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By The Numbers

A start-up is creating t-shirt tycoons

Tony Wagner Apr 20, 2015
$5 million

That’s how much one small store on Chicago’s south side sold in lottery tickets last year. Lucky Mart used to be a convenience store, but after selling a ticket that won big, the shop rebranded and now sells lottery tickets almost exclusively. At the time our reporter visited the store, officials came by with a plaque naming Lucky Mart the top-grossing location for the Illinois state lottery.

7 million

That’s how many shirts TeeSpring sold last year, raking in about $100 million, Bloomberg reported. The start-up is a platform for designing, buying and selling t-shirts, taking care of production, shipping, customer service and the like. The site makes more than half of its sales through targeted ads on social media, and its birthed a group of t-shirt entrepreneurs, some of whom make more than $1 million with their designs. 

7,072,000 tons

That’s how much electronic waste the U.S. generated last year, much of it from large appliances, according to a new report from United Nations University. The U.S. outstrips other countries’ e-waste, the BBC reported, leaving thousands of tons of valuable recyclable materials like copper in landfills.

90 percent off

That’s the hook for one of airline JetBlue’s many “flash sales,” wherein a business offers deep discounts for a very short time. Marketplace Weekend looked into how companies leverage these eye-popping deals — which often run at a loss — for publicity, and how consumers can best take advantage of them before time runs out.

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