Word: boom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...John Mariani in his remarkable book America Eats Out, "Within six years of airing his first national TV ad in 1965, the Ronald McDonald clown character was familiar to 96% of American children, far more than knew the name of the President of the United States." Being a baby-boom company, McDonald's has found maturity a bit difficult. Its food today is as consistent as ever. But Americans are different, much surer of their tastes. They no longer need the security McDonald's provides. So the same assets that had made the restaurants so great started to turn against...
...1920s brought in a different era: the Big Boom. Economists chattered about a "plateau of permanent prosperity"--sound familiar? The men who wrote about business were either hacks in eyeshades or dandy dilettantes who looked like escapees from The Great Gatsby--or crooks. A couple of Journal columnists planted their bylines above stories prewritten by corporate flacks; crusading Congressman Fiorello La Guardia exposed them by producing the canceled checks that the writers had accepted...
...first national daily newspaper. "Don't write banking stories for bankers," he ordered. "Write for the banks' customers. There are a hell of a lot more depositors than bankers." Helped by the public's warm interest in business and industry during World War II and then by the postwar boom, Kilgore saw all his dreams come true. The Journal's circulation soared (today it is 1.74 million...
Prior to Dilbert, people prepared for corporate America without really knowing what it would be like. Today kids have Dilbert to guide them. I like to think I have steered people away from unpleasant corporate jobs, thus contributing to the entrepreneurial boom. But maybe I've reduced the number of future engineers below the level needed to maintain technology, thereby condemning civilization to a second Dark Age. (When my parents ask me what I've been doing lately, I rarely mention that part...
SNEAKERS While many people, including the 13th century Indians of the Amazon, can lay claim to inventing sneakers, what really launched the boom was the arrival in 1916 of Keds, shoes with canvas uppers and rubber soles made by the U.S. Rubber...