Groundhog Day 2024: Trademark, bankruptcy, and the dollar that failed

0:00This message comes from Capital One with the Venture X-Card. Earn unlimited double miles, a$300 annual Capital One travel credit, and access to airport lounges. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Details at CapitalOne.com. This is Planet Money from NPR.

0:24And Amanda Aronchek has entered the Zoom. Hello, Kenny. How are you? Thank you for coming, Amanda. I don't know why I'm here. All I know is it's a meeting and I was invited and it's a little mysterious. You know it's Groundhog Day, yes? Yeah. And you may be aware, Planet Money suffers under an ancient curse where every year on this day, we have to report stories only about things that occurred on Groundhog Day. Vaguely recall this? I do. And if they're good enough, big enough, important enough economic stories, then we break the curse? That's how this works. And I have very exciting news for you.

1:03Yeah. You're in the episode. I'm in the episode. That's what this is. That's the mystery meeting. I see. Okay. And Erica, what about Erica? She was the host last year with you. Yeah, no, no one's seen Erica since last year. Kenny, I'm here. I'm here for it. I'm here for Groundhog Day. Bring it. Great. So, quick reminder of how this works. We will start presenting a Planet Money episode about, I mean, I don't know, the Great Groundhog Day train robbery of 1906. Kenny, is that a thing? Just roll with it. So you know how our show usually starts? We play some chill music. Yeah, yeah. Then we say something like, hello, and welcome to Planet Money.

1:46Today on the show, the Great Train Robbery of 1906 was not just an example of how money... This is Planet Money from NPR. So yeah, that's what happens. If the fickle groundhog gods don't like our story, in this case, I'm guessing the problem is that I did literally make that story up. The little coin drop thing sounds and we have to start all over. Yes, right. This is like the movie Groundhog Day. Bill Murray keeps waking up on the same day over and over and over and over again until he is able to break his time loop curse. It's all coming back to me. Yeah. Yeah. And what is great about only looking for stories that happen on some February 2nd in history is that it lets us as a show tell stories about the smaller everyday things that actually add up to make the economy.

2:34There's real value here.

2:38All right. That is today's episode. I'm Amanda Ronchick. I'm Kenny Malone. After the break, we go Groundhog Day Story 100.

3:17Thank you. home, or managing debt. Using rich first-party insights, Amazon Ads connects brands with the right audiences where they browse, buy, and stream. Learn more at advertising.amazon.com. This message comes from Capital One with the Capital One Saver Card. Earn unlimited 3 % cash back on dining and entertainment. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Details Okay, so last year, the story that got us closest to being able to break the Groundhog Day curse was one that we did about the invention of the ice cream scoop because the patent for the ice cream mold and disher was issued on February 2nd, 1897.

4:06Yes, and that story got us close. So this year we were like, okay, we've done patents. We've looked at that. So what if we go sifting through a different kind of intellectual property? What if we look to see what trademarks were created on February 2nd? How's this? That's perfect. One, two, three. This is Jennifer Jenkins. You may have heard her on the show before. She's like our planet money phone-a-friend when it comes to intellectual property stuff. Right, because Jennifer is a lawyer, she's a professor at Duke, and she's also a leading scholar in IP. And we explained to our very smart, leading legal scholar friend, you know, the usual stuff.

4:45How we needed to find a story that happened on some February 2nd, and because of an ancient curse laid upon our podcast by mysterious groundhog gods, etc., etc., she got it. Oh, this is great. Well, I love Groundhog Day, so happy Groundhog Day. But I didn't know you were breaking a curse. This is news. As curses go, I think this one's pretty good. Sure. It's not cursed for demon spawn or something. It is not. That would be a very different Groundhog Day. Just saying. No, that's right. Now, we are hoping that Jennifer can help us break our curse with trademarks. Yeah, trademarks, of course, are a way for companies to claim as property all the special names or sayings or really all kinds of things that identify their brand.

5:24Think of the Nike swoosh, the scent of Play-Doh. Jennifer says even the sound of a certain cartoon father. Doh! Which is Homer Simpson. Wait, is Doe trademarked? It is. Doe! Yeah, I can't. I don't sound like Homer. Yeah, for real. So can we go through some of these? Let's look at some trademarks. Together, we pull up this searchable trademark database that, as far as we can tell, contains all federal trademarks filed since the 1800s. And there are so many trademarks filed on groundhog days throughout history. February 2nd, 1924, some chemical company filed a trademark for the name Malitol, which apparently was a malaria medicine.

6:06February 2nd, 1970, the Lacoste company, yes, that one, files for a new logo, we believe, a pretty angry-looking version of their alligator logo to put on their, quote, all-weather coats for men. And then we see it. February 2nd, 1976. A trademark filed by General Mills. The mug-a-lunch. I mean, it's so 1970s. I love it. Mug-a-lunch? Mug-go-lunch? Mug-o-lunch. Mug-o-lunch. I mean, honestly, my first thought was a sort of Harry Potter thing. But then I was like, oh, no, no, wait. It's a lunch. It's a lunch in a mug. It's a lunch in a mug. It's a lunch in a mug, right? So it's a combination of pasta and sauce that comes in a box.

6:50And then you can put said ingredients from said box into your mug and enjoy a mug-o-lunch. Now, I know this just sounds like some kitschy product, but the more we thought about mug-o-lunch, the more we were like, no, no, no, there's something here. Yeah, because why might General Mills be offering up quick and easy lunch solutions? Well, the answer is likely that by the end of the 1970s, for the first time in history, more than half of women in the U.S. had jobs outside the house. So, time to make your own lunch, kids. Yeah, grow up. Put it in a mug. See if I care. Pourses of water in a mug. I don't care what you make.

7:25Make it yourselves. And we did actually find an old 1970s commercial for Mug-O Lunch. Wow, macaroni and cheese. Mine's spaghetti. Look at that. The trick is new Mug-O Lunch from Betty Crocker. Three tasty hot dishes you make in a mug, one helping at a time. Just add boiling water. Oh, God. Oh, it does not look good. Yeah, between the color and the texture. It isn't magic that makes them disappear. Muggle Lunch, new from Betty Crocker. Okay, okay, perhaps not the most attractive product, but I think worth our first offering to the Groundhog Gods here. Let us see if they will let us do a story about this.

8:06All right, I'm going to try. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Aronchik. I'm Kenny Malone. Today on the show, the Muggle Lunch. It's not just reconstituted brown beefy needles. No, I mean, it is that. But today on the show, just add a little water and you get an entire story of perhaps one of the greatest employment and social changes in U.S. history. Because Mug-O-Lunch was... This is Planet Money from NPR. Oh, all right. No Mug-O-Lunch. We've got to find something else. Got to start over. Oh, those fickle, capricious groundhog gods. Now, I know it feels like we have failed to please the Groundhog Gods, but Amanda, what really even is failure, I would ask you.

8:53Failure is just a point of time on the road to success. That's right. That's the right attitude. Thank you. Because if you think about it, the economy, it is sort of just a cycle of success and failure. And so maybe for our next idea to offer up, we should go looking for more failure, perhaps the kind of failure that is bankruptcy. There's two real types of bankruptcy if you're a business. Kate Waldock is a lawyer at the firm Wachtell Lipton, and she's our first call whenever we want to talk about bankruptcy. The kind where you go defunct and cease to exist. That's Chapter 7. Unlucky 7. That's how I remember that one.

9:31Yeah, that's a good way to remember it. And then there's Chapter 11, which is where you get a second chance at life. Right, where you try to restructure your debts and attempt to stay alive as a company. Kate pulls up a database that anybody's allowed to use. It's called PACER. It's for legal filings. And for our purposes, it has pretty much all the bankruptcy filings ever in there. So you can search here by chapter. I'm going to put in Chapter 11 because I'm optimistic. I like to think about the companies that have a hope of survival. This is the Phoenix from the Ashes. bankruptcy. Exactly. But let me see.

10:05So Groundhog Day, February 2nd. And there are hundreds of companies that have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on February 2nd. Yeah, there's some company called USA Log Carriers, another one here called Caltech's Swabbing Company. We got Almost Heaven Ribs filing for bankruptcy in West Virginia. Yeah, I'm pretty devastated about that. But it's Chapter 11, Kate. I hope they emerged. I hope they emerged. We did poke around a little bit and almost heaven ribs appears to have ascended to actual heaven. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have made it R.I.P. So there's one here, Movie Gallery Inc. Movie Gallery Inc.

10:45I think that that was kind of like a blockbuster. I'm going to have to double check. Let's check. Yeah, Movie Gallery Inc. So yes, Movie Gallery was the second largest movie rental company in the U.S. and Canada. This is after Blockbuster. They also owned a chain called Hollywood Video. And it appears that Movie Gallery was stuck in their own little time loop curse because on Groundhog Day 2010, they were actually filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time. If you file for Chapter 11 twice, academics like to call that Chapter 22. It's cute. 11 plus 11. Oh, but you know, February 2nd.

11:21They filed their second Chapter 11 on February 2nd. Is that true? Is that what happened here? It's true. And I personally think that I broke the curse for you guys. I hope so. If it's broken, I'm going to take credit for it. That's fair. So, okay, I don't know. I feel like there's something here. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. You know the saying, Amanda. File chapter 11 once, shame on you. File chapter 11 twice, valuable economics lesson for all of us. Today on the show, it is the story of movie guys. This is Planet Money from NPR. Oh. Oh. Again. I will say, I had this whole thing I wanted to do about the method by which movie rental companies used to acquire videotapes in order to rent them out.

12:06Yeah, I don't know, Kenny. I don't think the Groundhog Gods want it. They're wrong because there are actually three ways that movie rental companies could acquire videotapes. No, no, no. I don't know if anyone wants this. Number one is they buy them outright. Number two is to buy at a discount but agree to give back or destroy a bunch of those videos when you're done renting them out. Why do you think anyone would want to know about this? Because studios don't want to compete with a flood of used movies entering the market. This is Planet Money from NPR. That is fair. But number three is straight up to a revenue share with the movie studios or the video company.

12:39This is Planet Money from NPR. Kenny. I feel like it's clear what's happening here. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. But Amanda, silver lining, silver lining, getting cut off all those times and having to listen to the coin spitting over and over, it does give me one last idea. Last idea for sure. Okay, here we go. Well, I came across this story when I was stuck in last year's cursed time loop and I will say it is better than a story about a failed lunch in a mug. If that's possible. It is better than a story about a failed movie rental company which does have three genuinely fascinating ways of acquiring the films that they rent out but I don't want to go on about that.

13:14Okay, we get it. This one is a story about the time the U.S. dollar itself failed. That's after the break. God's willing.

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14:54Okay, so our next and final Groundhog Day story idea, well, it is about money itself. Yes. Now, Amanda, you know that the U.S. dollar is one of the most prized currencies in the entire world. And yet, this is a story about a time in recent U.S. history when the U.S. government made money that basically no one wanted. And for this story, we need an expert with a particular set of skills. Do you want to start by introducing yourself? Yes, my name is Dennis Tucker, and I'm the publisher at Whitman Publishing. You know some things about coins. A little bit. But Dennis is being a little modest here because his company publishes what is sometimes called the Bible of coin collecting, named a guidebook of United States coins.

15:41He's here to tell us a story which begins about 50 years ago. In 1975, the Treasury Department commissioned a nonprofit study to kind of look at the entirety of U.S. coinage and make recommendations. Yeah. So, you know, a study where they survey people who work with coins a lot, run models, look at coinage around the world, and then make recommendations for ways that U.S. coins could be better. You know, there were some weird things. I believe they recommended getting rid of the one cent coin. Ah, yes. And replacing it with a two cent coin. Oh, no, no, no. That's not the fix. No, get out of here with that.

16:21That's worse. But this study had one huge recommendation that, unlike the weird two-cent coin thing, got traction, got implemented, and... Hello and welcome to Planet Money! Became a full-on coin fiasco. A proper cointastrophe. A national cointroversy. Not getting cut off by the ground, huh, gods? No? All right, let's do this one. Now, the big recommendation from the big coin study was a dollar coin, or rather specifically, a smaller dollar coin. Right, America had the Eisenhower dollar coin, the Ike dollar. They were big. They were meaty. Apparently too big and too meaty because no one was using them.

17:13Yeah, there were like loads and loads of Ike dollars just sitting around in people's houses, in bank vaults, in government storage. The solution, as the great coin today had said, was for the U.S. meant to start making smaller dollar coins. And so the coin people got to work. They picked a design featuring famous 1800s women's voting rights activist Susan B. Anthony. And then, barely two years later. Today is Groundhog Day and Pennsylvania's Puxatawney Phil. That's right. Groundhog Day, 1979. Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal was at the U.S. Mint in San Francisco today to witness the first production of the new dollar coin featuring the face of suffragette Susan B.

17:57Anthony. The very first Susan B. Anthony dollars. Now, technically, the very, very first of these Susan B. Anthony coins were minted in Philadelphia like a month earlier. But, I mean, come on, on actual Groundhog Day, we've got the actual Treasury Secretary watching these coins pouring out into the world. This is a Groundhog Day story. Yeah, it's fine. And you have to imagine the monetary strangeness of 1979. All of this brand new currency that hadn't existed before was suddenly going to flood into the country. We wondered if we might be able to recreate the feeling of that strange moment. And so we went to a coin shop, bought their entire available stock of 52 Susan B.

18:43Anthony dollars. And then? So I have the package here. Sent them to our producer, Sam Yellow Horse Kessler. Go ahead and pull that out of there. Okay, all right. So it's a bag which is filled with coins. Yeah. Kenny got me money. I got money. Do you know what those are, Sam? These are coins. They look like quarters, but slightly bigger. They're$1 coins. They're$1 coins. We told Sam that for one day, he was going to have to transact exclusively in Susan B. Anthony dollars. Okay. I do need to eat today, so I can run out and purchase. Listeners may not know this about me. I eat exclusively sandwiches.

19:26I will purchase my sandwiches. Okay, so while Sam is off purchasing his sandwiches with his Susan B's, let's go back to our 1970s coin drama. Dennis Tucker, publisher of the Coin Bible. He was just a kid when this coin finally started to flood out into the world. Believe it or not, I remember friends at school, even though we were very young, talking about the coin, I think because they were in the news at the time. Perhaps because the U.S. government was spending all this money on a Susan B. Anthony Dollar public relations campaign. Among other things, they printed a series of cartoons. And I mean, I have not shown you these yet, but here is one.

20:07Oh, that's sort of a Charlie Brown looking kind of guy. Yeah. So we've got a kid who's holding a coin. Huge smile. Why? Well, here's the caption. Happiness is a dollar that won't blow away. Yeah. Of course. That's what happens to my dollar bills all the time. Just the wind takes them. But to be clear, the propensity of paper dollars to like blow away everywhere was not really the reason the U.S. Treasury wanted us all to switch to a dollar coin. They'd figured out that coins were in fact cheaper in the long run than paper bills. They estimated that they would save$50 million a year making dollar coins rather than having the BEP print dollar bills.

20:51Because paper dollars are made of paper. They wear, they tear, they catch on fire. Should you light them? I'm not suggesting you do, but you could. Don't light them on fire. Coins, they simply last longer. Yeah. And the Treasury said at the time that paper bills last about 18 months, a coin 15 years. So the Treasury and the mint went big. They made millions of the Susan B's and then released them out into the world. Well, we don't know if it will catch on or not, but they're telling us it will save the country money in printing costs for those flimsy green dollar bills we carry around. Almost immediately, there was backlash.

21:32The federal government is attempting to peddle a product for which there is no demand. Seriously, do you know anyone who is dissatisfied with the paper dollar? This is an NPR commentator, and he was also apparently annoyed by the government's big PR campaign, which had included a bunch of suggestions for how Americans could help the cause. My favorite is the following. Quote, stage a Susan B. Anthony party to brighten up the summer. Offer Susan B. Anthony dollars as a door prize. Wow. Sounds like fun. I mean, that does actually sound like a little bit of fun. Are you kidding? We could dress up like Susan B.

22:07Anthony and give coins? Like, this is exactly what we do at Planet Money. But, yes, a variety of, like, kinds of complaints started to emerge. So some of the complaints were about the government pushing this coin when people actually liked the paper dollar. Yeah, and then some of the complaints, honestly, from even before the coin came out, had this, like, not great tone to it. So, for example, here's Delaware Congressman Thomas B. Evans Jr. on the House floor. I, for one, don't want to carry around a purse, at least not yet, with a bunch of coins jangling around. And I think it would be a mistake.

22:42Yeah, there seem to be a lot of angry men with angry things to say about this new coin that happened to have a woman on it. But perhaps the biggest problem for the Susan B. Anthony dollar was honestly one of the simplest things you could imagine. It looked an awful lot like a quarter. It's true. It's basically the same color as a quarter. Also has the same little ridgy lines on the outside edge. And the size, says our coin expert Dennis Tucker, it is so close to a quarter. Yeah, it's like two millimeters wider than a quarter. Is that like a fingernail? Is that a fingernail? What's two millimeters?

23:18Yeah, just tiny. It's tiny. It's, you know, you would be hard-pressed to even be able to visually make that difference. This was a real problem. And in a radio moment that we at Planet Money will be jealous of for the rest of our existence. The Susan B. Anthony dollar is not a silver dollar. This is NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg, and she invited the director of the U.S. Mint, Stella Hackle, on to All Things Considered to do a dropping comparison between a quarter and the Susan B. Anthony dollar. All right, that was the new Susan B. Anthony dollar. Here's a quarter. I didn't hear much difference.

24:03The dollar is 43 percent heavier. Oh, it is. Yes. Ah, so NPR. Not sure that Susan Stanberg was convinced there. No, and not sure America was either, because Dennis Tucker says three years after they started, the U.S. Mint stopped making the Susan B. Anthony dollar. As a circulating U.S. coin, the Susan B. Anthony dollar was a failure. And, you know, as with the Ike dollar, tens of millions of them ended up just sitting in storage in government vaults. Yeah, pretty much no one used the Susan B. Anthony dollar. It's not ideal. I mean, the purpose of coins is to circulate and to serve commerce, you know, to help oil the machine of industry and commerce.

24:51You know, there was this quote from the news coverage of all of this stuff that really has stuck with me. Quote, it seems a shame the name of Susan B. Anthony is somewhat associated with this problem that she has nothing to do with, really. And it also seems a shame that complete failure is where our story has to end, too, I think, Amanda. But, you know, it's not like the Susan B. Anthony dollar just went away. Susan B's are still legal tender in the United States of America. And so on this Groundhog Day, we are here to fete, to celebrate and circulate the Susan B. Anthony dollar. I'm looking for a place to spend my 52 Susan B.

25:31Anthony coins. We rejoin our very Philadelphian producer, Sam Yellowhorse Kessler. So I think first stop is to find myself a nice cheesesteak to fill my belly. And so, Groundhog Gods, as our final offering, we present to you the sounds of Susan B. Anthony dollars, not in a vault, but in the world. And is it okay if I pay in coins? Is that all right? Oiling the machine of industry and commerce. Is that like a challenge? You have to pay in coins? Yes, it is a bit of a challenge. And so here is Sam using Susan B's to buy one Philly cheesesteak. Classic whiz wit and fried onions, please. One Philadelphia Eagles dog leash.