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A tale of strange businesses
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
The distinction between needs and wants is one of the fundamental tenets of business. For example, our country needs the Springboks to win. We want them to do it by a fat margin.
Jokes aside, you’ll find some weird stuff in the experiences economy, where the concept of wants is taken to an extreme. This is a function of a world where millions of people are living lives far beyond their basic needs.
Drawing on a famous Pine and Gilmore article published in the Harvard Business Review back in 1998, Dominique Olivier explores the top rung of the economic ladder. Experiences become products, human wants become markets, and people will sell you glitterbomb letters to send to your enemies. As shown in this column, capitalism can be just as colourful as our imaginations.
But this doesn’t mean that communists can’t be creative as well. Read on for a story from the USSR in the 1980s, when Swan Lake on the TV became a tip-off that all was not well in Moscow.
And in the Fast Facts, Dominique brings you more examples of wild business ideas. There really is no excuse in 2026 not to have a side gig.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)
The top of the economic ladder: a tale of strange businesses
When creative entrepreneurs address wants rather than needs, capitalism can become a lot more colourful.
Dominique Olivier explores the top of the economic ladder, where experiences become products and unusual human wants become markets.
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Hush the alarms and send in the swans
TL;DR: For a stretch of Soviet history, the surest sign of a political crisis was unexpected ballet on the television.
The Soviets loved ballet, and they were good at it too. In a country not otherwise known for its consumer exports, ballet was a point of national pride - proof that Soviet culture could produce something the whole world wanted. The Bolshoi and the Kirov toured to sold-out houses abroad, dancers like Maya Plisetskaya became international stars, and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake in particular was rolled out for visiting foreign dignitaries like a crown jewel.
But for Soviet citizens in the 1980s, Swan Lake was more than just a ballet - it soon became a signal that something serious had gone wrong.
When the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, died in 1982, state television cut into programming not with news of his death, but with Swan Lake in its full three-hour, four-act expanse. The idea was to stall and fill the airwaves with something soothing and apolitical while the leadership worked out who would rule next.
The same thing happened when Yuri Andropov died, and again for Konstantin Chernenko.
The problem with a soothing distraction, of course, is that people quickly learn to read it (particularly if you use the exact same distraction every single time). Swan Lake came to mean the opposite of calm. Seeing it on TV became a tip-off that all was not well in Moscow.
By the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union was falling apart at the seams. Mikhail Gorbachev had spent years loosening the state's grip, and a group of hardliners had had enough. While he holidayed in Crimea, they placed him under house arrest, declared a state of emergency, and rolled tanks into Moscow. And on state television, right on cue, Swan Lake began to play. It returned to the screens again and again over the following days.
Everyone knew what that meant. The story goes that one lawmaker, relaxing at a southern resort, watched the swans dance for an hour before the penny dropped and he caught the next flight to Moscow to help defend parliament. He wasn't alone: thousands who had understood what the swans on the TV meant poured into the streets. Boris Yeltsin clambered onto a tank to rally them, and the coup unravelled in three days.
But just a few months later, the Soviet Union collapsed anyway.
The signal of the swans has become so entrenched that it is still used symbolically to this day. When Russia's last major independent channel, TV Rain, was forced off air in 2022 over its anti-war stance, its final broadcast ended with staff walking out of the office, followed by a clip of Swan Lake. Because, what else?
Dominique’s Fast Facts - “You’re selling what?!”
A space in line: In New York, you can pay a stranger to stand in a queue so you don't have to - and not just at Home Affairs like we do here in SA. Robert Samuel founded Same Ole Line Dudes in 2012 after making roughly $300 waiting overnight for someone else's iPhone, and now runs a roster of dozens of sitters charging roughly $25 to $38 an hour. They've queued for cronuts, sample sales, Broadway rush tickets and, more recently, courtroom seats at high-profile trials.
An average middle-aged man: The Japanese service Ossan Rental hires out middle-aged men by the hour (for around ¥1,000) to listen to your problems, dispense advice, or simply accompany you somewhere so you're not alone. It sits alongside rent-a-friend and rent-a-family services, most of which sternly forbid anything physical.
An ad the size of a pixel: In 2005, student Alex Tew built a web page of a million pixels and sold them to advertisers at $1 each, in blocks of 100. It sold out, netting him roughly a million dollars for what was, functionally, a blank grid.
A lot of crickets: As Western appetite for insect protein grows, farming crickets for flour and snacks has become a real agricultural niche. It falls in the same genre of "weird ways to make money" that includes maggot farming for bait and animal feed.
A goose-scaring service: In North America, people (often with trained border collies) are being hired to harass geese off golf courses, corporate lawns and parks. Anyone who’s ever had to face off with a goose will know that this is not an easy way to earn a paycheck.
A reclaimed golf ball: Any golfer will know that lost balls are a feature of the sport, not a bug. But trained scuba divers in the US report making between $50,000 and $100,000 by diving for balls and reselling them. The catch? They are navigating murky, pesticide-laced water full of snapping turtles, snakes and, in Florida, alligators.