Before we begin, a correction. This one will be strange if you did not read yesterday’s newsletter:
25 years X 40 weeks of work per year X two procedures a day = 2,000 colonoscopies.
But, I forgot that you probably also have to multiply that by 3, 4, or even 5 workdays per week. So we might be talking about as many as 10,000 colonoscopies, not 2,000.
Thus, I am even more confident. Thank you.
43,000 words about rotisserie chickens
Over the past two years I’ve solved the age-old question about what comes first, the chicken or the egg? In my case anyway, it’s the egg.
Explanation: I started taking a GLP-1 drug about a year and a half ago (I know I’ve shared that here), dropped roughly 50 pounds, and changed my lifestyle to mean working out, watching what I eat, and eating a lot of protein:
In the morning: two eggs, sometimes three, with a protein shake.
At lunch: chicken. Most often it’s rotisserie chicken, because it’s relatively inexpensive (I don’t live close enough to Costco to get them for $4.99, but still), and unelaborated with sugary sauces or whatever else.
One chicken lasts me two or three meals, even accounting for the fact that I’m not all that good at carving them.
So, I’m now an accidental rotisserie chicken expert, which led me like a moth to a flame to a new 35-page academic paper, with a 50-page online appendix, out of Stanford GSB and NJIT, analyzing when and how supermarkets should sell rotisserie chickens and other premade food to maximize profits and minimize waste.
Before we dive in, an average page in this thing has about 500 words, so do the math and it means these business professors just wrote a nearly 43,000-word treatise on how to sell rotisserie chickens.
Of Mice and Men is 30,000 words, as an comparative example.
Anyway if they wrote that much, maybe there’s something intersting buried in there, right?
Here’s the problem they addressed: A major retailer noticed it was throwing away 9 percent of its freshly prepared food, rotisserie chicken included, according to a summary on Stanford’s website.
So they asked Erica Plambeck, a professor of operations, information, and technology at Stanford GSB; Dan Iancu, an associate professor in the same department; and Jae-Hyuck Park, a Stanford PhD now at NJIT to take a look.
Challenge accepted, and they set out to built a model to find the most efficient, least wasteful way to sell prepared food.
What they found goes against how most stores actually do it.
Supermarkets typically sell first-in, first-out (FIFO), so the oldest chicken goes first.
Except the researchers found last-in, first-out (LIFO) works better.
“It’s true that some portion on the back of the shelf may expire,” Plambeck says. “But LIFO increases the average quality of items sold. That leads to increased demand and, paradoxically, less gets thrown out.”
Part 2 in the chicken-selling strategy suggested: Get rid of the time stamps on packaging that actually indicate which are the newest or freshest (or, I suppose, time stamps that consumers can easily decipher).
Shoppers who can see how old a chicken is are likely to cherry-pick the newest one and leave the rest. But if there’s no timestamp …
“If you do one without the other,” Plambeck says, meaning just go to LIFO but let the customers know which chickens actually are last in, “it doesn’t work,”
Plambeck says the project gave her a new appreciation for what it takes to run a grocery store.
“Next time you’re in a supermarket, stop and look around. It’s a complex operation, and the details really matter for the cost and quality of the food we eat, and for what we don’t eat.”
As for me, I realize I’m absolutely the kind of person who looks for the last-in chicken if I can find it. Most often, at least where I shop, everything is quite fresh anyway.
But it’s nice to know the thing I eat almost every day for lunch triggered a 43,000-word obsession at good ol’ Stanford University.
I’ve never felt so trendy.
Other things worth knowing …
AP: The U.S. military hit targets in Iran on Tuesday and Tehran fired missiles and drones at various sites across the region as hostilities flare once again in an intermittent war that has lasted more than six months. One U.S. strike hit a home hosting a wedding, killing five people and wounding dozens, local officials claimed.
Mediaite: In his first interview since being detained by ICE and deported, far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos said he is “very ashamed” to have ever supported President Trump. Yiannopoulos admitted to cheering on ICE actions in the past, but argued they should be focused on violent criminals and drug dealers.
Business Insider via MSN: Is $155,600 a working-class salary? More than half of Americans who make that much say yes. Overall, 60% of Americans now identify as working class, according to a Pew Research analysis of a January 2026 survey — up from 54% in 2024.
Time: The Trump administration plans to spend at least $250,000 to renovate the White House bowling alley. When the Obama administration tried to do this project in 2014, only 90 minutes passed after the story broke before the RNC posted a list of other things that could be done with the money, and Congress moved to prohibit the use of funds on the project.
Futurism: Now that AI models have officially passed the Turing Test, there’s no doubt they’re capable of imitating human traits to a degree that would have flabbergasted even an expert just a few years back. But the more we use tools like ChatGPT or Claude, the tables are starting to turn: chatbots appear to be influencing human behavior, making us behave more like them.
WCVB: A man is facing charges after he was accused of assaulting a priest with a beer can at a church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “Yes, a man attacked me at confessions and adoration this evening after he tried to steal the monstrance,” Father Chris Peschel posted on Facebook. “I forgive him. I am just glad nobody else was hurt. I pinned him down until the police arrived.”
Mac Rumors: A science project Apple co-founder Steve Jobs built for his 8th-grade science fair in 1968 sold at auction for $34,375. Jobs was attending Cupertino Jr. High when he designed the project, titled “What is the SCR? (silicon-controlled rectifier).” The lot includes a display board built from plywood with three explanatory panels and a 10-page report.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
Now, granted I'm a tad older than you, but my assessment of number of meals from a rotisserie chicken runs almost double yours. Consider a meal per: leg including thigh plus a wing(2), breast(2), carcass scavenging(1) for a total of 5. Using the breasts for a chicken salad or other enhancement might increase that, not to mention using the bones for stock. So 5 minimum seems reasonable. Bargain basement costwise!