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In 1949 Samuel Wurtzel watched television reach a Richmond, Virginia barbershop, moved his family there and opened Wards Company. His son Alan Wurtzel took over in 1975 and opened Wards Loading Dock, a warehouse showroom that put stacked inventory in plain view, renamed the Circuit City Superstore in 1978. The company became Circuit City Stores in 1984, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, built red tower entrances for its 1985 push into Los Angeles, and relied on a trained, commissioned sales staff under the slogan Where Service Is State of the Art. In 1988 CEO Richard Sharp declined to buy regional rival Best Buy for $30 million.

In 1991 it launched CarMax, later spun off for over $1.2 billion, but its 1997 DIVX discs, which expired after 48 hours and required a phone line, cost $114 million to shut down. In 2000 it walked away from $1.6 billion in annual appliance sales and spent $1.5 billion remodeling stores, just ahead of the housing boom. In 2003 it eliminated commission sales and cut 3,900 experienced salespeople; in 2007 it laid off 3,400 more and offered rehiring at lower wages after 10 weeks. In August 2008 executives ordered stores to pull a MAD magazine issue mocking the chain for always sitting next to Best Buy. It filed for Chapter 11 that November, converted to Chapter 7 liquidation in January 2009, and 30,000 employees lost their jobs.

• The appliance exit came with an exclusive video game deal with Sony that left out Sega and Nintendo.
• A 2004 Verizon Wireless exclusive halted sales of other carriers as cell phones boomed.
• Circuit City paid $284 million for InterTAN, then lost the right to use the RadioShack name in Canada.
• Blockbuster made a buyout bid of over a billion dollars during the bankruptcy, then withdrew it.
• Systemax bought the brand and website for $14 million, and the Richmond headquarters appraised at $46.2 million sold for $3 million.

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Christian Dior ran his own fashion house for only about a decade. In 1946 textile magnate Marcel Boussac, whose vertically integrated business ran from sheep to weaving mills, asked Dior to revive the fading Philippe et Gaston label. Dior refused and demanded a new house under his own name, winning legal leadership of the firm, a non-controlling stake, a generous salary and one-third of pre-tax profits. The house opened in late 1946 at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris with 80 employees. On February 12, 1947, Dior showed 90 looks with nipped waists, soft shoulders and skirts below the calf, including the Bar suit built in an atelier headed by a young Pierre Cardin, and the press called it the New Look.

The volume of fabric, sometimes 20 yards per dress, drew backlash: a League of Broke Husbands claimed 30,000 members, feminist critics called the corseted shapes regressive, and Coco Chanel criticized them. By 1949 Dior accounted for 75 percent of Paris fashion exports and 5 percent of France's export revenue. He launched Miss Dior perfume, named for his sister Catherine, opened a New York ready-to-wear store in 1948, and in 1950 he and general manager Jacques Rouët launched licensing for ties, hosiery, gloves and handbags, which the French couture chamber denounced. Dior appeared on the cover of Time in March 1957 and died of a third heart attack in Italy that October at 52. Yves Saint Laurent, his 21-year-old assistant, took over and debuted in 1958.

• Dior's 1947 debut was shown in the house's own salons on six mannequins.
• Cloth rationing was still legally enforced in some markets when the New Look appeared.
• The house announced 100,000 garments sold at its 10th anniversary in 1957.
• Management considered shutting the house after Dior's death because licensees and exports depended on him.
• Later designers included Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri.

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This episode works from a single Wikipedia disambiguation page to trace what happened to one name. At the top is Pontiac, the Odawa leader and war chief who lived from around 1714 or 1720 until 1769 and fought during 18th century colonial expansion. Directly beneath him sits the Pontiac automobile, the former General Motors brand whose decades of advertising made a car, not a man, the name's main association. The hosts argue that companies borrowed the attributes they wanted from historical figures while discarding their actual histories.

The list then scatters across the map. In Quebec, Pontiac names a municipality, the Pontiac Regional County Municipality and federal and provincial electoral districts, and there was once an Apostolic Vicariate of Pontiac, now the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pembroke. In the United States there are Pontiacs in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island and an unincorporated community in Richland County, South Carolina. The name also lands on the Pontiac Correctional Center, the Pontiac Silverdome, the Pontiac Mills and Chicago's Pontiac Building, and finally on Amtrak stations, Navy ships, an album, a fictional musician and a disease.

• Pontiac's estimated birth year is given as circa 1714, though some sources say 1720.
• Illinois uses the name for a state prison, the Pontiac Correctional Center.
• Several United States Navy ships have carried the name USS Pontiac.
• Lyle Lovett released a country album titled Pontiac in 1987, and John Lurie created a fictional musician named Marvin Pontiac.
• Pontiac fever, a form of legionellosis, follows the practice of naming illnesses after the place an outbreak is identified.

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Less than a mile west of Chicago's Gold Coast, the 70 acres that became Cabrini-Green began as a swampy 1850s immigrant district nicknamed Little Hell, after a gas refinery that shot flames into the air day and night, and later known as Little Sicily. The Frances Cabrini Homes opened in 1942 as 54 two-story row houses, followed by the red brick Cabrini Extension in 1957 and the concrete William Green Homes in 1962. Built on Le Corbusier's towers in the park idea, the project started with a 75 percent white, 25 percent Black occupancy rule and was predominantly African American by 1962. As factories closed and white flight shrank the tax base, the city paved over lawns, left lights broken and wrapped the open galleries in chain link fencing.

At its peak about 15,000 people lived in the complex, and gangs took control of dark stairwells and broken elevators. Officers Anthony Rizzato and James Severin were killed by sniper fire in 1970, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot walking to school in 1992, and in 1997 a nine-year-old known as Girl X was assaulted in a stairwell, a case in which a judge later found the housing authority negligent. Residents organized throughout: Marion Stamps led rent strikes, and Dorothy Gautreaux's 1966 lawsuit proved the Chicago Housing Authority segregated Black residents and won at the Supreme Court. As River North boomed, the 1999 Plan for Transformation demolished the towers between 1995 and 2011, leaving about 150 renovated row houses.

• Mayor Jane Byrne moved into a fourth-floor apartment in 1981 for three weeks, surrounded by police and cameras.
• Cabrini-Green was the uncredited backdrop for Good Times and the setting of the 1992 horror film Candyman.
• The janitor who found Girl X resigned the same day.
• Fifth graders in Room 405 at Richard E. Byrd Community Academy, wearing coats indoors, campaigned in 2003 and 2004 for a working school.
• The Wallace lawsuit argued demolition outpaced new construction, pushing displaced families into segregated neighborhoods elsewhere.

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In 1917 Pierre Cartier traded a double-stranded natural pearl necklace and $100 in cash to banker and railroad tycoon Morton F. Plant for his neo-Renaissance mansion at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in New York. The deal caps the story of three grandsons who turned a Parisian workshop into a global house. Louis, who took over Paris around 1899, pioneered platinum in fine jewelry, letting hair-thin settings hold diamonds that seemed to float, and with watchmaker Maurice Couet built mystery clocks whose hands sat on clear rock crystal disks. In 1904 he made the flat Santos wristwatch for Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, and in 1919 the Tank, modeled on the top-down view of a Renault tank.

Pierre opened New York in 1909 and sold the Hope Diamond to Evalyn Walsh McLean by leaning into its curse, while Jacques ran London and sourced stones directly in India. Clients ranged from Tsar Nicholas II to the Maharaja of Patiala, whose 1925 order is put at roughly 2.1 billion euros today. After Pierre died in 1964, the heirs sold the Paris, London and New York branches to separate investors. In the 1970s Robert Hocq led a syndicate that bought them back and reunited them; Hocq and Alain-Dominique Perrin created Les Must de Cartier, a line of lighters, pens, sunglasses and perfume, and after Hocq died in a 1979 car accident in Paris, Perrin led the company into the group that became Richemont.

• Louis Cartier's mystery clock work culminated in a 1933 patent for the invisible mount.
• King Edward VII ordered 27 tiaras for his 1902 coronation and is credited with calling Cartier the jeweler of kings.
• The Love bracelet, introduced in 1969, is screwed onto the wrist with a tiny screwdriver.
• From 1976 to 2003 the Cartier name was licensed to Ford's Lincoln Continental luxury cars.
• Michael Douglas wore a solid gold Santos in the film Wall Street as a corporate raider's status symbol.

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Carl Icahn grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, the son of school teachers; his father was a synagogue cantor and an avowed atheist. He wrote a Princeton philosophy thesis on the empiricist criterion of meaning, graduated in 1957, left NYU medical school and joined Wall Street in 1961. In 1968 he used $150,000 of his own money and a $400,000 loan from his uncle to buy a New York Stock Exchange seat. In 1978 he took a controlling stake in appliance maker Tappan, won a proxy fight and forced its sale to Electrolux for a $2.7 million profit. In 1985 he began a leveraged takeover of TWA, taking it private by 1988.

He sold TWA's London routes to American Airlines for $445 million and left with a $469 million personal profit, while TWA carried $540 million in debt and went bankrupt. Recast as an activist shareholder, he pressed Yahoo to accept Microsoft's offer, pushed eBay to spin off PayPal, made $800 million selling half his Netflix stake, and moved Apple's stock with a social media post. In 2016 he endorsed Donald Trump and advised on regulation while owning 82 percent of CVR Energy, which stood to save over $200 million a year; he stepped down in 2017. A 39 percent Hertz stake cost him nearly $2 billion in 2020.

• He is described as a real world inspiration for Gordon Gekko.
• His first wife, former ballerina Liba, sued to void a prenuptial agreement she signed while eight months pregnant.
• His 2022 proxy fight over McDonald's pork suppliers' gestation crates won about 1 percent of shareholder votes.
• He signed the Giving Pledge, and Mount Sinai renamed its medical school the Icahn School of Medicine.
• A 2023 Hindenburg Research report on Icahn Enterprises' dividends and his margin loans sent its shares down 20 percent in a day.

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Calvin Klein grew up in the Bronx, in the same Jewish community that produced Ralph Lauren, and in 1968 started a company with childhood friend Barry K. Schwartz on $10,000, making coats out of the York Hotel in New York. A placement at Bonwit Teller led to a Vogue cover in September 1969 and Coty Awards in 1973, 1974 and 1975, the first making him the youngest winner. He then moved into denim, cutting jeans tighter and putting his name on the back pocket. Revenue reached $30 million by 1977, and licensing spread the name to shoes, belts, sunglasses and bedsheets; by 1981 he was earning $8.5 million a year.

A logo T-shirt began as a gift: assistant Jeffrey Banks silkscreened the company logo onto a brown shirt, Schwartz mistook it for a prototype, and buyers demanded it. In the early 1990s head of menswear John Varvatos merged the boxer and brief into the boxer brief, promoted by a 1992 campaign. Yet heavy advertising spending and struggling licensees strained finances until fragrance profits helped. In December 2002 the company was sold to Phillips-Van Heusen for about $400 million in cash, $30 million in stock and royalties estimated at $200 to $300 million over 15 years, and Klein departed in 2003.

• The 1980 jeans ads shot by Richard Avedon featured 15 year old Brooke Shields and were banned by some TV stations.
• A 1995 denim campaign drew criticism over the models' youth and was pulled.
• A 2014 campaign with model Myla Dalbesio was criticized for being read as a plus size label.
• Licensee Warnaco filed for Chapter 11 in 2001, and PVH bought it for $2.8 billion in 2013 to reunite the brand.
• Global retail sales under the name reached $9 billion in 2022.

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Keith Kramer and Matthew Burns visited the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino and in 1953 opened Insta-Burger King in Jacksonville, Florida, built around the Insta-Broiler oven. It struggled, and Miami franchisees David Edgerton and James McLemore bought it in 1959 and dropped the "Insta." The quarter pound Whopper of 1957 let the chain compete on size rather than speed. Pillsbury bought the company in 1967, and loose franchise terms let a Louisiana operator, Chart House, grow large enough to try to buy the parent in the 1970s. Donald N. Smith, hired from McDonald's in 1978, launched Operation Phoenix, requiring owners to live within an hour of their restaurants.

Norman E. Brinker started the Burger Wars with attack ads comparing burgers on screen. Later neglect under Grand Metropolitan and Diageo left franchisees like the 400 store AmeriKing in Chapter 11. TPG Capital bought the chain for $1.5 billion in 2002 and hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which revived the King as a silent mascot and launched the Subservient Chicken website. 3G Capital paid $3.26 billion in 2010, dropped the King, and merged with Tim Hortons in 2014 to form Restaurant Brands International, a tax inversion that drew political criticism.

• In Australia the name was already taken by an Adelaide takeaway, so the 1971 franchise became Hungry Jack's, after a Pillsbury pancake mix.
• In 1977 Burger King sold Star Wars glasses, the first major fast food movie tie in.
• The Xbox game Sneak King had players deliver food as the mascot.
• Recent changes include the Impossible Whopper, nugget servings cut from 10 to 8 and the digital focused Sizzle restaurant design.
• A UK International Women's Day tweet reading "women belong in the kitchen" was meant to promote a scholarship for female chefs.

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Thomas Burberry was 21 when he opened his shop in Basingstoke in 1856, and in 1879 he introduced gabardine, waterproofing cotton yarn before weaving it so tightly that rain stayed out while sweat could escape. Roald Amundsen's 1911 South Pole party wore it, as did Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition and George Mallory on Everest in 1924. In World War I the company made the trench coat for British officers, with epaulettes, D rings and a storm flap built for combat, and the red, camel, black and white check was added in the 1920s simply as a lining.

After Great Universal Stores bought the company in the mid 1950s, licensing spread the check onto everything; the Japanese license alone generated over 430 million euros in retail value. By 2001 to 2005 counterfeits and chav and football hooligan associations led some UK pubs to ban the pattern. CEO Angela Ahrendts and creative director Christopher Bailey removed the check from about 90 percent of products, bought back licenses including the Spanish business worth 20 percent of revenue, and pushed early into online retail. Sales passed £2 billion, market value tripled to £7 billion, and by 2012 Ahrendts was the UK's highest paid CEO.

• Pilot Mrs. Victor Bruce flew around the world in 1930 in a reversible coat of gabardine on one side and tweed on the other.
• In 2018 Greenpeace revealed the company had destroyed over £90 million of unsold goods over five years, a practice it then halted.
• Burberry pledged to be climate positive by 2040 and dropped real fur and exotic skins.
• Statements on Xinjiang cotton in 2021 led to backlash and lost sales in China.
• Wrestler MJF swapped his AEW title strap for a custom Burberry check belt, and 2024 to 2025 profit warnings led to plans to cut up to 1,700 jobs by 2027.

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David Cook ran Cook Data Services, a database company for the Texas oil industry, before opening the first Blockbuster in Dallas on October 19, 1985, with 8,000 VHS and 2,000 Betamax tapes. He walked away from a VideoWorks franchise over its refusal to allow his blue and yellow color scheme, and built a $6 million barcode driven distribution center in Garland, Texas, to tailor each store's stock. Waste Management co-founder Wayne Huizenga and John Melk bought in at 19 stores in 1987 and applied a McDonald's style model, opening a new store every 24 hours. Huizenga, wary of video on demand, sold to Viacom for $8.4 billion in 1994.

CEO John Antioco rejected Warner's DVD revenue share deal in 1997, cheap Walmart DVDs followed, a 2000 streaming venture with Enron collapsed, and Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix for $50 million. It peaked in 2004 with 84,300 employees and over 9,000 stores. Its 2007 Total Access program let mail customers swap discs in stores and alarmed Netflix, but it cost about $2 per exchange. Carl Icahn's proxy fight pushed out Antioco; successor Jim Keyes ended the program. With $900 million in debt, Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 in 2010, and Dish Network bought what remained for $320 million in 2011.

• Blockbuster beat Nintendo in a 1989 legal fight over game rentals under the first sale doctrine.
• Its 2005 "no more late fees" campaign charged the full retail price after eight days, and more than 40 states sued.
• Icahn objected to Antioco's pay of over $51 million in 2004; Antioco left with nearly $25 million in severance.
• In 2008 the company bid for Circuit City before withdrawing the offer.
• The leftover shell, BB Liquidating Inc., surged in the 2021 GameStop frenzy, and the Bend, Oregon store was listed on Airbnb in 2020.