On November 16, 1821, William Becknell and four companions from Franklin, Missouri, rode into Santa Fe with a small load of trade goods and opened the first legal trade between the United States and New Mexico.

Just days earlier, a company of Mexican soldiers had met them on the trail. Under Spain, American traders who reached Santa Fe had been jailed and their goods seized, but Mexico had just won its independence, and the new government wanted trade.

Becknell had good reason to take the risk. The Panic of 1819 had left him more than $1,200 in debt, he'd been briefly jailed over it, and a judge had given him until early 1822 to pay. Whether he set out meaning to reach Santa Fe or simply to trade on the plains is still debated, but his roughly $300 in goods reportedly brought back about $6,000 in silver. On his second trip in 1822, backed in part by investors, he took a shortcut across the Cimarron Desert that nearly killed his party, and the trip reportedly returned a profit of around $91,000.

Becknell's trips launched the Santa Fe Trail, a commercial route that carried American goods south and Mexican silver, mules, and furs north for nearly 60 years, until the railroad reached Santa Fe in 1880. The story shows how a closed market can open overnight, and how the first trader through the door is often the one with the least to lose.

Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.

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On November 11, 2009, Alibaba's Taobao Mall ran a 24-hour, 50-percent-off sale with just 27 merchants and brought in about 52 million yuan, or roughly $7.5 million.

The date wasn't random. As the story goes, students at Nanjing University in 1993 picked November 11 as a day for single people because 11/11 looks like four ones standing alone, and by the 2000s young people across China treated it as an anti-Valentine's Day. Alibaba, the Hangzhou company that brought online shopping to China, saw a chance to borrow a holiday that nobody owned.

The business logic was about timing. Alibaba said it chose November 11 because the date was easy to remember and fell in a lull between China's National Day holiday in October and Chinese New Year. Daniel Zhang, the executive running Taobao Mall and later Alibaba's CEO, is most often credited with the idea. Sales grew from $135 million in 2010 to $2.7 billion in 2012, the year Taobao Mall became Tmall, and in December 2012 Alibaba trademarked "Double 11," the holiday's common nickname, then used it to push rivals like JD.com to rebrand their own promotions.

Singles' Day became a spectacle, with a televised gala, a Guinness-recognized $14.3 billion day in 2015, and $38.4 billion in 2019, far beyond Black Friday's online sales in the United States. By 2021, the event had stretched into an 11-day, $84.5 billion sales period, the last total Alibaba published. Amazon's Prime Day, launched in 2015 to fill a slow summer stretch, is reported to have drawn on the same idea. The story shows how a company can find dead space on the calendar, attach commerce to a date that already means something, and make it its own.

Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.

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On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street premiered on public television stations across the United States.

The idea started with Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist and vice president at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who by his own account found his three-year-old daughter watching a television test pattern one morning in 1965, waiting for cartoons to start. At a dinner party in New York City in 1966, Morrisett asked producer Joan Ganz Cooney whether television could teach young children. Her feasibility study led to the Children's Television Workshop, launched with about $8 million from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Office of Education, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Instead of putting a classroom on TV, Cooney's team built the show to compete with commercial television, borrowing its format. Short teaching segments were threaded through each hour like commercial breaks, and each episode was "brought to you by" a letter and a number. Research director Edward Palmer tested segments with a device called the distractor, which tracked when children looked away. When test episodes in July 1969 showed kids losing interest in scenes with only human actors, producers reshot them with Jim Henson's Muppets living on the street.

The business model mattered as much as the format. Henson owned the Sesame Street Muppets and split merchandising revenue with the Workshop. When federal funding was withdrawn in 1981, licensing kept the show going, covering about two-thirds of its costs by 1987. In recent years the model has been tested again, through an HBO deal in 2015, staff cuts and a move to Netflix in 2025, and the shutdown of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The story shows how a nonprofit used the tools of advertising and product testing to build something that could last.

Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.

Visit us at www.bsnsDailyPodcasts.com