The series' running gag of Mr. Burns being unbelievably old gets an additional wrinkle here. Burns' age is usually stated to be 104, so he'd be born in 1893 for the purpose of this story. But the series also contains frequent clues that he's even older than he lets on. In this one he owns a stock from "Confederated Slave Holdings," suggesting that he was already in business before 1865 (the last year of American slavery).
When discussing the value of Mr. Burns' shares, Smithers claims to be born 25 years after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. This means that Smithers (for the purpose of this story) was born in 1954 and is 43 years old.
Bret Hart was very insistent that he be shown wearing his pink wrestling outfit. He explained that "It's so cool to be part of a show that makes people laugh really, really hard." The media, aware that the animated Hart would want to purchase Mr. Burns' home, mistakenly anticipated that "Bret offers to wrestle him [Mr. Burns] for the place." In a 2009 interview with the A.V. Club's Dave Hofer, Hart explained that the reason why his animated counterpart sounds nothing like him was that initially, he was brought in to voice a generic wrestler. When Mark Kirkland realised how famous Hart actually was, he told Hart that if the artwork had not been started yet, he would be drawn in as himself.
Uriah's Heap is named after the Charles Dickens character Uriah Heep, a bad man who causes trouble for David Copperfield.
Mr. Burns's walk through the supermarket was based on a false rumor that George Bush visited a store and was confused by the scanner and, in the original draft for the episode, Burns met Bush while shopping there. (The real event involved Bush being unusually impressed by a simple bar code scanner at a filmed event.)