Watermelon Oreos: A reason to remember 2013?
Well, we did it, dear listeners. We made it through another year. And for this, our final Marketplace story of 2013, we thought we’d share with you some of the people, products and businesses that will not be joining us in 2014.
Like the limited edition Watermelon Oreo, a product that expired before it even had a chance to really live. Or The Hobbit-themed menu at Denny’s, also no longer with us.
Hopefully Bilbo’s Breakfast Feast is up in that big diner in the sky sitting in a big booth with its ancestors, Harry Potter Pancakes and Star Trek Waffles.
This year we also bid a heart-wrenching farewell to airline competition: The merger of US Airways and American Airlines gave us the largest airline company ever created, New American.
And we said goodbye to another new American, Walter White. “Breaking Bad” was monumental in the TV business. It resurrected the career of Vince Gilligan, brought big financial rewards to AMC and gave birth to the spinoff, “Better Call Saul” and a string of new anti-hero shows.
America also began its slow goodbye to fiscal stimulus, and hello to the taper, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made this announcement, “We expect that growth will pick up somewhat in coming quarters helped by highly accommodative monetary policy.”
The tapering announcement helped stabilize markets and gave birth to the new spinoff, “Better Call Bernanke.”
But perhaps the most dramatic goodbye of 2013 was the farewell speech made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who choked up numerous times while addressing thousands of Microsoft employees in Seattle’s Key Arena.
“Microsoft is like a fourth child to me,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
Ballmer chose to make his exit to a song, he said, “that looked back retrospectively and a song that celebrated the future.”
And so, with tears streaming, the CEO of one of America’s most influential companies made his exit, jumping up and down and high-fiving his employees, to the theme from Dirty Dancing, “The Time of My Life.”
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