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.