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By The Numbers

The island of lost baggage

Tony Wagner Jun 15, 2015
40,000 square feet

 The size of Unclaimed Baggage Center, a huge Alabama store that sells items recovered from lost or unclaimed luggage all around the country. The bags become airline property after 90 days, and the store buys them up sight-unseen, reselling what’s inside and donating the rest. Quartz profiled the company, which is sort of like a thrift store combined with “Storage Wars.”

54 years

That’s how long the U.S. kept Cuba under embargo before starting to normalize relations with the country late last year. Over the weekend, news broke that ties will likely be restored next month. In the latest episode of our new podcast Actuality, Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour and Quartz’s Tim Fernholz dig into what this process means for Cuban entrepreneurs.

5 days

That’s how many paid vacation days the average American leaves on the table every year. We take a closer look at why the U.S. seems to have developed a culture of work martyrdom and why it’s not necessarily the best for employees and companies alike.

80 percent

 That’s the percentage of questions posed on Twitter that are ignored by companies, according to a new study. That’s four out of five questions going unanswered. As Mashable reports, if you want to get a company’s attention, you’ll have much better luck on Facebook.

13

That’s how many episodes of “Orange Is the New Black” dropped on Netflix over the weekend, and it’s likely many fans have already devoured them all. This kind of appointment binge-watching has become increasingly common as Netflix builds its stable of hits, and it’s helped establish the company’s dominance in streaming. But as Vox points out, Netflix doesn’t own any of its shows, opting to license them from other studios. That means the company gets shut out of a lot of potential revenue in the long term.

86 percent

That’s the percentage of trans fats that food companies say they’ve already removed voluntarily. So what would an official ban on trans fats by the FDA really do? Some analysts say it would just be the icing on the cake.

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