on June 26, 1974, and was a 10-pack (50 sticks) of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum.[6] The shopper was Clyde Dawson and cashier Sharon Buchanan made the first UPC scan. The NCR cash register rang up 67 cents.[7] The entire shopping cart also had barcoded items in it, but the gum was the first one picked up. This item went on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.[8]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Code

Fascinating, thanks for the share. For the interested, the full 25 part series in its original form is available as newspaper scans here: sites.dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/mirage-pamela-zekman-zay-n-smith-chicago-sun-times

http://sites.dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/mirage-pamela-zekman-za...

That is absolutely brilliant. I hope the current fears over the demise of 'real journalism' are overblown, and that we never lose the news outlets who will back type of work no matter what it costs.

You write "no matter what it costs" but the article points out they did have a limited budget.

Remember, journalism in that era was funded by advertisements and classified. Facebook, Google, Craigslist, etc. have sucked out a lot of that money.

Who pays the cost now?

If you want this sort of news, if you think it's important, help pay for it. Get a subscription to your local paper, for example. I send $35/month to Democracy Now.

Sadly it's easy to do lots of things "no matter what it costs" when you're swimming in ad revenue.

The demise of journalism is largely tied to the deep pockets being gone. Gone are the days of being able to afford to have a reporter working on a single story for months or years.

If you want this kind of thing, you have to pay for it. Subscribe to newspapers you think are making a difference.

More so than swimming in ad revenue, said revenue was funneled first and foremost to cover journalistic expenses, not dividends for shareholders.

I have seen one too many newspapers be subject to a leveraged buyout, that then lead to the advertisement division spun off as its own company, and the rest left to rot.

David Simon's lecture, "The Audacity of Despair", addresses this.

Roughly mid-way through, I believe around 40 minutes or so.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw

> we never lose the news outlets who will back type of work no matter what it costs.

In the end, it is about the costs. Great journalists rarely quit out of fear or apathy:

- http://www.npr.org/2015/04/25/402160015/2014-pulitzer-winner...

- https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/pulitzer_prize_jou...

- http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

- https://www.deseretnews.com/article/563215/Village-Voice-car...

> I think one of the things that amazed us is that these inspectors sold out public safety on the cheap. They were not taking huge amounts. We were told to leave $10 for one inspector, and $25 for another inspector.

According to inflation, that's $40.25 and $100.62 in today's dollars. That's pretty much a joke!

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25&year1=19770...

It seems like a joke, but the amounts make sense.

It can't be so expensive that all of the inspectors' combined bribes become too expensive for the least able institution to afford. You don't want the bribes to be such a burden that someone complains, either. When you're inspecting possibly multiple businesses in a day, 5 days a week, all those "cheap" bribes add up to a nice tax-free bonus paycheck on top of what the government is paying you to do the job.

Brehon Tap is a fave of mine. I like dropping in.

I have to give Kudos to Pam Zekman and her colleagues for having the massive courage to pull this off.

Another interesting story about the bar (Brehon) - a guy started a successful pharma advertising agency out of that bar! They actually used the pay phone as their phone line. The business is still successful and located about a block away, called Closerlook.

Now the bar is an Irish pub called the Brehon Pub. It doesn't look all that great inside. But it does have clean beer lines.

There are so many bars in Chicago with dirty/yeasty tap lines...so sad...

How does one tell?

Same way you tell a rectal thermometer from an oral thermometer - by the taste.

Sometimes just by the smell

Remind me not to borrow your thermometer

Their waffle fries aren't bad either.

You're right. Those are freaking great.

It's still a pretty great lunch or post work spot. That whole neighborhood is pretty much a weekday/workday only kind of crowd though.

Very interesting story. I'm also surprised by the $18,000 asking price. Seems cheap even with inflation.

> I'm also surprised by the $18,000 asking price. Seems cheap even with inflation.

It does seem low. Of course, it was a maggot infested bar, not up to code, before the era of urban renewal.

Also has to account for average income growth, not just inflation: due to Baumol's cost disease, no one would run bars if they only paid as much as they did in 1976, based on 1976 wages. Non-labour productive stuff like bars has gotten more expensive generally I believe.

Interest rates (and thus, discount rates) were significantly higher back then. If you can get 5% a year with short-term treasuries, you're not going to pay as much for the free cash flow from buying a bar.

It's $72,448 in today's dollars.

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=18%2C000&year1...

I suspect the business itself had issues and the owner just wanted out.

and whatever inspector we would have to deal with and we should leave an envelope with a certain amount of cash, and he told us what the cash amount should be for each inspector. And how to do it all!

Bill: He was one of those guys, after you shake his hand, you want to go wash.

Systemd walks into a newspaper...

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