Eliminating Pennies, the Blind Box Phenomenon and a Brilliantly Diabolical Diamond Verification Device

Dear Fellow Trend Curator,

It is exactly a week until our team hits the ground in Austin for SXSW, our biggest event of the year. From pajama parties to 7-minute meetups to a fireside chat about the future of events, Non-Obvious will be heading all over the city and our biggest goal is to encourage more human connections in a time when we could all really use them.

See a full list of all our 2025 events and collaborations »

For the seventh year in a row I will be premiering another all-new Featured Session … but if you’re not coming to Austin, don’t worry — I’ll share the full video of the talk when it comes out. Ok, clearly, I have SXSW on the brain … but as usual this week I have another collection of non-obvious stories and so without further delay, read on my friends.

Enjoy this week’s insights and always stay curious!

The Truth About the Penny

No one wants one. People will walk past a penny lying on the street, a real-life demonstration of just how worthless it is for most of us. For many, it’s also a perfect example of governmental inefficiency since it’s widely known that the cost to produce each one is higher than the actual value of the penny itself. It is estimated that the U.S. government loses 2.7 cents on every penny it mints. If they stopped making them, it would save about $85 million a year. Sounds great.

Unfortunately, there are some side effects. If we all stopped using pennies, cash transactions would be rounded to the nearest five and usage of the nickel would probably increase. That’s the bad news, since the government actually loses 8.8 cents on every nickel it produces. If there were no pennies, the increased demand could lose the government well over $100 million, canceling out any savings from eliminating the penny.

If you eliminated both the penny and the nickel, that could work but then you’d only really have two coins in wide circulation—dimes and quarters … and based on inflation both of those are likely to be money losers within the next 10 years too. So maybe we should just stop using coins or move more quickly to digital currency, but even that requires a societal change that typically takes generations to happen.

So what should we do here? In response to President Trump declaring the US would stop producing pennies, The NY Times laid out all the options presented above and ultimately came to this conclusion—”studies have estimated that over $100 billion of income goes unreported each year because of cash transactions, amounting to tens of billions in lost tax revenue. If eliminating coins led to even a modest decrease in untraceable transactions, the effects could be far greater than the profits or losses of the U.S. Mint.”

Unemployment Is Low, But No One Is Hiring. Experts Are Calling It The Big Freeze.

What do you call it when unemployment is at record lows at the same time that hiring is similarly stalled? Actually, there’s no word for that because it’s never really happened—so experts came up with one: The Big Freeze. Usually if unemployment is low, that’s a good sign for job seekers. Unfortunately, the circumstances bringing about this current situation seem to be partially based on widespread uncertainty among workers … which means they will rarely leave a job to seek something else. Indeed, the percentage of workers voluntarily quitting has fallen to nearly its lowest level in a decade.

The other reason for this situation may come down to a backlash from the post-pandemic moment from 2021 to early 2023 when so many people were reevaluating their life situations and quitting their jobs that economists at that time dubbed it “the great resignation.” Perhaps burned from those times, employers seem much less likely to let people go now or want the disruptions that can come from hiring, training and onboarding new team members.

All of this is likely to be the toughest news for new graduates entering a job market where no one seems to be vacating any spots for them to take over. Which means we will likely see many more stories like this one from HBR about how to get hired when AI does the job screening or this one about the necessity to always be upskilling. If you’re currently affected by this “big freeze” — I’d love to hear from you. Share your story and let me know your experience.

A little over six months ago, De Beers Group announced the DiamondProof “diamond verification instrument” at a jewelry trade show in Las Vegas. The idea was that this device could sit inside a retail jewelry location and immediately distinguish between a natural diamond versus a lab-grown diamond. The official announcement for the device included this telling line: “with research showing that almost half of consumers are unaware that every LGD can be readily detected, the device … help[s] underpin the integrity of natural diamonds.”

In a world where the difference between natural and lab-grown diamonds cannot be seen with the naked eye, this device will offer visual evidence immediately to a consumer of the differences … presumably to help the jeweler make the case for selling a natural diamond instead of the significantly lower priced and visually identical lab-grown alternative. On one hand, this is a masterful upselling tool that likely will work to help jewelers close the deal with customers for the more expensive piece made with natural diamonds.

On the other hand, it could provide a valuable service to improve consumer trust and prevent fraud by showing that what you’re buying is actually what you get. What do you think—is DiamondProof an enviably clever upselling tool or a valuable real-time device to prevent fraud?

Inside the Blind Box Phenomenon Fueling the Resurgence of the Art Toy Industry

Outside a Pop Mart store in Vietnam there is a line around the block at 2am. The cause for all this excitement is the latest blind box release of a limited edition figurine … otherwise known as an art toy. In case you’re not familiar, these figurines are collectibles that allow customers to “express creativity, find joy and connect with others.” That’s a quote from an executive at Pop Mart (obviously) but he’s not exaggerating that there are plenty of customers who devote hours to building their collections, displaying them and sharing unboxing videos of their own blind boxes and what mystery figure they received. As one pair of YouTubers bluntly put it, “these are boxes filled with mystery toys that do nothing.”

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s a craze that you might recognize from any number of other collectibles fads in the past, from action figures to playing cards. The mystery pack is definitely a time-honored marketing tradition that still continues to work. What’s perhaps new is just how deeply these blind boxes are filling a need for some consumers. As loneliness skyrockets and people struggle to make the same sorts of connections with each other, one collector suggested buying these boxes is a way to bring him closer with friends who share the same passion he does. If they continue to help people do that, we may see even more rapid growth from the collectible toy sector.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Trendwatching Newsletter + Platform

Trendwatching has been a part of my media diet for so long I can’t even recall the first time I started reading it. The site and team behind it have been a constant source of inspiration for me, and perhaps more than a little professional jealousy when they would come up with a brilliant term to describe a trend that I desperately wished I had come up with. It was perhaps this longstanding feeling that also led me to collaborate with Henry Coutinho-Mason, one of the long-time trend visionaries behind the platform, when writing my first book about trends (The Future Normal) that was not part of my decade-long Non-Obvious series of books that I finished back in 2020.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Community Data by Rahul Bhargava

For my book selection this week I’ll start by sharing that I have known this author for literally his entire life—because it’s my younger brother, Rahul! His first book, Community Data was just released this week by Oxford University Press. The book delves into the work he has been doing for the past few decades around data storytelling first as a research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab and currently as a professor teaching about data and journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

How can you get a community to not just view but participate in storytelling using data? Why should we use data not as a window into a certain group but for that group itself to reflect on their own stories by using it as a mirror instead? What new insight might we all learn from data if we could present and interact with it physically rather than just gazing over charts on a page or spreadsheets on a screen?

The fascinating stories in this book will take you across the world from a fashion show in Tanzania featuring clothing depicting data murals to a team of sound engineers in California creating music concerts based on climate data. Complimented by full color illustrations, Community Data makes a powerful case for why we should all rethink the way we use and tell stories around data. Aside from the fact that the author is like a brother to me, if you have an interest in getting smarter about using and understanding data—definitely pick up this book.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Bookshop.org

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?

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