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welcome to the good news ride home for Wednesday, August 5th, 2020.

I'm Jackson Bird.

Do you live in a zip code that's a harbinger of failure?

The newly discovered secret to anglerfish's parasitic success.

The woman who returns items left behind in used books to their owners,

and the 87-year-old athlete who just became the oldest man to complete the Ironman World Championship.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

Going back into the archives on this one, did you know that there are certain zip codes

whose purchasing behavior can predict what products will flop and even which political

candidates will lose?

So-called Harbinger customers or Harbinger households are the folks who liked Diet Crystal Pepsi,

Frito-Lay lemonade, Colgate, Kitchen, Entres, and other doomed products,

and whose penchant for those unpopular products is so reliable, it can be used to predict if a

future product will succeed or not. This is based on a 2019 paper in the

Journal of Marketing Research, which built on a previous 2015 study from the same journal. The 2015

study coined the term harbingers of failure and noted, quote, their early adoption of a new product

is a strong signal that a product will fail.

...