Peter Askew didn’t intend to become an onion merchant. He just happened to be a compulsive buyer of domain names, and when he noticed that VidaliaOnions.com was up for sale, he snagged it. He then discovered that some people love Vidalia onions. Like, really love them:

During a phone order one season – 2018 I believe – a customer shared this story

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A lot of well-intentioned people suffer from what we might call Superhero Syndrome : they want to save the world, but they want it to be saved by them in particular. They want to be the one who blows up the Death Star, not the one who washes the X-Wings.

This is a seductive fantasy because it disguises selfishness as sacrifice. It promises to excuse... See more

People have polarized views of business these days. Some people think we should feed grandma to the economy so it can grow bigger, while other people think we should gun down CEOs in the street. VidaliaOnions.com is, I think, a nice middle ground: you find a thing people want, you give it to them, you pocket some profit. So if you want an honest... See more

People are constantly crashing against each other in the great sea of humanity, but only under special conditions do they form the molecular bonds of friendship. As far as I can tell, these social nucleation sites only appear in the presence of what I would call unreasonable attentiveness .

Many so-called “thought leaders” strive for such an impact and never come close. What made Shoup so effective? Three things, says his student M. Nolan Gray:

1. He picked an unsexy topic where low-hanging fruit was just waiting to be picked.


2. He made his ideas palatable to all sorts of politics, explaining to conservatives, libertarians, progressives, and

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According to this terrific profile, Donald Shoup “has a strong claim on being the scholar who will have had the greatest impact on your day-to-day life”. Shoup did not study cancer, nuclear physics, or AI. No, Shoup studied parking . He spent his whole career documenting the fact that “free” parking ultimately backfires, and it’s better to charge... See more