"My husband teases me that I'm too vigilant when I buy turkey and put it in a plastic bag and put it on the bottom shelf of the grocery cart, away from everything else, " Undurraga said.

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Sidney Frank made billions by selling Grey Goose vodka, nearly indistinguishable from bottom-shelf brands, at a rich price.

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Working from the base of Wild Irish Rose, Marvin Sands steered Canandaigua into other bottom-shelf wines like Manischewitz and Old Duke for three decades.

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Wells Mason's chairs, benches, and tables are simultaneously playful and--with their stark joining of organic and man-made materials (such as the Baltic birch, stainless steel, and fiberboard embedded in a telephone pole in the Shelf Life chair, bottom)--aesthetically and intellectually challenging.

FORBES: Above photo courtesy of John Langford

The bottom line is that the cylinders have now passed their useful shelf life as the ultimate reference for the kilogram and as a result, scientists around the world have been working on new ways to define the kilogram.

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