Emojis in the Unicode standardUS frozen pizza retail sales
Frozen pizzas in American freezers and emoji codepoints in the Unicode standard, both growing. The pizza is not, in any official sense, an emoji. The emoji is, in fact, a pizza. Yet only one of them is being eaten, and the other gets added to four operating systems on release day.
US frozen pizza retail sales grew from about 4.5 to over 6.5 billion dollars between 2015 and 2022 as pandemic-era stockpiling expanded the freezer category and inflation lifted unit prices. The Unicode standard's emoji count climbed from about 1,800 to over 3,600 in the same window as Unicode Technical Committee proposals expanded gender-, skin-tone-, and object-variant coverage. Two unrelated growth stories sharing a window because the late 2010s and early 2020s expanded almost everything that had a low marginal cost of inclusion: another pizza variety, another emoji codepoint. The era added.
More options arrived in the freezer and the keyboard at once. Some decades simply prefer expansion.
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