Amanda Mull | The Atlantic

The One Place in Airports People Actually Want to Be

2024-05-17T07:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Max Guther

On a bright, chilly Thursday in February, most of the people inside the Chase Sapphire Lounge at LaGuardia Airport appeared to be doing something largely absent from modern air travel: They were having fun. I arrived at Terminal B before 9:30 a.m., but the lounge had already been in full swing for hours. Most of the velvet-upholstered stools surrounding the circular, marble-topped bar were filled. Travelers who looked like they were heading to couples’ getaways or girls’ weekends clustered in twos or threes, waiting for their mimosas or Bloody Marys or the bar’s signature cocktail—a gin concoction turned a vibrant shade of violet by macerated blueberries, served in a champagne coupe.

Other loungers in the golden-lit, plant-lined, 21,800-square-foot space chatted over their breakfast, boozy or otherwise. At the elaborate main drink station that formed one wall of the lounge’s dining room, I chose the tap that promised cold brew, though spa water and a mysterious third spigot labeled only as “seasonal” beckoned. When I reached for what I thought was a straw, I pulled back a glistening tube of individually portioned honey, ready to be snapped into a hot cup of tea.

While I ate my breakfast—a brussels-sprout-and-potato hash with bacon and a poached egg ordered using a QR code, which also offered me the opportunity to book a gratis half-hour mini-facial in the lounge’s wellness area—I listened to the 30-somethings at the next table marveling about how nice this whole thing was. That’s not a sentiment you’d necessarily expect to hear about the contrived luxury of an airport lounge. In the context of air travel, nice has usually meant nice relative to the experience outside the lounge’s confines, where most of your choices for a meal are marked-up fast food eaten at a crowded gate, or the undignified menu truncation of a Chili’s Too.

American Airlines opened the world’s first airport lounge, then an invite-only affair for VIPs, in 1939. By the end of the 20th century, lounges had cemented their reputation as the domain of road warriors—mostly solo travelers headed to, say, medical-device sales conventions or engineering-job-site visits. The experience was less brussels-sprout hash and champagne and more “cheese and crackers and $5 beers,” Brian Kelly, the titular guy behind the Points Guy website (and arguably the most influential person in the travel-status game), told me. But behind those generously staffed check-in desks, things have been changing. Private-lounge networks have rapidly expanded over the past decade, as scores of new travelers have begun demanding entry. What awaits inside is changing, too.

Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the modern airport lounge is that it is busy. According to one estimate, the number of fliers visiting lounges hit an all-time high in the summer of 2023, and this year’s vacation season appears likely to top it. As Americans have rushed back into travel after a pandemic lull, they’ve also rushed to apply for new credit cards, the fanciest of which promise bounties of travel-related perks, including lounge access. Now a broader cohort of fliers is squeezing in alongside the usual business travelers. This new group might be described as work-from-home travelers: people tapping away on laptops, trying to wedge in a few more emails or Zoom meetings around pleasure travel.

In the past year, for reasons both journalistic and personal, I’ve visited seven lounges across five cities. These rooms held the expected corporate types in company-issued quarter-zips, but also 20-something women in Taylor Swift tour merch, bros with tennis rackets protruding from their carry-on, and lots of young people with one AirPod in and their Zoom camera turned off.

The lounge’s booming popularity complicates its premise. This expanding group of high-spending customers is valuable to airlines, which operate most lounges, and to credit-card issuers, who have joined the lounge market with their own club networks. (High-fee credit cards, Kelly told me, have become the most common way for airline-perk neophytes to access lounges, no matter whether they’re run by airlines or banks.) But to attract these customers, lounge operators need to uphold the impression that lounges are exclusive—a special place far from the airport cattle call, not one crammed with too many other valued customers. The operators’ solution to this dilemma has been to build fast and build big, putting up huge, extravagant new clubs as quickly as the vagaries of airport construction will allow. Globally, more than 3,000 airport lounges are now open, with most major operators promising to add at least a few new locations this year.

Most of the existing lounges max out somewhere around the ambience of a Panera, with booze instead of lemonade. The food and drinks are free, and that’s usually their main selling point. With the new mega-lounges, though, airlines and credit cards alike talk a big game about their culinary acumen, cocktail programs, and spa amenities, which include massages, private showers, and manicures. In United Airlines’ new 35,000-square-foot, three-story lounge in Denver, one of its two bars evokes a brewery, complete with tasting flights from Colorado brewers. Delta is opening the first in a series of ultra-premium clubs in June: a 38,000-square-foot mega-lounge at New York’s JFK airport containing, among other things, a full-service French bistro. American Express’s largest-ever lounge, which opened recently in Atlanta, has a backroom whiskey bar, a menu designed by a celebrated local chef, and 4,000 square feet of outdoor space from which loungers can watch planes roll by.

You could dismiss the amenities arms race as an absurd exercise in flattering wealth’s vanity—it is. But that flattery is so effective because lounges offer a solution to a real set of problems. In the past few decades, air travel in the United States has become notably worse. Airlines have shrunk seats, increased fees, and pushed a larger proportion of passengers toward expensive tickets that offer more room and better service. At the same time, tickets at the back of the plane have become much less expensive, which has increased overall demand. Americans took 665 million flights in 2000, and by 2019, that number had increased to more than 925 million. On top of this, American airports are pretty old, and many need serious upgrades to handle the passenger volume more comfortably.

Airlines profit from these conditions, but they still have to keep their most profitable customers happy. Lounges go a long way toward placating frequent fliers. They are, on some level, a decent deal for all involved: Private companies shoulder the cost of building them. They cater to people who endure the indignities of air travel most often. For many of those people, the pricey fees probably do save money over time, relative to how often they’d otherwise buy astronomically marked-up food from airport vendors. And the clubs tend to get put in inconvenient spots, which should theoretically help ease overcrowding at the gate, or at least move some of the fussiest passengers to their own containment area.

[Read: Flying is weird right now]

More curious is the fact that credit-card companies are making the effort to launch entire lounges themselves, competing against airlines when they already partner with airlines to get cardholders into existing lounges. A lounge is, by all accounts, a huge money sink—even besides the cost and red tape of building within an airport, making people feel special requires an army of workers available 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone I spoke with at companies that run lounge networks said some version of We do not view the lounges as revenue opportunities.

Illustration by Max Guther

Lounges are, however, a great incentive to sign up for credit cards. As people’s day-to-day financial lives become more cashless, credit-card issuers are battling one another to win over customers and encourage them to swipe as much as possible, Joseph Nunes, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California, told me. One big reason: interchange fees. Card issuers take a cut of the purchase price from sellers every time a card is used, and that cut tends to be larger for more premium cards. Frequent pleasure travelers are a creditor’s dream: They are wealthier than the average American, they do a lot of discretionary spending, and they pay their bills on time. Lounges have already succeeded at enticing this group to sign up for airline-specific credit cards, so card issuers have taken the next logical step: lounges for people who aren’t quite road warriors and who may not be devoted to any particular airline, but who want perks all the same.

Controlling an entire lounge, stamped with an enormous company logo, is a play for what marketers call brand affinity. “It solidifies our relationship with our customers,” Audrey Hendley, the president of American Express Travel, told me. Those customers might visit a lounge only a few times a year. But if everything goes according to plan, those visits are one of the reasons they love their Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire card and use it for everything, even though they’ve got three or four others they could pull out of their wallet.

Of course, the genuinely wealthy still need to be convinced that they’re more special than the rest of us. Credit-card companies have been ready to oblige with even more layers of exclusivity. Chase’s LaGuardia lounge is open to anyone who pays a $550 annual fee for the right credit card, but the private suites inside, which include a palatial bathroom and all the seafood towers you can eat, cost up to $3,000 for a three-hour visit. This is part of what Nunes called the further tiering of society, fueled by the incredibly granular financial-data profiles that companies can now make of their customers. “We really say, ‘Where are consumers spending, who are the consumers that are the most profitable for me, and how should I treat them?’” Nunes told me. “We’re going to see further and further discrimination by firms, I think, in treating their most profitable customers the best.”

Credit-card perks have proved such an effective way to lure high-income customers that the airport lounge has begun to make its way outside the airport. Card issuers now commonly sponsor VIP areas at concerts and sporting events, especially those that appeal to high spenders. American Express and Chase offer members-only lounges at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. The Sundance Film Festival has had a Chase Sapphire lounge for years. And although it can seem silly to get excited about entry to a VIP area, few people are immune to the charms of more places to sit down, shorter lines for cleaner bathrooms, and a couple of free drinks.

[From the April 2020 issue: It’s all so … premiocre]

Even if you never have entered or never will enter an airport lounge, the perks arms race affects your daily life. More premium-card use means higher fees for retailers, and those fees then get baked into the prices everyone pays—an easier task for large sellers, who usually pay less for their goods than mom-and-pop stores. (A recent settlement in a class-action suit against Visa and Mastercard could lower and cap these fees while allowing retailers to charge customers with premium cards extra.) Meanwhile, many card issuers have also begun to experiment with opening places that target other tiers of customers too. Capital One now operates more than 50 cafés that are open to the public, which seem aimed at the kind of young, laptop-lugging workers who might someday be high earners but for now just need a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi. In addition to baristas, these spaces have “ambassadors” and “mentors” available to guide patrons through the bank’s range of services while they sip their lattes. These cafés, like the airport lounges, are money sinks. But Kelly told me that it’s a mistake to think about banks the way we think about other consumer-facing businesses. “Look at the earnings reports of any of the credit-card companies,” he said. “This is a drop in the bucket.”

In February, I visited American Express’s Centurion New York club in Midtown Manhattan. The space, which uses the entire 55th floor (and one dedicated express elevator) of the new One Vanderbilt skyscraper on 42nd Street, is the first of its kind for the company. It is, in some sense, a Capital One café for people already very comfortable with the services offered by their preferred financial institutions. A few tables in some of its spaces can be reserved by the general public, but no one there will sell you a new credit card or recommend a loan for your small business. The club’s best nooks and crannies, including a large corner table with clear views of much of the city’s skyline, are reserved for those who carry the company’s invite-only Centurion Card, which is rumored to require at least $500,000 in annual charges for membership. One Centurion-exclusive bar gives you a view from heaven down onto the Art Deco curves of the Chrysler Building below, as though you are a god yourself.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Airport-Lounge Arms Race.”

Will Americans Ever Get Sick of Cheap Junk?

2024-04-29T07:00:00-04:00

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In all the years I’ve spent covering American consumerism, I’ve heard one type of question from readers far more than any other: This can’t go on forever, right?

Maybe they’d learned what happens to the huge volume of online purchases that get returned, or saw one too many questionably sourced mascaras and sunscreens hawked on TikTok Shop, or realized that the newly minted e-commerce behemoth Temu is spending many millions of dollars to urge you, quite explicitly, to shop like a billionaire. Whatever the impetus, the people asking this question tend to regard the consumer landscape with a mix of exhaustion and incredulity. The ever-expanding American closet is already swollen with cheap clothes, and our junk drawers and spare rooms and storage units already overfloweth with everything else. Americans have so much excess stuff that much of it can’t even effectively be given away. Can we—the people who have bought so much already—really keep buying more, and at a hastening clip?

As pickled as I am in information and theories about consumption, I’ve never really known how to answer this. I can’t blame anyone for being tired—of the advertising and affiliate links that have eaten search results, of constant prompts to purchase random things, of clothes made of plastic that fall apart after a few washes. Consumer choice is the animating logic of so much of American life, and buying things is how we are taught to assert our agency or express our political views or embrace our identities. Amazon has been on a decades-long push toward a logical extreme of American consumption capacity. The company’s newest crop of even cheaper, China-linked competitors—Temu, Shein, and TikTok Shop, most prominently—seem intent on pushing further.

[Read: Temu is speedrunning American familiarity]

The endgame to all of this, one might reasonably expect, has to be drawing nearer, if only because the United States is already so full-to-bursting with unwanted junk that entire industries and media genres have cropped up to help people pare down their possessions. Surely, one might reasonably expect, something’s got to give. There must be some sort of ceiling, some point of exhaustion—if not emotional, then financial. This can’t go on forever … right?

By the numbers, Americans still seem plenty enthusiastic about high volume and low prices. As the ultra-cheap internet retailers have sprung up, shoppers have rushed by the tens of millions to patronize them. The biggest ones are already pulling in billions of dollars of sales from the U.S. each year. And even though these retailers primarily draw in shoppers through super-low prices, they’re very popular with people who already have plenty. According to a recent report from Earnest Analytics, a credit-card-data firm, almost half of Temu’s American sales come from people making more than $130,000 a year, and the retailer’s popularity is growing the quickest with that same group of high earners. Wealthier people have more buying power in the first place, but that’s exactly the point: If even they haven’t yet gotten their fix of cheap stuff, we might be nowhere close to the extremes we’re ultimately capable of.

“It may seem like the air is getting thin, but we have not reached ‘peak stuff,’” David Garfield, the global head of industries for the consulting firm AlixPartners, told me in an email. According to Garfield, the underlying phenomena all point to continued growth, especially for inexpensive products: Demand is strong; impulsive purchases have never been easier; and the rise of influencers has made sales pitches even more omnipresent and sometimes more difficult to discern from genuine recommendations. On the supply side, a growing number of third parties that Garfield calls “infrastructure players”—transport and logistics companies, easy-setup e-commerce platforms, contract manufacturers—have entered the market in order to move larger volumes of goods into consumers’ hands more and more efficiently.

Garfield also pointed to one of the less discussed ways that pandemic changes have continued to affect how Americans spend their money: Before 2020, he said, consumers were in a slow, steady, long-term pattern of moving their spending incrementally away from goods and toward services—things such as hotel stays and Uber rides. Pandemic shutdowns reversed that trend virtually overnight, and four years later, a greater proportion of consumer spending is still going to goods than it was in 2019. Population-level spending habits move with all the agility and grace of a container ship; without a pandemic-level force to send them swiftly back where they came from, people just seem to be used to buying a little bit more stuff than they used to, especially online.

Much of that stuff, when bought from American retailers, is now significantly more expensive than it was in the recent past. Since 2019, prices for many types of consumer purchases in the U.S. have shot up. On average, goods cost nearly 20 percent more than they did before the pandemic. This, according to the e-commerce analyst and Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas, is among the reasons that ultra-cheap retailers that ship to the U.S. from overseas have found such enthusiastic audiences. “During uncertain economic times,” he told me, “price tends to bubble up to become the most important variable” in how even greater numbers of people make purchase decisions.

[Read: It’s too easy to buy stuff you don’t want]

Confounding all of this is the reality that price and quality are not as closely tied to each other as they once were. Kaziukėnas challenged a common assumption that the novelty of stores like Temu and Shein will have to wear off eventually: Not everything they sell is as off-putting or low quality in person as you might think. Much of it, according to Kaziukėnas, is identical to what American brands and retailers sell—it is, after all, coming from existing manufacturers—but at a much lower price. Temu and Shein were designed to drive overhead down to a minimum: They’ve bet that lots of people are willing to trade instant shipping and robust customer service for lower prices, and they’ve largely been right. American retailers’ emphasis on speed and variety requires more overhead because they’ve built systems with more steps between manufacturers and buyers. “Amazon and eBay would happily replicate Temu’s ship-from-China model if they hadn’t spent decades optimizing for a different kind of experience,” Kaziukėnas said.

When you look at the data, lots of people who say they hate this phenomenon of cheap, high-volume consumption tend to be enthusiastic participants in it. Kaziukėnas pointed to a recent report published by The New Consumer and the venture-capital firm Coefficient Capital that found that Shein shoppers are considerably more likely to express concern about the environment and sustainability than shoppers overall. “There is a disconnect between what we tell ourselves, what we tell others, and how we behave,” Kaziukėnas said. Dan Frommer, the founder of The New Consumer, echoed those sentiments: “The allure of cheap stuff is universal, almost, to American culture,” he told me. Some people may get burned by junky products and turn away from these types of retailers, which may raise prices on some of their products as they dial back discounting that was implemented in order to lure an initial customer base, Frommer said. But he thinks they’ll stick around in some significant capacity for the foreseeable future, even if their recent meteoric growth cools.

If Shein, TikTok Shop, and Temu are popular even among the economically comfortable and environmentally conscious, the question of what it would take to turn a meaningful number of Americans away from these kinds of retailers gets significantly more difficult to tease out. Frommer mentioned that the same concerns over foreign ownership that currently threaten to bring down TikTok could possibly be applied to many ultra-cheap internet retailers, if lawmakers were so inclined. Kaziukėnas said that he didn’t think consumers were likely to make this choice themselves anytime soon, but that regulatory measures designed to make foreign retailers’ existing business models less viable could harm their ability to compete against American retailers on price. One such measure—closing the de minimis loophole, which, in effect, allows foreign retailers to import goods into the U.S. one purchase at a time without paying taxes or duties—is currently being considered by Congress.

Ken Pucker, a professor at Tufts University and the former chief operating officer of Timberland, agrees that regulation is likely the most efficient way to reform particularly wasteful consumption and production practices, but he sees the looming possibility of a second path. One of the major things that enables American buying habits, he told me, is the separation of consumption from production. Goods are produced far away, and when we tire of them, the trash they create is also swiftly moved out of our field of vision. Rarely do Americans—and especially the well-off Americans who drive this sort of consumption—experience the downsides of plastics production or discarded cheap goods, such as groundwater contamination. “We no longer see the effect of the consumption that we still enjoy,” he told me. We just experience the upsides of convenience and abundance.

Eventually, this separation will be more difficult to uphold. As the physical effects of climate change become more difficult to outrun even for the relatively affluent, Pucker said, the joys of consumption and realities of production are bound to recouple. You can see it beginning to happen already: A recent report found that PFAS “forever chemicals,” which are used widely in the manufacture of stain- and water-resistant products and linked to a host of medical issues, are present in high concentrations in sea spray the world over.

Maybe, one day, buying cheap stuff as a form of entertainment will run afoul of new behavioral norms that a changed physical reality creates. People might begin to feel ashamed, or at least more self-conscious, about buying things they don’t even really want as a salve for stress or boredom. But if we have to wait for wastefulness to become uncool, then we probably have our answer as to whether this will all slow down anytime soon.

Tupperware Is in Trouble

2024-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

For the first several decades of my life, most of the meals I ate involved at least one piece of Tupperware. My mom’s pieces were mostly the greens and yellows of a 1970s kitchen, purchased from co-workers or neighbors who circulated catalogs around the office or slipped them into mailboxes in our suburban subdivision. Many of her containers were acquired before my brother and I were born and remained in regular use well after I flew the nest for college in the mid-2000s. To this day, the birthday cake that my mom makes for my visits gets stored on her kitchen counter in a classic Tupperware cake saver—a flat gold base with a tall, milky-white lid made of semi-rigid plastic. Somewhere deep in her cabinets, the matching gold carrying strap is probably still hiding, in case a cake is on the go.

If you’re over 30 and were raised in the American suburbs, you can probably tell a similar story, though your mom’s color choices might have been a little different. As more and more middle-class women joined the workforce, new products that promised convenience in domestic work, which largely still fell to them, became indispensable tools of the homemaking trade. Reusable food-storage containers kept leftovers fresher for longer, made packing lunches easier, and, when combined with the ascendantly popular microwave, sped the process of getting last night’s dinner back onto the table. Tupperware became such a dominant domestic force that its brand name, like Band-Aid and Kleenex, is often still used as a stand-in for plastic food-storage containers of any type or brand.

In theory, Tupperware should be even more popular now than it was decades ago. The market for storage containers, on the whole, is thriving. Practices such as meal-prepping and buying in bulk have further centered reusable food containers in America’s eating habits. Obsessive kitchen organization is among social media’s favorite pastimes, and plastic storage containers in every conceivable size and shape play an outsize role in the super-popular videos depicting spotless, abundant refrigerators and pantries on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But Tupperware has fallen on hard times. At the end of last month, for a second year in a row, the company warned financial regulators that it would be unable to file its annual report on time and raised doubts about its ability to continue as a business, citing a “challenging financial condition.” Sales are in decline. These should be boom times for Tupperware. What happened?

[Read: Home influencers will not rest until everything has been put in a clear plastic storage bin]

The Tupperware origin story is a near-perfect fable of 20th-century American ingenuity. Earl Tupper, the product’s namesake, was a serial inventor who used mid-century advances in plastics technology to develop the first range of airtight food containers affordable for middle-class households. Tupperware debuted in 1946, but it didn’t really take off until a few years later, when Brownie Wise, a divorced mom from Michigan, began selling the stuff to friends and neighbors she invited to her home. Her success caught the attention of Tupperware, and then of women across America who had gotten a taste of the working life during World War II but had been displaced from their wartime jobs by men returning from military service. Many of them began selling the food containers to their friends and neighbors in the living-room showcases that became Tupperware parties.

In the following decades, the range of plastic tubs, matte and mostly opaque, expanded in color, shape, and size—1960s pastels gave way to the citrus oranges, goldenrod yellows, and avocado greens of the ’70s and ’80s, and then to the rich reds and hunter greens of the ’90s. Modestly sized lidded bowls were joined by dry-goods canisters, pie keepers, pitchers, and measuring cups. A kitchen full of Tupperware products became a symbol of social and domestic success: Practical but a little pricey, the storage containers were trafficked through women’s community bonds, and owning them telegraphed a commitment to order, cleanliness, and sensible stewardship of the family’s time and food budget. Particularly stylish moms matched their Tupperware collections to their kitchen decor.

Tupperware did not respond to an interview request on the company’s current woes, but the problems it faces are not difficult to see. The first is that, in a lot of ways, its products are still those products. Much of Tupperware’s range still looks at least a little bit like it did decades ago—textured, pliant plastic that obscures what’s inside. Some of these products are a clear nostalgia play to tempt younger shoppers with the retro, rainbow-colored bowls and tubs their mom used, but many of the products just look dingy, clunky, old. And nostalgia is not necessarily something buyers want in plastic kitchenware. Since Tupperware’s heyday, what we know about the safety of plastics that were commonly used in food storage has changed, and the public’s buying preferences along with it. Like most older plastic containers, Tupperware made before 2010 contains a type of chemical called BPA, which is associated with a host of health problems including infertility, fetal abnormalities, and heart disease. Tupperware has since removed BPA from its products, but on a visual level, many of them still appear to be the bowls you might now wish your mom hadn’t microwaved so frequently when you were a kid.

Tupperware’s competitors have multiplied in recent decades, and most of them have been more adept at signaling newness and cleanliness to customers. OXO, Pyrex, and Rubbermaid, for example, all sell popular lines of containers that use crystal-clear hard plastic or glass and have mechanical latches or seals to prevent spills and keep food airtight. They look neat and orderly—even expensive—in the bright, cool-toned LED lighting of modern refrigerators. At $50 to $80 for a modestly sized set, they actually tend to cost less than their Tupperware equivalents, which can top $90 for a set of basic plastic bowls. For buyers more concerned about price than beauty, Ziploc and Glad make sets of cheap, thin plastic containers that can be bought for $10 or $12 at most grocery stores.

Where exactly one buys Tupperware has also become an issue over time. The bulk of the company’s dwindling sales volume still comes from women selling to their social circles, which is now more of a liability in the United States than it was a generation or two ago. This type of “direct sales” model has proliferated widely in the social-media era, with distant Facebook friends pestering people to buy things like essential oils and cheap leggings. It has prompted a significant backlash, creating a consumer base that’s tired of sales pitches from acquaintances and suspicious of products sold in that format. Tupperware parties still work for the brand in some parts of the world, but for mainly the same reason that they worked in mid-century America: In 2013, Indonesia became Tupperware’s biggest market, thanks in large part to a growing population of workforce-curious women who embraced the opportunity to make some extra cash for their family by doing business with other women in tight-knit social communities. Sales in North America have continued to decline, and they now make up only a little over a quarter of the company’s total volume, according to its most recent annual report.

Instead of changing with the times, Tupperware has clung to its old ways for decades longer than it probably should have. The company brought in a new CEO late last year, and she has said she will modernize both the products and the company’s sales structure. But those efforts now seem likely to be too little, too late. Other than a brief dalliance with what were then called SuperTarget stores in the early 2000s, the brand didn’t make a serious push into traditional retailing until 2022, and its products are now stocked alongside more modern-looking and frequently less expensive competitors at Target and Macy’s. You can also now buy Tupperware online directly from the brand, but when you arrive at its website, a bright-orange banner across the top alerts you that you’re not shopping with a representative, in case you should want to remedy that and give a co-worker or neighbor the credit for whatever you buy.

None of these issues takes a keen retail or product-development mind to detect. Tupperware’s woes don’t seem to be the result of unpredictable market changes or fickle consumers. Instead, like many once-prosperous 20th-century American companies, Tupperware’s downfall appears to land squarely at the feet of its management. As far back as the 1980s, according to The Wall Street Journal, it was clear to executives at Kraft, then the company’s owner, that high workforce participation among American women was making the direct-sales model less viable; if women had full-time jobs, they mostly didn’t need side hustles or want to go to buying parties, even if they still wanted storage containers and kitchen gadgets. At the same time, Tupperware’s patents began to expire, which created new competition for a brand that had long had very little. At that time, the company still had decades of goodwill in front of it, and it had a direct line to an army of women who could have helped guide the company’s development of newer, better products that people would have been excited to continue stocking their kitchens with. Instead, those products are now made by its competitors and available virtually anywhere that food or home goods are sold. Tupperware, meanwhile, is still waiting for the return of a glorious past that is never coming back.

Why Rich Shoppers Get So Angry About Hermès

2024-04-02T07:00:00-04:00

Should you want to own an Hermès Birkin handbag, there are two main reasons that’s probably not in the cards. The first limiting factor is that even in its smallest size and most basic format, the Birkin, which has been one of the luxury industry’s ultimate brass rings for decades, has a starting price tag of more than $11,000—roughly what you’d currently pay for a gently used 2013 Honda Accord. The second is that even if you have the money, one does not simply waltz into one of the hundreds of Hermès boutiques worldwide and walk out with their bag of choice, and certainly not a Birkin. There are too few of these bags—of most types of Hermès bags, at this point—to satisfy everyone willing to pay up, even at five-figure prices. And if they’re in stock, they probably still aren’t available to you.

For a chance at getting a Birkin, you have to play the “Hermès Game,” according to aspirants who gather online to discuss what they’ve gleaned about its vague rules. Most agree that in order to increase your odds of being offered a Birkin or Hermès’s similar (and similarly popular) Kelly bag, you need to build a purchase history at an Hermès store by buying products that are more readily available—shoes, home goods, silk scarves, jewelry. Nothing Hermès sells is affordable, so building such a history would cost, at a minimum, thousands of dollars. Prospective customers commonly report being told by sales associates, who are said to have broad authority over how coveted bags are meted out after arriving in stores, that priority for scarce products goes to loyal customers. How much one would have to buy in order to demonstrate loyalty, relative to your competition on any given boutique’s client list, is anyone’s guess. The overwhelming majority of people are going to be turned away when they ask for a Birkin, even if they pick up a pair of sandals and a few bangles here and there.

You can probably guess how this goes over. People with enough money for a frisky little Birkin purchase are generally not used to hearing the word no, and some of them react to it like their civil rights are being violated. According to a lawsuit filed in California last month by two people who recently had no luck buying a Birkin (though one of them already owned at least one of the bags), what has been violated is actually federal antitrust law. Hermès has a monopoly on Birkin bags, so the suit alleges, and the Hermès Game amounts to tying, a potentially anticompetitive practice in which buyers are required to purchase additional, unwanted goods as a precondition of receiving a desirable product.

[Read: Something odd is happening with handbags]

Hermès did not respond to a request for comment. So far, legal experts seem dubious on the suit’s merits. Hermès does not control the robust secondhand market for its bags, and people sometimes do just walk into a boutique off the street, ask nicely, and get lucky. But the lawsuit’s very existence is a glimpse inside the luxury industry’s most precarious balancing act: How do you sell putatively rare things at corporate scale?

The most important thing to understand about why Hermès bags drive so many people wild is that they’re actually pretty rare, compared with the products made by the brand’s closest competitors. Hermès is a huge company—it has a bigger market cap than Nike—but it has mostly resisted modern, high-capacity manufacturing methods. Instead, it has trained an army of traditional leatherworkers and other tradespeople to do things the old way at a large scale. Birkins and Kellys are assembled by hand, beginning to end, by a single craftsman. According to a 2019 story in T, The New York Times’ style magazine, the process for the Kelly takes 20 to 25 hours of work; for certain Birkins, some estimates put it at as high as 40 hours. Those practices put a hard limit on supply that can’t be quickly or easily raised, and they also help Hermès and its fans spin a compelling tale about why its prices—high even among luxury brands, though not by as wide a margin as they once were—are justifiable. If anything, the lively resale market for Birkins, where pristine bags almost always sell for more than their retail price, suggests that the brand is undercharging relative to what customers will bear. Luxury is an industry built on hierarchy, and when it comes to handbags, Hermès is alone at the top among global brands.

All of this—the European workshops, the training academy for craftspeople, the plying of centuries-old trades—is the stuff that many of Hermès’s competitors encourage you to assume that they, too, must be doing, by virtue of being based in France or Italy and selling very expensive things under an extremely old name. The reality is a little different. It’s true that most of these brands do still operate ateliers and workshops where old-school craftsmen develop new designs or manufacture the company’s most expensive tier of products. Even so, modern luxury is a high-volume business that has been modernized, scaled up, and made far more efficient, most prominently by LVMH, the corporate conglomerate that owns brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Fendi. Many of the changes LVMH implemented are now standard operating procedure for major brands at large. Scale and efficiency mean less handwork and greater speed on a larger number of products. The biggest players have at their disposal a staggering array of material resources and mammoth capacity to produce goods, many of which are created by methods and available in quantities that are not especially distinct from other types of consumer goods.

This glut is the paradox at the heart of the luxury industry. These goods derive cultural and monetary value from scarcity, but there are relatively few situations in which demand genuinely outstrips supply. Luxury brands, then, must manufacture the illusion of scarcity, which is one reason that limited editions and collaborative releases have become so popular—they impose brief bouts of lack on top of industrial abundance. The regular stuff, which is what most people buy anyway, is still there waiting for you, no matter where you are, if you want to pony up.

[Read: Make the collabs stop]

Over the decades of growth that have turned the executives of these luxury conglomerates into some of the richest men in the world, their wealthy customers have settled into a routine that flatters a sense of exceptionalism: What the customers want is almost always available to them, and that availability still feels special and enticing because those products are theoretically not available to some unseen other, even as sales of those exact same products tick ever upward worldwide. Buying luxury goods isn’t intoxicating to so many people because they all love fine craftsmanship, or even necessarily because they all want everyone to know exactly how much money they have. At least in part, it’s because arriving at a velvet rope and being let inside is a thrill, and modern luxury businesses have found ways to preserve that feeling while raising the velvet rope for as many paying customers as humanly possible.

When customers groomed into this kind of acquisitive ease encounter actual, material scarcity from which they are not exempted—when, say, a Birkin isn’t available to them even though they have $15,000 to spend—the effect can be combustible. The market’s paradox, which brands are adept at keeping out of sight and out of mind, becomes just a little too visible. Luxury goods, at least in the truest sense of the term, aren’t infinitely scalable—intense investments of resources, materials, skill, labor, and time are inherent to the enterprise, and their limitations cannot be fully mitigated.

But the luxury industry has changed since the days when handcraft dominated what was then a much smaller and far less efficient market. The term now refers less to the exceptional material attributes of an object and more to its price point, which was a trade-off made to turn the business into a fabulously profitable global juggernaut. Most of these goods aren’t rare; they’re merely expensive, which is sort of obvious if you think about it for too long. Which is why Hermès drives so many wealthy customers to distraction. Its velvet rope is one of the last that a single credit-card swipe isn’t guaranteed to lift.

What Happened to Baseball Jerseys?

2024-02-20T16:05:00-05:00

Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad.

The MLB announced the uniforms, which have been redesigned by Nike for all of the league’s 30 teams, in a press release last Tuesday. It included praise from some of the biggest baseball names on Nike’s endorsement roster. As images of the uniforms began to circulate, however, a number of other players voiced, shall we say, differing opinions. Many were upset that they’d no longer been given the chance to tailor the fit of their pants. The uniforms are thin and flimsy feeling. Some of the colors seem off. The design elements are poorly spaced and sized, and the lettering for players’ names seems too small. According to The Athletic, some players feel so strongly about the changes that they’ve taken their concerns to their union. The Chicago Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson, who has an endorsement deal with Nike, has said that he contacted the brand himself to see if some of these concerns could be resolved.

It’s hard to dismiss the aesthetic complaints, especially when you compare the new jerseys with those of previous seasons. The new ones look tawdry and a little swagless, like replica jerseys. Fans quickly joined the chorus of outrage. Regular people are the actual primary consumers of pro-sports jerseys, and Nike plans to offer three versions of the new uniforms to buyers, each with varying levels of fidelity to what players wear on field. The two currently available cost $175 and $395. One post on X from the popular MLB-fan account Korked Bats said the jerseys looked like players’ moms had gotten them on clearance at TJ Maxx.

The uniforms might bear the Nike logo, but in looking to assign blame, fans have largely seized on what has become a familiar villain in American sports: Fanatics, the sprawling memorabilia conglomerate that manufactured the new uniforms on Nike’s behalf. Over the past couple of decades, Fanatics (with the apparently full support of all of the major American sports leagues) has upended the licensed-sports-merch market and centralized much of the production and sale of team gear under its control. If you’re a fan who wants a T-shirt or cap with your team’s logo, Fanatics has immense power over your options. Complaints about the quality and prices of the products it sells abound.

The story of how American pro-sports jerseys—baseball and beyond—have lost some of their swagger, however, goes further than a single company. It’s also a story about the nature of sports uniforms themselves, and why fans might be doomed to more disappointment in the future.

[Read: Your sweaters are garbage]

As you might expect, complaints about jersey changes are far from new, in baseball or in any other sport. Some level of player pushback tends to crop up any time major changes are made, and the MLB uniforms unveiled this week use what Nike describes as an entirely new “chassis.” (Yes, that is how self-serious these things can get.) Fans, too, tend to be a nostalgic and change-averse group of people, and perhaps in regard to no American sport more than baseball, where some logos, colors, and other aesthetic elements of uniform design date back many decades.

Even so, one has to acknowledge that the new uniforms look like a team of designers sat down with last year’s MLB template and found as many little details as possible to make worse. The off-putting finished product gets only more perplexing the deeper you dig into how the new MLB uniforms came to be. In 2019, Nike won a decade-long contract to design the league’s uniforms, the first of which debuted in 2020. Despite being one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world, Nike has never produced the actual jerseys itself. Instead, the company contracts with Fanatics to manufacture them. This production takes place in a Pennsylvania factory that has made all MLB uniforms since 2005; Fanatics bought it in 2017, and prior to that, it was owned by another jersey maker, Majestic Apparel. Production subcontracting is incredibly common across all sectors of the apparel market. Relatively few brands manufacture their own clothing, usually to save money by using existing manufacturers overseas or to access production capabilities that would be too costly or inefficient to build in-house.

Production subcontracting is just what it sounds like—production. The manufacturer receives the specs and materials and turns them into a product, but it is not responsible for the actual design. By all indications, that’s the case with the MLB jerseys. A representative for Fanatics declined to answer specific questions about the creation of the new MLB jerseys but told me that Fanatics was not involved in the design of the uniforms or the development of the materials used in them. This claim aligns with last week’s press release announcing the new uniforms, which fully credited Nike with everything but the actual manufacture of the garments. The journalist Paul Lukas, who runs the website Uni Watch and has been covering American sports uniforms for decades, came to much the same conclusion.

Nike did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor does the company seem to have addressed the controversy publicly. But the evidence suggests that the flop is on Nike more than anyone else. The biggest sportswear brand in the world delivered a dud.

Part of this problem isn’t really Nike’s, or at least not entirely. An inherent tension exists in the two distinct purposes for which jerseys are developed and sold—for actual athletes engaging in physical competition, and for fans of those players who want to signal their team affiliations to the world. Garments independently purpose-built for each of these users would probably diverge mightily from each other; a 21-year-old elite athlete has different physical needs than a middle-aged insurance adjuster at a sports bar. But jerseys are valuable as consumer products precisely because of their relationship to what a very particular person is wearing when they hit a game-winning home run or burst through a defensive line and into the end zone; fidelity to the original is what makes them desirable.

When the distance between the practical needs of players and the emotional needs of fans increases, the space for conflict grows. Over the past few decades, high-end athletic-apparel brands have sunk their resources into developing proprietary synthetic textiles that they claim outperform more traditional fabrics when used for actual physical activity—things with trademarked names such as Dri-FIT and AEROREADY and HeatGear. Garments using these textiles are generally cut close to the body, and they promise to be lightweight, stretchy, highly breathable, moisture-wicking, and quick-drying—the kind of thing you want to wear when your job involves a lot of running or twisting or jumping, especially in summer heat. (For brands, cycling new materials through pro equipment also serves another purpose: Creating an association with elite performance is a potent marketing opportunity to sell expensive workout clothes.)

Over time, more and more design elements of professional sports jerseys have bent themselves to this same logic of thinner, lighter, stretchier. Details that in the past might have been highly textured have been lightened considerably, and are even screen-printed or heat-pressed by some brands. Those changes reduce bulk and remove stitchwork that could impede the textile’s ability to stretch. These changes can also make production and maintenance of these uniforms cheaper and easier. The end result is a flatter, simpler-looking garment, but one that should, at least in theory, perform better under extreme conditions of human movement.

What makes for a good piece of performance gear, though, doesn’t necessarily make for a good piece of casual clothing. Jerseys are expensive, and for many of the people who buy them, they’ll be among the priciest garments they’ve ever owned. What signals quality in regular clothing is everything that performance brands have worked to strip out of athletic apparel: thick, weighty textiles; layers of added detail; textural variation; embroidery. Sports fans are also a nostalgic beast; the people with enough money to buy official jerseys en masse are likely at least approaching middle age, and for a lot of fans, how a jersey should look is however it looked when they first became a fan, back when jerseys were thicker and more embellished and had bigger, blockier proportions. This is not a strictly rational thought process, but sports fandom isn’t rational. This is true of the players, too, who were usually fans first. When Dansby Swanson calls up Nike to make sure that the team takes the field on opening day wearing actual “Cubbie blue,” it’s not because doing so will make him a better shortstop.

Practicality is only part of the explanation, however. Some of the changes made to the new uniforms—especially a lack of customization options in the fit of the pants—seem to be more about ease and cost of manufacturing rather than adhering to the on-field preferences of elite competitors. (Nike has sent tailors for addressing this issue to at least one team, the Cincinnati Reds, but according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, those tailors will only tweak waists and inseams, not overall fit.) Shrinking down players’ names, too, serves no discernible performance advantage and makes the real jerseys look like hastily drawn-up knockoffs.

These changes point to a larger issue that’s driving so much dissatisfaction with team merch in general, among players and fans alike. Design and fabrication duties used to be shared by many different brands and producers; for much of professional-sports history, teams all chose their own jersey suppliers. But those duties have become more and more centralized in the past few decades, leading to a market where the aesthetic choices are controlled by a very small group of companies—Nike, Fanatics, a handful of other inescapable sports brands—that have dominion over nearly the entire market, no matter the sport. The result: A lot of things now look sort of bad, and also sort of the same. When one of those brands duffs a new release, far more people notice because it affects a far wider swath of fandom than it would if the decision making weren’t so centralized. Nike didn’t make just one baseball team’s jerseys reminiscent of a knockoff—it made all 30 look that way. It’s no coincidence that as this collection of behemoths has executed a widespread blanding of the sports-merch market, sales of vintage sports apparel have exploded

This phenomenon is hardly limited to sports. Clothing is available in larger quantities than ever before in human history, but that quest for scale has resulted in reduced quality and an inescapable blandness all over the apparel market—in knitwear, leather goods, clothes of all kinds. Fans venting their frustrations over jerseys have likely encountered a version of these issues while trying to buy other things, but the jerseys are a bridge too far. Sports are such a potent presence in American culture because they are an animating force in how so many people relate to their family or to their city or to their understanding of themselves. Sports are compelling precisely because of all of the emotional heft that humans invest in them, and all the meaning we imbue in particular colors and fonts and markings as a result.

[Read: Fashion has abandoned human taste]

When companies and organizations with near-infinite money and resources—Nike, MLB, Fanatics, whoever—cannot even seem to bother to get those things right on behalf of all the people who have made them rich, the fury it elicits is maybe not rational, but it’s legitimate. They have you over a barrel and they know it, because you have nowhere else to turn if your son wants a jersey for his birthday or your team wins a championship and you want an object to remember it by. No one has to do a very good job, and they’ll still get to charge you $400.

Temu Is Speedrunning American Familiarity

2024-02-12T19:02:00-05:00

Last night, the shopping app Temu, which is not quite a year and a half old, ran its second Super Bowl ad in as many years. It was hard to miss, because the same ad appeared several times, including following the game-winning touchdown. By most estimates, the three times the ad was featured in the middle of gameplay would have cost an eye-watering $21 million alone.

Alongside ads in which Beyoncé announced a new album and Sir Patrick Stewart proposed skinning Peppa Pig to make a football, the content of Temu’s ad was comparatively unremarkable. It had no A-list celebrities or beloved cultural touchstones; not a single heartstring was tugged. Instead, a cast of silent, off-brand Pixar characters saw their wishes for 99-cent toupees and $6.99 jeans granted by an orange-gowned sorceress, who had herself been granted those powers by ordering the magical dress she was wearing from Temu for $9.99. All of this played out under a jingle that encouraged viewers to shop like a billionaire—which is to say to shop constantly, for fun and entertainment, without a moment of regard for price tags. The ad had the milquetoast gleam characteristic of media generated by AI, though beyond aesthetics, there’s no indication that that’s the case.

Most companies that spend big bucks on Super Bowl ad time go to great lengths and great expense to make commercials that are plausibly worth the priciest real estate in American marketing—the kind of thing that people might actually like, or at least discuss, instead of merely tolerate. Temu, which was launched by a company in China but caters to a largely American consumer base, took the opposite approach: an ad that wouldn’t have looked out of place during a block of Law & Order reruns or a house-flipping reality show on HGTV but that played over and over again to the biggest audience money can buy. By its third appearance, one of the guests at my Super Bowl party was singing a portion of the jingle—ooh ooh, Temu—to himself, and the rest of us had realized that we’d been pronouncing the app’s name incorrectly all along. (It’s TEH-moo, apparently, as opposed to TEE-moo.)

Temu, if you’re among the uninitiated whom the ad was intended to reach, is one of a wave of fast-growing retailers with ties to China, including Shein and TikTok Shop, that have emerged in recent years. These retailers offer a huge selection of dirt-cheap consumer goods, and they’re competing against one another in a bid ultimately to challenge Amazon’s dominance as the primary intermediary between Chinese manufacturers and the Americans who buy their products. The company’s ad, which is just one part of a larger campaign across media that a recent J.P. Morgan report estimated would cost the retailer $3 billion this year, had performed precisely as intended, at least judging by my party guests. Temu is spending a literal fortune in an attempt to speedrun familiarity among American shoppers.

From the beginning, Temu has seemed to understand that one of the biggest obstacles it faces on its apparent quest to rise to the top of American shopping is simply getting its name out there. The United States is a mature consumer market—Amazon dominates online retail, and Walmart and Target, long a couple of Amazon’s chief digital competitors, also have a chokehold on everyday in-person shopping for much of the country. At the lowest end of the market, Dollar Tree and Dollar General operate tens of thousands of stores in North America, largely targeting customers in poorer or more rural areas. Americans are not exactly at a loss for places to buy weird junk, and it wasn’t clear that they really needed or wanted another one when Temu launched in September 2022. When the company ran its first Super Bowl ad a few months later, not that many people in the U.S. had heard of Temu or its parent company, PDD Holdings, which until recently was headquartered in Shanghai and also operates the Chinese retail giant Pinduoduo.

Over the past few decades, Super Bowl ads—historically the province of powerful consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Budweiser, and Ford—have become a way for new companies that are flush with investor cash to signal their desired entrance into mainstream consumer consciousness. At the dawn of the millennium, dot-com start-ups such as E-Trade and Pets.com bought up all the Super Bowl ad inventory they could get. More recently, ads for cryptocurrency exchanges enlisted stars including Matt Damon and Larry David to introduce the concept to the not-so-terminally online. When most Americans have no clue who you are, what you sell, or why they should buy it, a slick ad in a notoriously expensive moment not only spreads the word about your company to an enormous audience; it also suggests that your company belongs alongside those that have been around so long, they’ve become part of the scenery of American life.

Temu’s ties to China make these associations even more valuable to its future. A majority of Americans have long said they prefer to buy domestically manufactured goods, and a significant number of consumers report being opposed to Chinese-made products specifically. But these preferences start to bend when foreign-made products are cheaper. In practice, almost all Americans now routinely purchase consumer goods made elsewhere. Amazon has contributed mightily to this reality: Slowly but surely, the retailer’s broad offering of products from third-party international sellers, its chaotic user interface, and its huge number of listings created by non-native English speakers seem to be acclimating millions of people to the kinds of transactions that would have seemed intolerably risky a decade ago. Buying directly from a foreign retailer is a step that Temu clearly is betting many of these same shoppers can now be persuaded to take, if the circumstances are right. One of the first hurdles is making sure everyone knows your name.

History tells us that we should be skeptical of businesses trying to use expensive ad campaigns to buy their way into those associations. The dot-com boom busted spectacularly, and the crypto market plummeted with revelations of scams not long after it splashed a lot of cash on TV ads. That Temu is back for a second year is notable, as is the choice to pursue familiarity instead of glitz or buzzy celebrity associations. The absence of picky megawatt stars, expensive licensing for famous songs or characters, and football-specific themes means that the ad will be easy to rerun again and again during all kinds of broadcasts, teaching millions more Americans how to say the app’s name via a simple jingle. The lesson was already spreading before the Super Bowl: Temu has been blanketing previous “shop like a billionaire” ads across other broadcasts all year. (This is perhaps one explanation for Temu’s counterintuitive popularity among older adults, whose shopping habits are thought to be more difficult to change than those of younger consumers who are comfortable shopping all over the internet; older people also watch a lot more broadcast TV.)

This approach is exactly in line with a number of other marketing moves that Temu has made in the past year, which have seen the retailer pouring millions of dollars into surfacing its products in search listings and online-ad placements. Combined with its efforts on TV and elsewhere, these campaigns cost an estimated $1.7 billion. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, those enormous expenditures—along with a smaller campaign by Shein—have been enough to push up the cost of advertising all over the internet. In turn, that has buoyed the fortunes of Google and Meta, which control the bulk of online advertising. It’s also begun to eat into the bottom lines of some of Temu’s competitors, which now must pay higher prices for advertising while Temu undercuts them on the prices of its products.

Last year, Temu did an estimated $16 billion in sales, which was roughly more than three-quarters of Target’s online revenue in 2022. Most industry watchers attribute this unprecedented scale-up to a combination of ubiquity and price—the company is spending a ton to get in front of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, and it’s selling many of its products at prices so low that they seem mathematically impossible. Temu has been accused of selling goods made with forced labor in order to achieve those prices. The company is also widely believed to be temporarily selling products at a loss in an attempt to buy market share from competitors. (Temu has denied accusations about its working conditions. In a statement to the WSJ, a spokesperson for Temu also denied that the company was losing money in an effort to quickly gain ground on its rivals.) Amazon, too, has tamped down prices for years in order to convert online-shopping skeptics, though it has denied that pushing for lower prices is predatory.

Advertising is both more and less powerful than people commonly believe it to be. It’s almost never enough, on its own, to make a product or service into a phenomenon from scratch; if it were, consumer history wouldn’t be riddled with so many famous failures once hoisted aloft by luxurious marketing budgets. But in the global consumer system, advertising of some sort usually is a prerequisite for whatever success you’re trying to achieve. Otherwise, it’s rare that many people will even find out your business exists. Temu’s long-term success will depend on a lot more than ads, but if it fails, it won’t be because no one knew its name.

Lab Diamonds Are Too Perfect for Their Own Good

2024-02-07T13:37:00-05:00

Last year, a funny thing happened at Ring Concierge’s Manhattan showroom. A bride-to-be brought her engagement ring back to the popular jewelry store after wearing it for a few weeks and wanted to trade out her diamond for a worse one. The woman was worried that the original rock was too clear, too bright, too perfect for its large size, Ring Concierge’s CEO, Nicole Wegman, told me. She wanted to replace it with a lower-quality stone of a similar size—something a little less bright white.

Brides sometimes bring in new rings for tweaks; maybe they want the fit adjusted, or they’re having second thoughts about the setting. Occasionally, they decide they want to pay the extra money to go bigger. That the central diamond is too good, however, is just not a complaint that jewelers get, except in cases of totally blown budgets. But this particular bride wasn’t worried that she’d spent too much money, Wegman said. In a sense, the bride was worried that she hadn’t spent enough. She and her fiancé had selected a lab-grown diamond—a gem that’s chemically identical to a mined diamond at a fraction of the cost—in order to get the kind of size and clarity that would push a natural stone far beyond their means. Now she was concerned that everyone they knew would take one look at the big, perfect stone on her finger and immediately see the trade-off.

In recent years, lab-grown diamonds have flooded into the market, causing something of an existential crisis in the natural-diamond industry, which has spent decades making the diamond engagement ring into a singular goliath of American luxury shopping. This new wave of stones offers a tempting bargain: You can have the ring of your dreams (or something much closer to it), even if your budget is significantly smaller than the average ring cost of somewhere around $5,500. A real stone—and its symbolic value in life and romance—no longer requires all that expense, or all of the baggage of mined stones’ bloody imperial history. Diamonds, it would seem, are now a solved problem.

Except, of course, a diamond’s appeal has never had that much to do with the chemical specifications or atomic structure of the stone itself. Even as lab-diamond sales have taken off, Wegman told me, most buyers have the same approach as that regretful bride. They want to stick to a stone that would still seem plausible for their income and status were it mined, and they don’t plan to tell their family and friends that it’s not. The rationality of lab-grown diamonds is butting up against an even greater force: the cultural power of their mined counterparts, built on a generations-long influence campaign to change the way Americans think about marking personal milestones. In the end, it’s a fight that lab-grown-diamond purveyors actually might not want to win.

Diamonds, as you have probably heard before—perhaps from someone trying to get out of buying one—are just chunks of carbon. More precisely, they are chunks of carbon that form more than 100 kilometers belowground, some of which are eventually carried by volcanic activity back toward the surface, where they can be reached by miners. To make a diamond, nature requests your patience. The timeline is rather lengthy—on the order of millions, if not billions, of years. In that span, heat and pressure arrange the carbon’s atoms in a crystal structure that lends the resulting rocks their strength and sparkle. This process also grants diamonds a whole host of plausible symbolic meanings—eternal commitment, enduring love, that sort of thing—arguably as important to their commercial appeal as any of their physical properties.

Natural diamonds are generally pit mined—a difficult, dangerous process in which they are hauled by humans out of great human-made craters in the earth—and they can develop in only a handful of rock varieties. Deposits of those rocks can be found on every continent, but relatively few of them are diamondiferous (delightfully, that’s the real word for it); even fewer are close enough to the surface to be mined. The most productive mines can yield enormous quantities of diamonds annually, but only a fraction of those stones will have physical characteristics that the industry considers desirable for jewelry.

For generations, De Beers—a British–South African mining corporation that the journalist Edward Jay Epstein described in a now-legendary 1982 Atlantic exposé on the industry as “the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce”—controlled enough of the trade to meter the supply of jewelry-quality stones released to the consumer market, ensuring a sense of scarcity and high, stable prices. Over the past few decades, however, De Beers’s influence has waned. According to Edahn Golan, a diamond-industry analyst and a managing partner at the jewelry-analytics firm Tenoris, supply has become more responsive to consumer demand. This is one reason, he told me, that “the industry’s economics are more wobbly these days.” Sometimes stones are scarce, as they became during the post-pandemic rush for delayed proposals and weddings. By the time that pent-up demand petered out, jewelers had stocked up, and diamonds were in surplus. Prices dipped.

[Read: Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?]

You can probably understand the appeal of an identical product that feels a little more orderly, more precise, more modern—especially if all that efficiency is cheaper. Lab diamonds promise exactly that: beautiful stones created with industrial predictability and control. The first lab diamonds were produced in the 1950s, but decades of additional research were needed to refine a commercially viable process that can consistently produce customizable, gem-quality diamonds. Now what takes nature perhaps a billion years and a great deal of happenstance can be accomplished in a factory in a few weeks with the right machinery, the right materials—including a sliver of diamond that acts as a seed—and enough skilled technicians. (The lab moniker is something of a not-inconvenient misnomer. It may imbue the stones with an air of white-coated technological precision, but the stones themselves come from a less glamorous industrial setting.)

A one-carat round mined diamond—the kind that anchors a huge proportion of American engagement rings—currently costs anywhere from $50 to $1,000 to produce in its rough form, depending on where it’s mined, according to Golan. In a lab setting, that same diamond now costs $15 to $20 to manufacture. At retail, a lab-grown diamond will generally sell to a consumer for less (and sometimes much less) than half of what a mined stone with near-identical characteristics sells for. Even the Gemological Institute of America, or GIA—a highly influential industry organization that provides, among other things, widely accepted standards of diamond grading that help determine a stone’s worth—has stopped referring to lab-grown diamonds as synthetic. They’re real. No caveats.

You don’t have to be especially skilled at math to discern the grave disruption that this confluence of circumstances could cause for the traditional diamond industry, and some growers have marketed themselves to the public as exactly that. When new materials come along that promise far lower prices, greater predictability, and more advanced technology, manufacturers are generally happy to give them a try. Some of the biggest jewelry and watch brands in the world, including Pandora and Breitling, have either moved their diamond usage entirely to lab stones or pledged to finish that transition in the near future. Russell Shor, a veteran of the diamond industry who spent almost two decades as the senior market analyst for GIA, told me that according to some of the estimates he’s seen, lab diamonds accounted for 30 to 40 percent of the engagement-ring stones sold in the United States last year—a serious encroachment on a crucial sector of the natural-diamond business. Overall, the numbers are impressive: In 2016, about $1 billion’s worth of lab diamonds was sold worldwide. By 2022, the total was $12 billion, which constitutes about 17 percent of the global diamond market, according to Golan.

Diamond growers aren’t just competing against purveyors of mined gems; they’re competing against one another for dominance of a market that is not yet mature. This competition is rapidly driving down prices as the sales numbers shoot up. New players can buy a few machines, lease some factory space in a country with cheap labor, and start churning out low-quality lab-grown gemstones in short order, relative to how long it would take to spin up a fresh pit mine. (Like natural diamonds, lab-grown stones can have occlusions or wonky colors, and those grown too quickly develop what can only be described as stretch marks.) What has happened is exactly what you’d expect when supply far, far exceeds demand: According to Golan’s data, at the end of 2018, the average wholesale price for a one-carat round lab diamond was $1,786. At the end of 2023, it was $163. “It’s a race to the bottom,” Shor said. Retail prices have not collapsed quite as quickly, but they, too, are trending down in rather dramatic fashion.

On one level, that’s great. Diamonds have endured as a part of engagement jewelry for lots of reasons that have little to do with practicality, but the stones’ characteristics—chiefly their incredible durability and neutral color—do make them a reasonable choice, in purely physical terms, for jewelry you intend to wear on your hand every day for decades. If big, flawless diamonds are no longer even plausibly rare or difficult to source, then people who want a diamond of any sort can simply choose the size and shape that suits them best and not worry about their budget—or about what their diamond says about their position within old-fashioned ideas of status and hierarchy.

Except, well, what if all of that is still sort of the point? Lots of people want to give or receive big diamonds because of their implications, not in spite of them—especially when it comes to wedding jewelry, where price is so freighted with meaning. Wegman, Ring Concierge’s CEO, was skeptical of the idea that price had become incidental to the appeal of a diamond engagement ring. “Lab-diamond prices will have to bottom out at some point, but if they go too low, then is it not going to be enough for an engagement ring?” she asked. “If they start selling for $1,000, let’s say, instead of the $8,000 that they might be selling for today, are women going to feel comfortable with that being the price of their engagement ring, even though it is a diamond?”

The idea that receiving a big, beautiful diamond engagement ring might be less exciting if that ring doesn’t strain your beloved’s budget is, of course, a boon to those in the business of selling jewelry, no matter what kinds of diamonds are in their inventory. It’s also inherent to what Epstein termed “the diamond invention” back in 1982. A decades-long media campaign funded by the De Beers cartel didn’t just ensconce diamond rings as the default symbol of American betrothal; in order to goose sales of larger diamonds, it also painted the stone’s size as a shorthand for a couple’s personal and professional success. The expense itself has always been what makes the ring meaningful.

Why anyone would long to spend extra money when far more affordable, identically useful options abound can be a maddening question—but only when asked about products you’re not personally interested in. You may not feel that way about diamonds, but maybe sports cars or designer handbags or rare whiskeys do it for you. These are all known as “Veblen goods,” so named after the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first described the phenomenon in 1899. Veblen goods are products for which demand increases as their price goes up, even though improvements in practical utility are marginal at best. People come up with all kinds of arguments for why any particular Veblen good is totally worth the money in rational terms—fine craftsmanship, superior materials, that sort of thing. Sometimes, those assertions are true enough, but they’re not complete. A Veblen good’s primary utility is for social signaling; it derives value from its price, instead of the other way around. It’s desirable because people with less money can’t have it.

All of this puts lab-grown diamond purveyors in an awkward position. Sellers are cratering prices and rapidly expanding supply for a product that needs to be expensive and rare-seeming in order to remain desirable. If a Veblen good suddenly declines in price, demand increases in the short term, as people rush to access status signifiers that would have previously been out of reach for them. But in the long term, these dynamics can spell the end of a Veblen good’s power. As its effect as a status symbol becomes too diluted to be useful for people with actual status, those people eventually move on to other things, and the good begins to lose its aspirational appeal. If lab-grown diamonds become too cheap, in other words, they pose an existential threat to themselves by ruining the demand for diamonds altogether.

Lab-diamond makers, for their part, tend to argue that they’re not just creating a diamond alternative for people who can’t afford the mined version they’d prefer. Their product is also more ethical and sustainable—attributes constantly said to be of incredible importance to the young people who make up most of the engagement-ring market. It is, to be fair, not difficult to imagine that the relative sustainability claims would be at least notionally true: Diamond mining historically has earned its reputation for cruelty and excess, even if the modern industry has made efforts to clean up the worst offenses of generations past. But public proof of lab growers’ sustainability claims can be thin on the ground. And no clear evidence exists that many diamond shoppers are excited enough about an environmentally friendly sales pitch to switch their preference if price isn’t already a concern. No matter how anyone ignores or sanitizes it, after all, part of the appeal of luxury goods is the difficulty or danger involved in service of the buyer’s pleasure.

Lab diamonds are just as sparkly and beautiful as their mined counterparts, but they aren’t a product that has much clear value if people aren’t still being driven mad by desire for the mined diamonds they currently seek to undercut. Counterintuitive though it may seem, that’s great news for the traditional diamond trade—lab stones’ explosive popularity might actually strengthen demand for at least some types of mined diamonds, rather than subvert it. This outcome would be mutually beneficial to growers, miners, and jewelers who deal in any of these products. Mined diamonds would retain their status as Veblen goods, which would in turn help keep retail prices for lab-grown jewelry high (but still a solid deal by comparison), which means that jewelers keep their margins and have more options to offer potential customers. In the end, everyone I spoke with thought that lab-grown diamonds would likely end up just inducing additional demand for diamond jewelry of all kinds, if all the industry players were smart about it.

You can already see that beginning to happen in the numbers, if you look carefully: The size of the average American natural-diamond engagement ring, Golan said, has begun to creep up in the past few years. It used to be about a carat, and now it’s up to 1.2 or 1.3—a phenomenon that he attributed to the proliferation of big lab-grown stones, which make smaller natural diamonds look extra small in comparison, thereby encouraging those buyers to expand their budget to keep up. Buyers could also enter the market for fine jewelry at a younger age and lower price point with lab diamonds, and then “upgrade” to natural stones as they get older, get engaged, and make more money—something Shor said he also expected to see as the owners of lab engagement rings grow older. Upgrading your diamond and expanding your collection along with your socioeconomic status, after all, has long been a part of the diamond invention.

At Ring Concierge, Wegman has so far been reluctant to expand lab diamonds outside of the engagement-ring business, although the company offers a full line of other fine jewelry with mined diamonds. But as time goes on, she said, customers have begun to ask for lab options in other styles—even those who want a mined diamond for their engagement ring. The two types of products are beginning to look more complementary than competitive. This past Black Friday, Ring Concierge dipped its toe into those waters for the first time, offering a pair of lab-diamond stud earrings—a style that Wegman said is a financial stretch for almost everyone when using mined diamonds, because it requires two big stones. The earrings were a hit.

It’s Just a Water Bottle

2024-01-19T09:51:00-05:00

The world can be a baffling place. That’s true in many important senses, but also in plenty of unimportant ones, and the urge to make order and meaning doesn’t necessarily select for relevance. That’s why, for the past two weeks, a huge chunk of the internet’s attention has been focused on one baffling phenomenon in particular: What, exactly, is a Stanley cup, and why are suburbanites willing to scuffle over it in their most sacred space (their local Target)?

Let’s recap. As the new year began, Stanley, a century-old company that for much of its history made reinforced lunch boxes and drinking vessels for outdoorsmen and blue-collar workers, launched three pink, limited-edition Valentine’s Day versions of its jumbo-size Quencher cups, all in different shades of pink and only available at Target. The third of these cups, which came out a few days after the first two, was the grandaddy of them all—a new addition to the brand’s ongoing partnership with Starbucks, glazed in a shimmer finish instead of Stanley’s standard matte. All three flew off the shelves. Fans lined up in parking lots in the predawn hours to increase their chances of snagging one. In at least one instance captured in a now-viral video, an argument erupted over who was cutting whom in line, fingers were pointed, and a store manager was summoned to referee. A few videos of rushing shoppers and tepid interpersonal conflicts, plus one that appears to show store patrons trying to tackle a man who had grabbed a box full of tumblers and made a run for it, did the rounds on TikTok before jumping to local news broadcasts and the generalized zeitgeist.

As the internet watched this extraordinarily mild suburban chaos unfold, people understandably had some questions. Where did this fervor come from? Why does it revolve around these insulated cups in particular? How did Stanley, which has seen its annual revenue increase from $73 million in 2019 to a projected $750 million in 2023, become so popular, so quickly? Lots of very smart people have tried to reverse engineer an explanation to the Stanley mystery—why this cup, right now, out of all the zillions of insulated drinking vessels available to American shoppers? But the actual story here is more about the nature of trends themselves than about a cup. There is no real reason any of this happened, or at least no reason that will feel satisfying to you. Sometimes a cup is just a cup in the right place at the right time.

The legend of the Stanley cup’s meteoric rise starts out normally enough. According to a 2022 story in The New York Times about its popularity, the women who run the mom-focused product-recommendation blog The Buy Guide had begun singing the cup’s praises five years prior. The Stanley Quencher has some design features that undoubtedly ingratiated it to early adopters: Its handle makes the high-capacity vessel easier to maneuver for people with small hands. The tapered shape helps it fit in a car’s cupholder. The straw top (as opposed to a screw-on lid) enables you to take a sip with only one free hand and without pouring your beverage down your chin. None of these features was unique to Stanley, but the combination of all three in a single product was less common at the time than it is now, in a world of Stanley imitators.

The blog’s audience, which includes lots of Mormon moms—a group with outsized influence in how lifestyle trends form online—snapped up the cups. But Stanley had stopped marketing the product line, and pretty soon, they were no longer as readily available. The Buy Guide lobbied Stanley to reconsider, and in 2019, the company took an interest in courting what was, for them, a new market: young women. It has since plowed resources back into its line of tumblers, churning out versions of the cups in traditionally feminine colors and prints and linking itself to other businesses with dedicated, largely female fan bases. In addition to the Starbucks cups, Stanley has also released a collaboration with the country-music star Lainey Wilson, and it makes some products exclusively for Target.

Stories like this are how tons of things become moderately popular online. Products hop from person to person via word of mouth, and sometimes the velocity of that spread spikes when the products are picked up by influencers or reviewers who earn a fee when shoppers buy through their links. This is one of the main ways that people without massive technical expertise make money online—finding products that are pretty good or that other people seem to like and taking a commission for encouraging new people to buy them. TikTok has accelerated this process at an industrial scale, and it certainly accelerated the Stanley cup’s rise once the company was convinced that women constituted a viable market. The cup’s massive popularity on the platform has helped expand its customer base far beyond moms—according to the journalist and consumer-trends analyst Casey Lewis, Stanley cups were among the most popular gifts for young people on the app this holiday season.

But all of that is the how. It doesn’t cover the why. That part I can’t explain, and I don’t think anybody really can. Lots of people have given it the old college try—maybe the cups are uniquely beautiful or particularly well suited to the needs of certain types of TikTok influencers. These theories are all plausible enough explanations for some portion of the cup’s appeal, and that’s what trend stories require: divining some kind of recognizable signal in the noise of human behavior. Sometimes, though, we—people who write trend stories—end up making ourselves see signals where there’s not really much of anything. Why one thing happens and not something else doesn’t always have some kind of rational explanation. Some things don’t contain within them any kernel of truth about humanity or our current moment.

The Stanley thing, to me, seems largely stochastic in its specificity, but also just mind-numbingly normal in more general terms. High-end water bottles have been trendy status symbols for a long time. Before single-use plastics became outré, expensive bottled-water brands were wielded in similar ways, beginning with the Evian craze of the 1990s. When the Stanley caught fire, the market was already full of similarly priced, similarly pastel, similarly sized, similarly well-insulated drinking vessels from similarly viral brands, including Hydro Flask (remember the VSCO Girl?) and Yeti. Stanley’s hype has reached a cultural escape velocity that other brands’ water bottles haven’t quite achieved, but they’re all about the same, which is to say that they’re all perfectly fine. I know this because I own and regularly use a Stanley cup, a Yeti, and a Hydro Flask. Why did I buy the Stanley when I already owned the other two? I don’t know. People seemed to like theirs. I was bored and my credit-card information is saved in my phone. This is how a huge proportion of online-shopping purchases, especially of viral products, get made. Sometimes you just see something so many times that you give in.

[Read: It’s too easy to buy stuff you don’t want]

As for the lines outside the Target stores: If you go back and look at the videos again, you might notice that they’re mostly just the same few clips in which not much is actually happening—or, at least, not much that doesn’t happen regularly when too many people gather for a chance to buy what they all know will be too few of the thing they all want. This tension has been ratcheted up in recent years by the growing presence of resellers (which some of the people behaving badly in the Stanley videos almost certainly are), who buy up popular products before regular people can get their hands on them, in order to flip them online for a profit. The Starbucks Stanley cups, which retail for about $50, currently go for anywhere from $200 to $300 on eBay. Alongside the rise of resellers, the expansion of limited-edition releases and the dreaded collab also have helped push regular people’s behavior further toward the extremes.

But let’s be clear: Regular people have been acting up in parking lots for a long time. When I worked at a big-box store in the 2000s, the local police would dispatch a few officers every year to keep an eye on our Black Friday line to make sure no fights broke out. In advance of the PlayStation 3’s debut, we had to bring in a Porta-Potty because campers began to assemble outside a week before it went on sale. Loads of people out there are obsessed with things you’ve never even heard of, waiting in lines for stores to open so they can buy Squishmallows or Rae Dunn pottery or limited-edition sneakers or new Lego sets.

Trying to parse why strangers ascribe such meaning to an object or product that is meaningless to you—or why they’re so set on one thing and not another, similar thing—is usually a fool’s errand. Humans by nature turn objects into meaning, and consumerism is the process by which that impulse is commodified by middlemen looking to ascribe that meaning to particular things in order to sell your identity or values or group affinity or sense of community back to you. The product itself, as long as it’s good enough, can be largely incidental to this process. If you look at all of this and see an alienated population and degraded culture, well, I don’t disagree with you. But none of that is unique to the Stanley cup. Precious little is.

Home Influencers Will Not Rest Until Everything Has Been Put in a Clear Plastic Storage Bin

2024-01-08T07:00:00-05:00

Now that the frenzy of the holidays has spat you out into the harsh light of the new year, you might be tempted to look around your disheveled home and decide that it’s time to get your life together. Maybe your fridge is empty, or your pantry is full of the stuff you bought for Christmas baking projects you never quite got around to, or the laundry from your family’s trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa still isn’t done. The internet is full of suggestions on exactly how you might rectify this domestic chaos, but if you go looking for organizational inspiration, the tips and tricks you find will center disproportionately on a single object: the humble clear acrylic storage container.

If you’re unsure what to do with one, an entire video genre has sprung up on social media over the past few years to provide some inspiration. Watch a couple, and the tropes become clear. A pair of disembodied, feminine hands—wrinkle free, well manicured, adorned with trendy jewelry—unpacks consumer goods from their original containers and arranges them neatly inside their new acrylic homes, sometimes adorning the exterior with a customized label that identifies the contents. The videos are sped up so that the hands move with maximum efficiency and purpose; some include the same set of hands cleaning the containers and storage area to spotless perfection before the main event. There’s little to no narration or background music to be found—just the amplified sounds of objects plunking and crunching against hard plastic.

Restocking videos, as the genre is called, can make a subject out of anything in your home that could plausibly be stored in a clear bin of some kind, and often in enormous quantities: Snack-size pouches of Oreos or Doritos or applesauce are lined up alongside one another in transparent boxes in immaculate pantries. Laundry pods and beads and powders are transferred into matching containers with their own little scoops. Pens and highlighters and colorful paper clips are arranged in desk drawers lined with tiny clear receptacles. On pristine bathroom vanities, little jars fill with cotton rounds and bobby pins and hair elastics. No liquid soap, shampoo, or body lotion goes undecanted. Disinfecting towelettes are removed from their own tubs and tucked into new tubs specially designed to receive your rehomed wet wipes. Coffee creamers and flavored syrups are funneled into identical bottles to display at elaborate household coffee stations, alongside bins filled with enough Nespresso pods to keep a family of four caffeinated until the heat death of the universe.

These videos have grown to enormous popularity over the past few years on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where the form has blossomed—and where they have amassed tens of billions of views. The makers of consumer packaged goods now routinely pay organizing and cleaning influencers to include their products in restock videos, and acrylic storage products are now fabricated in nearly every size and configuration you could imagine, meant to showcase neat collections of durable goods such as sunglasses and eyeshadow palettes as well as products that need regular refills. It’s clear plastic’s world; we’re just living in it.

[Read: The golden age of gadgets for girlies]

Plastic storage containers have existed for generations, but the proliferation of this particular type of inflexible, minimalist, crystal-clear container can be placed on a much more recent timeline. On September 9, 2020, Get Organized With The Home Edit debuted on Netflix. The show followed an Instagram-famous organizing company as its two founders straightened up Reese Witherspoon’s closet and Khloé Kardashian’s garage and Jordana Brewster’s refrigerator, among other cluttered storage areas of the rich and fabulous. Within a week, Google searches for the duo’s signature organizational tool—clear plastic bins—shot up to what was then an all-time high.

The show was nothing if not accidentally very timely. Interest in similar bins had been steadily increasing for years, in part because of their popularity with professional organizers and lifestyle influencers—The Home Edit launched its own line of them at The Container Store in 2019—but all of the eyes on Netflix during the early pandemic proved a powerful accelerant. Americans were spending a lot of time cooped up and had begun to find their homes wanting. Those with extra cash on hand spent it on home goods of every conceivable type, spiking sales of storage and decor products. Membership in Costco, BJ’s, and other wholesale clubs also boomed, as did sales at grocery and big-box stores as people spooked by seemingly random shortages of all kinds looked to stock up. Many people’s pantries and freezers and closets grew crowded, and those who bought in bulk had little to do but sit at home all day and grow irritated at this newfound clutter.

By early 2021, creators on TikTok—another company that saw its American popularity explode during the early days of the pandemic—had picked up on this latent interest in aesthetically pleasing bulk organization and were making videos filling and arranging their own clear plastic bins, tubs, and bottles. And by later that year, brands had started looking for ways to get their products into the containers in those videos.

You don’t have to watch many restocks to get a sense of why people find them compelling. Part of it has nothing to do with organizing itself: The videos fall into the broad, wildly popular genre of ASMR, which means that their audio is intended to generate an autonomous sensory meridian response—i.e., brain tingles—that can feel soothing or relaxing. That’s why the sounds of crunching and plunking and tapping are so heavily amplified, and also one of the reasons acrylic (and, to a lesser extent, glass) containers—hard, unyielding, cacophonous when thumped—are such a ubiquitous tool of the trade. But the visual content of the clips broadens their appeal much further. The clips are satisfying—meaning, in this case, that you get to watch disorder transformed into aesthetically pleasing order—and aspirational, meaning that they give viewers ideas about products or services they might want to buy or behaviors they might want to emulate. Your fridge and pantry and junk drawer and medicine cabinet probably are a mess. Wouldn’t it be nice to straighten them up a bit?

[Read: It’s too easy to buy stuff you don’t want]

As tends to happen when anything becomes wildly popular online, the clear plastic bins have gotten a little out of hand. Using them to more efficiently fill vertical storage space, replace messy or uneven manufacturer packaging, or more easily keep tabs on what you’re running out of is no more inherently ridiculous than putting your clothes on hangers to store them in your closet. But the videos take the notion of restocking to its logical extreme. Videos described as depicting a normal grocery run include whole convenience stores’ worth of packaged snacks arranged in rainbow order. Some influencers chop up and store more bite-size veggies than a family of 10 could possibly eat before they go bad, or make tray after tray of colored, flavored, or flower-and-fruit-stuffed ice cubes for elaborate “ice restocks” in their enormous freezer drawers. Shelves above gleaming side-by-side washers and dryers are lined with canisters of powders, pearls, and crystals, some of them useful only to imbue clean clothes with a particular scent. Every guest bathroom is stocked with a full complement of hair, skin, and bath products, just waiting to one day be needed. These videos offer a glimpse of what it might be like to live in a store—everything you could possibly want is neatly arranged, exactly in its place, close at hand. Simply pluck it off the shelf.

These videos are quite literally performances, of course, but the activities they depict are also performances, of a different type. As social media has transformed formerly intimate areas of homes into backdrops for public communication, it’s also changed the ways people think about how those spaces should be arranged and whom they should please. Pantries, closets, and refrigerators are no longer where the messy background work of domesticity is hidden from view. Instead, the curatorial work of filling and arranging those spaces is proof of a new, highly prized form of domestic mastery. Keeping a gargantuan open kitchen filled to the brim with anything your family might want is clearly a luxury. It requires ample money, space, and time (or at least the time of a housekeeper you’ve hired). It’s no surprise, then, that many of the early adopters of the acrylic-bin lifestyle were celebrities. The Kardashian-Jenner clan in particular has been providing the general public with glimpses inside their enormous, pristine household storage areas for years; one of the most enduringly intriguing things about the family is their years-long public enactment of the fantasy of owning everything you’ve ever wanted.

The restock genre is a continuation of domestic expectations that began to form when these influencers’ grandmothers and great-grandmothers were homemakers. In Never Done: A History of American Housework, the historian Susan Strasser writes that after World War II, as electric washing machines, freezers, chemically complex detergents, and other products designed to make housework easier became more widely available, the skilled physical labor of cooking and cleaning became a bit passé. Instead, women were judged on how well they shopped. Trying all of these new products and spinning up new routines based on them was the province of the well-off, just like the immaculate clear plastic full of the bounty yielded from Amazon orders and Target runs is today. It became a new form of domestic aspiration, founded on the glory of American abundance—on all that you could build for yourself and your family if you were a diligent consumer at your local stores. Now, with stacks and stacks of clear plastic containers, success amounts to rebuilding the store inside your home.

The Golden Age of Gadgets for Girlies

2023-12-21T11:46:00-05:00

Every time I see a high schooler on TikTok flying through a tutorial of how she gets perfect beach waves with her Dyson Airwrap hair wand, I think of the time my mother straightened my ringlet-curly hair with an iron. Like, on the ironing board, in the kitchen, before a middle-school dance in the 1990s. Or my first Conair flat iron, purchased with money saved up from my summer job, which only got hot enough to make me look like the lead singer of a hair-metal band. Or the time I spent in my freshman college dorm, trying and mostly failing to harness the dexterity and fine motor skills necessary to manipulate the clamp on a Hot Tools curling iron. The Dyson Airwrap is my version of In my day, we used to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow. It is my proof, as someone rapidly progressing toward 40, that kids these days are soft.

TikTok is crowded with these tutorials, which feature the $600 hair tool or one of its many dupes. And hairstyling is just the beginning of TikTok’s love affair with gizmos and doodads. After you Airwrap your hair, you can prep your face for makeup with red-light currents, remove some hairs with your at-home follicle zapper, and throw together a salad with your veggie chopper. The chatty, short-form recommendation videos that proliferate on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, all algorithmically targeting various interests and demographics, have helped usher shoppers toward a new crop of tools designed to aid in domestic or personal-care tasks—domains traditionally thought of as women’s work. Some of these devices, such as Dyson’s hair tools and Dr. Dennis Gross’s at-home LED masks, cost hundreds of dollars. Others, such as personal milk-frothing wands and motorized scrubbing brushes, are pretty cheap.

These products count as something of a reversal in fate for gadgets as a concept. Tech-industry watchers and pundits have spent years wondering if the end of the gadget era might be nigh. Our phones, after all, obviate most people’s need for so many of the consumer-tech products that crowded the shelves of electronics stores in the recent past: GPS systems, digital cameras, CD and DVD players, iPods. After a brief resurgence during the pandemic, when Americans stocked up on ring lights and gaming rigs and tablets to entertain the kids, traditional consumer-electronics companies have seen demand slump. But not in every part of the market. Au contraire: We’re in a golden age of gadgets for girlies.

Dyson, which debuted its absurdly popular and very expensive vacuums in the United States in 2002, likely deserves much of the recent credit for convincing other brands that women might have a real interest in high-tech gadgetry, or that engineering advancements could be a selling point in stereotypically feminine realms. After winning over the vacuum market, Dyson released a series of fans and motion-sensing hand dryers—products with useful applications, but not the type of stuff that captures the public’s imagination. Then, in 2016, came a product that seemed a little out of left field at the time: Dyson’s Supersonic hair dryer, the first of a triad of launches that reimagined the basic physical reality of commonplace hairstyling tools. The Airwrap followed in 2018, and in 2020, the brand launched a cordless flat iron. All three have been smash hits, especially among the cohort of wealthy young women who are particularly influential in setting beauty trends online. Hair tools now account for almost a third of Dyson’s business in the U.S.

[Read: Shoppers are stuck in a dupe loop]

In tech-industry terms, a gadget is a piece of hardware—your smartphone is plausibly a gadget, but none of the apps within it is. In more traditional terms, a gadget is a device with a narrow set of uses, usually designed to perform or simplify a particular task. Not all gadgets are tech products, but a lot of them are the result of certain kinds of technology becoming less expensive to produce and more widely available to the average person. The idea that women will buy tech products that take their needs seriously is so obvious that I feel sort of stupid even bothering to explicate it, but it’s nonetheless something that tech companies seem to talk themselves out of—or just forget—over and over again. The industry is dominated by men, and that colors which new ideas attract support and which products get passed over for improvement. Certainly some past gadgets have been designed with women and girls in mind—most obviously tools used in the kitchen—but the domains of domesticity and personal care remained off the radar in the gadget boom that arose alongside personal computing. The curling iron that I struggled to learn to use in college was called a Marcel iron—so named because its complex hinged-clamp mechanism was largely unchanged from the one patented by the hairdresser Marcel Grateau in 1905.

That Dyson tapped into such demand for improved vacuums and hair tools is perhaps less of a reflection of the company’s capacity for technical innovation than of its capacity to identify stale markets and willing consumers. Or, I should say, once-stale markets. At the end of 2022, Dyson announced that it would invest roughly $600 million to develop 20 new beauty gadgets over the following four years. It will have far more competition for those gadgets than it did just a few years ago. Dyson’s existing hair tools alone have spawned enough knockoffs and dupes to fuel a cottage industry of tutorials and recommendations. In the case of the Airwrap, the cycle has been perpetuating itself for more than a year: New but very similar tools show up on TikTok Shop or Amazon or Temu, maybe at a newly low price or with some novel attachments. Influencers try them out, often because they’ve received the product for free (sometimes with an additional cash payment on top of it); make demonstration videos promising that this is actually the best dupe out there; and provide commission-generating shopping links. Smaller creators and regular users buy whatever new thing is surging in popularity and post their own reviews, many of them hoping that their accounts rise to greater prominence as everyone else tries to figure out what’s up with this new thing they’re suddenly seeing everywhere.

In other corners of the internet, much the same thing happens. CleanTok, where creators swap housecleaning tips and hacks, has links to a seemingly limitless number of battery-powered scrub brushes in every size and length, all from companies with inscrutable Amazon-brand names, that promise to make maintaining a pristine kitchen and bathroom a cinch. The skincare-curious have found a genre of device that costs less than $10 and shoots red light into your face to give you a “snatched” jawline. Fitness influencers extol the virtues of compact steppers and walking pads that you can tuck under a standing desk. I have seen so many close-ups of hairless underarms thanks to Ulike at-home hair-removal devices.

What gadgets of all kinds promise, above and beyond whatever specific task they’re intended to execute, is ease. On some level, most of these new gadgets marketed to women do make something—usually the fulfillment of a particular aesthetic or domestic standard—easier. Less time and skill needed to perfect your hair and less elbow grease spent making your bathroom fixtures shine offer potential buyers the possibility of, finally, getting it all done. Perhaps most important, those gadgets provide the possibility of relief—if not from the standards themselves, maybe from the sense that fulfilling them all would be impossible.

[Read: The real reason eye cream is so expensive]

But when adherence to cultural standards is at stake, convenience never holds for long. When current expectations become too easy to achieve, those expectations change. Consumer history is littered with examples of exactly how this happens. In her book Never Done: A History of American Housework, the historian Susan Strasser traces the path of domestic gadgetry over the course of industrialization and finds consequences both intended and not. Electric washing machines, for instance, genuinely did make the task of household laundry less physically demanding and more productive. They also changed where and how laundry fit into women’s lives: It became less communal and more isolated inside homes, and the ease of electric washers changed hygiene norms, requiring clothes to be washed more frequently. Over time, a hated once-a-week chore transformed into a ceaseless burden. Strasser found little evidence that the amount of time women spent doing laundry had been reduced at all.

Innovations in domestic and personal-care technologies tend not to clear the way for more leisure or personal time for women, even if they do reduce the physical strength or skill involved in some of their labor. Instead, they clear the way for even more onerous expectations of how we’ll perform, domestically and aesthetically. The results that many of these gadgets promise are the kinds of things that were, until recently, available only to the wealthy, and therefore not the default expectation of most of us: Your hair will look like you just got a fresh blowout, your skin will look like you see a cosmetic dermatologist, and your house will look like you have a maid. You can watch the bar of expectation get higher in real time on social media, as young women sort out how they should groom themselves and organize their living spaces. Ideas about how flawless their skin should look or how undisturbed their homes should be grow more uncanny, and things that gadgets can’t yet replicate—Botox, buccal-fat removal, expensive home renovations, adherence to rapidly changing furniture trends—become the new baseline among the affluent and influential. No matter how hard we run, the finish line is always getting a little farther away.

Is This How Amazon Ends?

2023-12-13T16:51:00-05:00

When you’re shopping around for something on Amazon, you’re probably hoping to end up with a product that is good enough. Many of the site’s stock images and product descriptions have an unpredictable relationship to the objects you’ll actually receive; to guard against surprises, you frequently need to peruse the ratings and reviews left by the shoppers who came before you. In exchange for this low-stakes gamble, you get a huge selection of products, decent prices, and very fast shipping. Often enough, you also get a good enough result.

This balance is part of what has made Amazon a fabulously profitable business. Over time, the company has transformed itself into something that functions more like a global flea market than a traditional retail store. Most of the products on Amazon’s website are sold by millions of third-party sellers, many of them outside the U.S., who construct their own product listings and mostly store their inventory in Amazon’s American fulfillment centers. Since Amazon launched its marketplace in 2000, sellers around the globe—and especially in China—have flocked to the program. When you buy something through these listings, Amazon takes a cut of the sale for streamlining your interaction with a business that may actually be in Guangzhou or Shenzhen.

This approach has, on some level, been a boon to all parties. Sellers get more direct access to American consumers than they’d ever had with traditional retail models, and those consumers get access to an abundance of cheap goods, even if sorting through all of them requires more guesswork than picking up something at your local Target. The biggest beneficiary of all, though, has been Amazon, which has managed to convince its customers to accept a fundamental jankiness in both the site and many of its goods. The success of this system is what has made the retailer into the Everything Store. It might also be what leads to the eventual end of Amazon’s dominance.

For several years running, American media have been puzzling over the rise of a new crop of ultra-cheap international retailers that ship much of their inventory directly to Western buyers from Chinese suppliers. Shein, founded in China and now based in Singapore, was the first of these mega-retailers to take off in the U.S., charming young shoppers in the early days of the pandemic with clothing so inexpensive that it made H&M look like a splurge. The company, which has expanded its offerings to include scores of electronics, sporting goods, and office supplies, brought in $23 billion in 2022, and the U.S. was its top revenue market. Then came Temu, founded by the Chinese conglomerate PDD Holdings and headquartered in Boston, which introduced itself to American shoppers through Super Bowl commercials in February. Analysts estimate that the retailer is on track to bring in $16 billion in revenue this year.

The sudden prominence of these companies has started to set off alarms. Their figures pale in comparison to Amazon’s $220 billion in 2022 revenue from online sales, but they’re startlingly high for companies so new to American shoppers. Target, by comparison, brought in about $20 billion in revenue from its website in 2022, which means that Shein and Temu have managed to spin up Target-size online retailers in just a few years. This turn of events has unsettled many people who seem to feel that China has barged into American retail completely unbidden. Last week, Bloomberg fretted that these retailers’ rise meant that “piles of Chinese junk” topped Christmas lists for U.S. consumers.

[Read: This is what happens to all the stuff you don’t want]

The sentiment is both a bit rude and a bit late, though not necessarily incorrect. Americans have been snapping up inexpensive, imported stuff, Chinese and otherwise, for decades. The shelves of Walmart, Target, and Costco, among many others, are full of cheap foreign products. This is a reality of American shopping, whether or not buyers realize it: Periodic surveys of consumer sentiment find that huge proportions of Americans say they either won’t or don’t want to buy things made in China, but their behavior usually doesn’t reflect those preferences and never really has. What’s new this holiday season is not that Americans are buying cheap things that come from China; it’s that they’re buying things from Chinese companies that appear to be pushing online retail as far to its logical extreme as possible.

Somewhat paradoxically, Amazon seems to bear significant responsibility for this turn of events. For much of its existence, one of Amazon’s primary marketing functions has been to put a trustworthy American veneer on products without a recognizable brand name that have been conceptualized, designed, and produced wholly overseas. In exchange for that familiarity and access to its audience and logistics services, Amazon takes a huge portion of each sale—around half, according to an estimate earlier this year. For scores of businesses overseas selling on Amazon under nonsensical collections of letters such as JOYMOOP and RFUNGUANGO, Amazon was the brand that made their products marketable in the U.S. Buyers might not be familiar with the names or products, but they trusted that Amazon would send their stuff quickly and take it back if they didn’t like it. Amazon made the unknown seem sufficiently reliable, or at least sufficiently American.

Over time, though, Amazon’s Americanness has begun to slip. As the site has made buying foreign products more palatable, it has also begun to feel more foreign. Perusing Amazon comes with an uncanny sense of placelessness—the reality that you’re not transacting with Americans is unavoidable, even if it’s never exactly clear who you are transacting with. Product descriptions have become stranger, and many clearly weren’t generated by fluent English speakers, if they were even generated by a person at all. The photos have become eerie in their odd proportions and obvious alterations. Earlier this year, the journalist John Herrman described the deteriorating quality of the experience of shopping on Amazon as “junkification.” Turkish sellers describing towels, Chinese sellers describing headphones, and Korean sellers describing skin-care products all sound sort of the same. Lately, significant elements of product listings are mediated by the retailer’s experimental forays into artificial intelligence, which place stock-image toasters into fake kitchenscapes and summarize lengthy customer reviews into stilted sound bites.

American shoppers, for their part, seem to have adjusted just fine to this new, strange shopping experience. People simply don’t seem to care too much that products come from elsewhere, so long as the price is right—especially as inflation challenges their spending power at domestic retailers. On its face, that’s great news for Amazon. The company has years of proof that a lack of quality and coherence is not necessarily an obstacle to increased profits. Amazon’s scope and power are unparalleled right now, as its profits continue to expand alongside its logistics operation, which now delivers billions of packages a year. But in a larger sense, consumers’ comfort with what and how Amazon is selling might also mean that Amazon’s own obsolescence as a retailer is built into the company’s business model. Walmart and Target, at the very least, have something extra to offer to consumers looking for wide selections and good prices: large networks of long-standing physical stores, which most shoppers still prefer. For Amazon, which has so far been unable to figure out its own brick-and-mortar retail strategy, acclimating American shoppers to risk and unpredictability in their everyday transactions is making the company’s veneer of domestic reliability less valuable with every passing day.

That, more than anything, is what Shein and Temu (and, to a certain extent, TikTok Shop) seem to be banking on: Amazon, in its quest for continual growth, has made millions of Western shoppers comfortable with the idea that they’re buying stuff that very well might be useless junk from unseen overseas sources. Why not cut out the American middleman? (Perhaps especially given that Amazon has been accused in an antitrust case by the FTC and 17 state attorneys general of attempting to exert anti-competitive control over its sellers; Amazon disputes the charges.) You don’t even have to create a particularly slick or reliable-seeming user interface to do it—Amazon is not a website known for its information clarity or aesthetic beauty, after all. Temu and Shein are using exactly these arguments to court sellers, promising much lower fees to use the platform. They also require sellers to display relatively little information about the products they’re selling.

Across all the big marketplace retailers, American and not, it’s not uncommon to find listings that appear to advertise products that are identical, or at least so similar that the differences are difficult to parse. Though not always, Shein and Temu are usually cheaper. Sometimes, they’re cheaper by a lot. Suppressing prices to unprofitable levels is a common tactic used by new retailers to steal market share from their competitors. Amazon has employed it for years to convert newcomers to online shopping and away from their local brick-and-mortars. Now Temu seems to have adopted the tactic to wrench sales away from Amazon.

Amazon, for its part, refutes the idea that products available on its website are similar to those listed by its foreign counterparts—it has gone so far as to exclude Temu from its price-matching policy, telling Reuters that it has strict standards for the competitors it considers reputable. Shoppers seem more than willing to give these cheaper options a try, though, and it’s not clear whether they’ll find much daylight between those options and what’s available on Amazon. If they do, it’s not clear how much they’ll care. Amazon’s tactics and dominance have gone a long way toward making the process of buying totally meaningless. Eventually, the company might not like what that means.

This Is What Happens to All the Stuff You Don’t Want

2023-12-11T07:00:00-05:00

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When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.

Michael is one of dozens of material handlers—the official job title—at the Inmar Intelligence returns-processing center in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania. Inmar is a returns liquidator, which means that popular clothing brands and all kinds of other retailers contract with the company to figure out what to do with the stuff that customers end up not wanting. Much of that process involves complex machinery and data analysis, but the more than 40 million returned products that the facility sifts through annually still must pass in front of human eyes. Material handlers are charged with determining a return’s ultimate fate—whether it goes back to the retailer to be sold anew, gets destroyed, or something in between.

I wandered by Michael’s workstation on a trip out to Breinigsville last month to see one of the great mysteries of American consumer life in action: what actually happens to your unwanted purchases when you send them back. Michael, who was on the clock and would only share his first name, had just begun evaluating a pink button-down, plucked from a box of identical shirts. In the space of barely more than a minute, he confirmed the item number on the fabric label, unbuttoned the shirt, gave it the same kind of smell test you’d perform on your dirty jeans to see if they have one more grocery-store run in them, turned the shirt fully inside out and back again, eyed it for stains or other imperfections, ripped the price off the paper tag, rebuttoned it, lint-rolled it, folded it to the precise dimensions of a new clear plastic bag, and deposited the shirt inside. A brand’s contract with Inmar can stipulate details down to exactly how many pieces of tape are used to seal a perfect (or very close to it) item into new packaging. The pink shirt, an overstocked design destined for a discount store, got two.

Reverse logistics—basically, the business of moving unwanted products back up the supply chains from whence they came, or into different supply chains entirely—is a ballooning global industry that was valued at nearly $1 trillion in 2022. Before the advent of online shopping, return rates for even finicky products like clothing were in the single digits; now 20 to 30 percent of all purchases come back. Beyond the behemoths—Amazon, Walmart—very few retailers undertake the messy, fiddly work of evaluating the deluge of products themselves. Instead, the prepaid shipping labels you print out guide most of your returns to third-party facilities like Inmar, where they’re stacked six feet tall in palletized bins known as gaylords, along with thousands of other retaped cardboard boxes and poly mailers, all waiting to be ripped open, eyeballed, and searched by hand.

When I arrived at Inmar’s facility, on a sunny morning shortly before Thanksgiving, I did so alongside a fleet of trucks pulling in to pick up or drop off loads of UPS packages or ShopRite groceries or Coca-Cola products at a sea of other surrounding warehouses. Breinigsville is the kind of place where logistics facilities tend to crop up. Just outside Allentown, it’s in an area with plenty of open, inexpensive land, which has allowed for the construction of wide, low-slung warehouses near highways for moving tractor trailers full of consumer goods between there and Philadelphia or New York City in a couple of hours. ProLogis, the industrial real-estate company that operates this sprawling campus, boasts to potential tenants that it is situated within a day’s drive of nearly a third of American consumers. The scene was industry for postindustrial America. No smokestacks rose into the sky; the grounds were neatly manicured; the buildings were uniform shades of white and pale gray. The Bridgestone facility on campus doesn’t make tires. It moves them around.

Inmar stakes its claim as the largest returns liquidator in North America. The company says that it processes half a billion returned goods a year across 17 facilities. At the Breinigsville facility alone, Inmar’s material handlers process more than 100,000 consumer goods each day on behalf of all kinds of retailers—e-commerce giants, big-box discounters, drugstore chains, clothing brands, purveyors of home decor. Inside, the first thing to greet me on the processing floor was an enormous cardboard baler, fed by a conveyor belt running high above the ground. Cardboard, just as much as returned products themselves, is an inescapable material reality of Inmar’s business; at times, it looked as if almost everything was cosseted by layers of repurposed cardboard or industrial-grade cling wrap. Beyond the conveyor belt, I found towers of pallets stacked to the ceiling as far as I could see, each box stuffed with throw pillows or defective toasters or skinny jeans that are no longer cool. Some were new arrivals awaiting final judgment; others had already been sorted and were waiting for their truck to come in.

I spent a little more than three hours in the facility. Some of that time was in a room with Inmar executives, dutifully scribbling notes as they answered my questions and expounded on the industry. For most of my visit, though, I simply meandered around the warehouse with them in tow, peeking around every corner, prodding at piles of returns, and watching staffers work. The facility was in the middle of a sleepy second shift. Occasionally a forklift would dart in or out of the aisles of pallet towers, depositing another load ready for transport or fetching a fresh set of home decor or sporting goods for inspection. Product examinations happened in a series of distinct work areas, each nestled in a clearing that I would encounter occasionally in the shelving forest. The zones dealt with different types of returns. Rugs had their own area. So did clothing and shoes. Near the baler, I watched employees sort through the fleece blankets and sets of fake eyelashes that had been sent in from a large chain pharmacy. All the way in the back, special care was taken to separate out the different brands of small appliances sold by a major discount department store.

I’m not identifying the pharmacy or department store, or any of the dozens of other brand names that I saw floating through the facility, because I had to agree to that up front to be allowed inside. All of Inmar’s clients have confidentiality agreements in their contracts that prevent Inmar from publicly naming the companies it serves. Retailers have a fraught relationship with reverse logistics. They rarely acknowledge the system in public. Consumerism has always required a certain amount of abstraction. Originally, this was accomplished through the invention of the department store and the advertising industry, which goaded shoppers into associating new dresses with the limitless possibilities of the self, not with the exploitation and grime of garment factories. As consumer industries have changed, that abstraction has gained new layers: overseas production, online shopping, free shipping and returns. When you order something on Amazon, it’s not so much an act of buying a specific thing, or even of buying an idea of yourself. Instead, you’re buying an idea of a product, and one in every three or four of those ideas doesn’t pan out.

Reverse logistics is, in some sense, the process of unwinding those abstractions—of turning ideas and possibilities back into physical goods that must be dealt with. Figuring out what to do with the stuff that people rejected is unglamorous work, but retailers know how necessary it is. They also tend to be terrible at handling all of it themselves. It’s difficult to process returns profitably without the benefit of enormous scale and the data-analysis capabilities that create it, not to mention a lot of regular people in exurban America making sure you didn’t accidentally include your underpants when you sent back that pair of jeans—the most common stowaways that Inmar’s material handlers find in returned clothing. (They also come across errant vape pens and the occasional wedding ring in garments’ pockets.) Returns “are not what the companies want to do, or what they built themselves to do,” Thomas Borders, Inmar’s vice president of product-life-cycle solutions, told me. “They were built to sell.”

Inside the facility, stripped of context and pretense and marketing, the goods I encountered seemed a lot more similar than they do when gleaming and new on a store shelf. Luxury area rugs probably won’t meet the same fate as the stuffed animals sold at chain pharmacies, but their futures are governed by the same unsentimental practicality. What actually happens to them hinges on a bunch of different factors: whether they were returned by a buyer or by the retailer itself, whether they’re still in their original packaging, whether they show signs of use, whether they’ve been reported by the buyer as damaged or defective, whether they’re high- or low-margin products, whether their original manufacturer is willing to take them back from the retailer, whether they bear a desirable brand name.

Where a product was purchased can play a major role too. Of the brands that Inmar processes, those that sell their own products directly to the general public put more than 90 percent of their returns back into their inventory on average, according to Inmar. Meanwhile, retailers that sell a bunch of different brands do so with less than half of their returns, according to Inmar’s data, largely because the logistics of multibrand retail are more complex and the brands carried by these stores tend to be less desirable. In the best-case scenario, what can’t be sold again by its original retailer will be liquidated to wholesale buyers, eventually stocking discount stores or resale platforms domestically or small retailers in poorer countries. The stuff that doesn’t find a buyer will be donated, recycled, or destroyed. (Destroyed is the preferred industry euphemism for products that end up landfilled, incinerated, or otherwise trashed.)

Inmar says that its donations go to a whole range of charities—food banks, shelters, animal-rescue organizations. But just like donations and recycling that come from individual households, there’s no guarantee that any particular product will find a willing recipient, or that it can be effectively remade into a safe, useful new material. Lots of things that aren’t immediately deposited in landfills still end up in them, even if they pass through the hands of multiple middlemen first.

In the Breinigsville facility’s garment-inspection sector, where Michael was sorting pink shirts, the work of determining any particular product’s destination is more complicated because the potential outcomes for clothing are more numerous. Many different types of wholesalers and discounters are willing to buy up liquidated clothing, and brands can be very picky about where goods bearing their name are allowed to show up. Inspections take place at a bank of about two dozen identical, brightly lit workstations where employees attempt to discern how honest you were when you filled out your return slip—or, in the highly likely event that you declined to fill it out at all, what that return slip should have said. The centerpiece of each station is a white tabletop, above which is mounted a computer monitor that will explain the precise level and type of scrutiny that different items from different retailers require. Employees are armed with an arsenal of very analog tools—lint rollers, box cutters, sanitizing wipes, an array of plastic bags. Behind each station, five colorful, waist-high bins represent the possible futures of each garment: liquidation, donation, recycling, destruction, or, if everything is perfect, a speedy trip back to the retailer’s main inventory.

Inmar collects huge tranches of data on what gets returned and why, which can be incredibly valuable to retailers desperate to cut down on their return rates or catch faulty products before they irritate even more customers. But really, information about customer returns can only do so much for retailers’ bottom line. Most of the returns that Inmar handles actually aren’t things that anyone bought and rejected, or that anyone bought at all. Instead, they are excess inventory—a surplus of goods that comes directly from retailers themselves. Their hope is to squeeze at least some value out of everything their customers didn’t want by selling it off or returning it to the wholesaler or manufacturer from which they bought it.

Consumer behavior isn’t cleanly predictable. Sometimes trend projections fall flat or the weather behaves in strange ways or sizing doesn’t work out as planned, and the velvet skirts or patio furniture or redesigned hiking boots just don’t move. Or, worse, they do move, but then they all come back. The system as currently constituted requires the circulation of much more stuff than will ultimately find useful purpose in people’s homes; the shelves must always be full, the sizes and colors must all be available, and there has to be surplus to satisfy consumerism’s promise of convenience and abundance. If your retailer doesn’t provide this—the excess that the industry itself taught people to expect—then your competitors will.

All of this—the high return rates, the extra stock, the endless shipping, and the enormous numbers of workers sniffing and buttoning their way through careful decisions—doesn’t come cheap. That expense drives up the prices of consumer goods for everyone, no matter what your personal shopping and returns habits are. Lately, retailers have started to take more pointed measures to try to close Pandora’s cardboard shipping box. Most notably, many have started to charge for return shipping, rolling back the free, open-ended policies that persuaded so many people to adopt online shopping in the first place. But these changes aren’t designed to dissuade people from shopping online; they’re simply asking shoppers to start subsidizing the process. So far, the tactic seems to be working. At the end of my visit, I sat down with Borders, the Inmar VP, in the Inmar facility’s lone conference room, readjusting to the scale of a space meant for humans after a couple of hours in those meant for industry. He told me that retailers’ new policies have so far not affected the volume of returns that Inmar processes at all.

Diamonds Aren’t Rare. Why Are They So in Demand?

2023-12-07T12:07:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.

It’s one of the most famous scenes in Hollywood history: Marilyn Monroe, shimmying in a hot-pink dress on a blood-red soundstage, flanked by unsuitable suitors in tailcoats, singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” while wearing an amount of jewelry that almost seems sarcastic. In 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Monroe’s charisma and cultural influence are at their peak, and it’s difficult to take your eyes off her and her flawlessly sparkling (and impeccably lit) diamonds as she flits around the stage, name-checking Tiffany and Cartier and advising a bevy of maiden backup dancers that diamonds will never do them wrong. The performance is so influential that an homage to it—Madonna’s 1985 video for “Material Girl”—is a legendary pop-culture artifact in its own right. The scene, perhaps the most famous in Monroe’s career, was also what we might now call “product placement” or “sponsored content.”

When the movie came out and for decades afterward, the diamond industry’s full-court press on mass media was unknown to the general public. In his 1982 Atlantic feature, “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?,” the journalist Edward Jay Epstein outlines what he describes as “the diamond invention.” Following the discovery of huge diamond deposits in South Africa at the end of the 19th century, the diamond industry had a problem on its hands: The British financiers who had underwritten the development of the mine had been a little too successful in their pursuit of the previously rare stones, and they suddenly had far more than they needed to satisfy existing demand. Diamonds were no longer rare at all, and that meant that they weren’t necessarily worth—and didn’t necessarily mean—much of anything.

The first step in solving that problem was the creation of the De Beers Corporation, a price-fixing cartel that brought the world’s supply of diamonds under its control. But ensuring that diamond prices stayed high didn’t itself induce demand for the stones; as the Great Depression drew to a close, it was clear that for the market to expand enough to make expansive mining operations continually profitable investments, regular people had to be made to yearn for a diamond of their own. The human tendency to imbue objects with meaning long predates the advent of the modern consumer system, and the meaning of the diamond needed to be changed. “We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology,” said a 1947 report authored by De Beers’s American advertising agency N. W. Ayer.

Epstein’s detailed account of what is arguably the most successful corporate-marketing campaign of all time is a landmark piece of consumer journalism, and it offers a glimpse inside a playbook that is still widely used to sell products today. De Beers hired Ayer to turn the diamond into a symbol of eternal love, with the intention of not just putting a diamond ring on more fingers, but ensuring that it would be seen as gauche and unromantic for consumers to resell theirs; with no significant secondary market, the cartel’s singular grip on the global supply would be maintained. When mines were mostly producing larger diamonds, their campaigns emphasized engagement rings, and carat weight was the primary marker of a good diamond. When De Beers partnered with the Soviets on a Siberian mine that produced tons of small diamonds, marketers invented the eternity band, and campaigns shifted to encourage shoppers to prioritize clarity and cut over size. Men, too, had to be trained to buy diamonds, without knowing whether their female partner might actually want one—no matter its specs, the best diamond is a surprise.

Some of the most powerful tools of the diamond invention, though, were indirect. The cartel’s ad agency flooded Hollywood with jewelry and fed information on stars’ gems to gossip columnists and newspaper reporters. It got diamonds in front of film cameras and on the hands of carefully posed starlets in fan magazines. As Hollywood grew in size and influence—first through movie theaters, then via television—so did its capacity to set cultural expectations. Ad campaigns alone don’t have the power to embed a durable new idea into old cultural norms. Marilyn Monroe did.

It’s Too Easy to Buy Stuff You Don’t Want

2023-11-21T08:00:00-05:00

I’ve made many impulse purchases in my life, but the first one that I found genuinely unsettling was a pair of Nike VaporMax sneakers. It was July 2018, and I was mindlessly tapping through Instagram updates while waiting to meet friends for lunch. That’s where I saw the sneakers, tucked between photos of last night’s outfits and this morning’s bagels: futuristic, baby pink, and a new arrival, according to the ad. This was the heyday of artificial sneaker scarcity, when every design worth a damn sold out before you even had a chance to decide if you liked it. I pounced.

The order took maybe 15 seconds. I selected my size and put the shoes in my cart, and my phone automatically filled in my login credentials and added my new credit-card number. You can always return them, I thought to myself as I tapped the “Buy” button. Almost as soon as I’d paid, I snapped out of the mania that had briefly overtaken me, $190 (Jesus Christ) poorer but with one pair of Jetsons-looking shoes on their way to my apartment. It’s always a little horrifying to realize that advertising has worked on you, but this felt more like I had just watched the velociraptor in Jurassic Park learn to use the doorknob. I had completed some version of the online checkout process a million times before, but never could I remember it being quite so spontaneous and thoughtless. If it’s going to be that easy all the time, I thought to myself, I’m cooked.

That experience wasn’t the result of any particular just-to-the-market technology. Instead, a handful of small changes to the mechanics of online shopping had begun to accumulate into something meaningful: Advertisers were amassing stores of personal data with which to tailor their ad targeting. Retailers were offering free shipping and free returns on everything—buy now, decide later. Browsers and operating systems were urging users to save login credentials and financial details within their software. The expanded use of payment shortcuts such as Apple Pay and Shopify’s Shop Pay was circumventing the need to create a new account or log in to an old one. “Buy now, pay later” services including Klarna and Affirm were beginning to pop up at more retailers to soften the blow of spending.

In the intervening five years, these changes have become the default infrastructure of online shopping, maximizing convenience over all else in an effort to make buying as effortless as possible. As retailers are all too eager to tell everyone, buying things online has never been so simple, so seamless, so easy. So easy, in fact, that we might all be better off with a few more speed bumps.

In the consumer system, friction refers to anything that slows down a potential buyer on the path toward completing a purchase—wondering which size will fit, remembering their password, getting their credit card out of their wallet. An estimated 70 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned without a sale, which does suggest that potential purchasers are incredibly easy to derail. Sometimes, just the realization that you’ll need to get up and get your wallet is enough to stop you from ending up with another novelty T-shirt or new throw pillows.

Retailers, of course, regard friction as the enemy. The history of online shopping is that of tamping down friction at almost any cost. Free shipping and generous return policies are an expensive way to do business—an e-commerce return for a $50 product costs retailers an average of $33, according to a recent estimate by the reverse-logistics firm Narvar. But these policies became the default precisely because buyers accustomed to shopping in person looked at the internet and thought to themselves, This seems like a bad way to buy shoes.

[Read: The free returns party is over]

Reductions in friction are generally sold to consumers as matters of convenience, which often has the benefit of being true. I hate resetting a password, typing in my shipping information, doing any of the paperwork that stands between me and the hit of dopamine that ordering something new provides. What online shopping keeps getting better at is ensuring that you arrive at that point as efficiently as possible. By its very nature, it already foists many of the putative inconveniences of buying something onto other people: Someone else is doing the work of locating the actual product and moving it from a retailer’s inventory to your home. You don’t need to drive to the store, find a parking spot, stand in line, interact with a human, or do much of anything at all.

Convenience, though, tends to be a hollow virtue on its own. Much of the consumer system is constructed to generate retailers’ desired outcomes as frequently as possible. When something is made convenient, it’s because that convenience benefits the company. Sometimes, your interests and those of the retailer can align—it takes me about a minute to reorder a 15-pound bag of my dog’s kibble, for example, and I don’t need a moment longer to be sure I’m making a good decision. Other times, conveniences are put in place in order to short-circuit your ability to act in your own best interests, even if just for a split second. Hence, my pastel-pink spaceship shoes.

Over the past year or so, exhausted by the tedious sameness of so much new clothing and disenchanted with its terrible quality, I’ve found myself buying most of my clothes through secondhand platforms such as Poshmark and eBay. At first, this shift seemed risky to me. Buying pre-owned goods is full of the type of friction that makes buyers mistrustful: The photos vary widely in quality, and the listings vary widely in content. Return policies tend to be extremely restrictive. On many secondhand platforms, ponying up seven bucks for shipping is still the norm. Everything about the buying process reminds you that you should read closely and choose carefully. I was nervous that I’d spend money and end up with little to show for it except a bunch of stuff that didn’t fit or that I didn’t like.

Those fears were misplaced. As it turns out, my entirely reasonable trepidation was useful and productive. Not everything I’ve purchased has been exactly what I’d hoped for; one dress arrived as described but reeking of stale cigarette smoke. But of the clothing I’ve ordered this year, I wear my secondhand purchases far more frequently than I do the things I ordered brand new. These garments—things like a 1980s oversize button-down with tiny cherries embroidered on it, or a pristine, finely knit cardigan in mustard-yellow wool—feel like things I actually chose instead of stuff that just happened to move through my field of vision in a weak moment.

In hindsight, that’s not such a surprise. When buying something feels like making a real choice, you have more opportunities to slow down and consider whether it might be the wrong one. Secondhand markets are some of the best places to relearn what a better, fairer version of online shopping might feel like right now, if only because using them requires a conscious acceptance of a certain amount of risk. E-commerce’s greatest trick has been convincing us that risk can be escaped, but of course it can’t. Even with the smoothest shopping, there’s still the risk of waste, of disappointment, of future inconvenience, of money lost to the fine print. Frictionless shopping might be convenient, in a sense, but it’s a bad system for making good decisions.

The Junk Is Winning

2023-10-25T11:16:00-04:00

TikTok would like to sell me a brush. Or, more specifically, an UNbrush. The $18 implement, made by the hair-tool brand FHI Heat, looks like a regular paddle brush, but with its rear panel removed so that air can flow through its perforated sheet of plastic bristles. Its promise, according to the dozens of video reviews that TikTok has pushed into my feed in the past week, is simple: The UNbrush cuts through tangles like a hot knife through butter, even if your hair is highly textured or coated in salt water after a day at the beach. At times, every third or fourth video in my feed has shown the brush doing exactly that, accompanied by a coupon code—never the same one, never for the same amount—and a link to buy.

The UNbrush is just one of many assorted products—mascaras, office chairs, battery-powered kitchen scrubbers—that have recently gone viral on TikTok Shop, which officially launched in the United States last month. TikTok’s endless stream of unpredictable, algorithmically selected clips has long been a powerful—if erratic—engine for shopping. Many people’s feeds were already full of informal, chatty reviews and product demonstrations that, at their best, feel like you’re getting a genuine tip from a friend. These videos have sold scores of seemingly random consumer goods, so TikTok Shop is the company’s bid to profit from those sales directly instead of sending those dollars elsewhere.

Thousands of sellers have rushed to list their wares on the platform, but TikTok Shop’s rollout hasn’t been universally beloved by the app’s U.S. users. To encourage creators to promote the shop’s products, people with at least 5,000 followers can join an affiliate-marketing program that pays them a commission on any sales they refer with their shopping links—a long-standing feature of more traditional online retailers, made potentially more powerful because of TikTok’s newly closed ecosystem of recommendations and sales. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote during the feature’s test phase this past summer, some users have balked at how much TikTok Shop encourages their fellow TikTokers not just to share recommendations but also to more pointedly hawk products, pushing people’s feeds even further toward a low-rent, Gen Z version of QVC.

[Read: TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok]

More than a month into the feature’s full rollout, those concerns seem prescient. The app is clogged with commission-generating sales pitches, listings for potentially counterfeit versions of popular products, and the kind of dirt-cheap plastic doodads that you’ll also see on bargain-basement retailers such as Wish, Temu, and AliExpress. TikTok, although never exactly a flawless source of recommendations, has had at least some utility as a venue for real reviews of stuff you might want to buy from regular people who are trying to sort through the same endless array of indistinguishable junk that you are. But the junk is winning.

TikTok Shop’s stated purpose is pretty logical: Aggregating the products that regularly go viral on the app and giving creators an opportunity to earn money from recommendations is remunerative for the app, for sellers, and for creators. As long as the end result isn’t spammy or unreliable, it also has the potential to be beloved by users, who are already going out of their way to buy a lot of that stuff anyway. However, it can be difficult to tell what’s happening with TikTok Shop, which lives under a tab within the app’s main navigation bar. Like Amazon, it uses a marketplace model, which aggregates listings created by more than 200,000 third-party sellers into a single shopping portal with a single checkout system. This system allows retailers to offer lots of products without taking the financial risk of buying and managing inventory up front.

Amazon, Walmart, and Target, among both other major retailers and upstarts, use versions of the marketplace model for a significant chunk of what’s available on their websites. Sellers buy the inventory, create the listings, and, in many cases, ship the orders themselves, assuming most of the risk and doing most of the work. The platform takes a cut of their sales in exchange for access to their audience of potential buyers. This model has become popular, because it allows wannabe retailers to spin up the online equivalent of a big-box store relatively quickly and with less initial investment.

[Read: Surprise! You work for Amazon.]

The tactic also has some downsides, no matter who is using it. Depending on third parties on a huge scale means that listings can be more unreliable or misleading than those created under in-house supervision, and the inventory risks being low-quality or fake—an issue that even the largest and most powerful marketplace retailers have a hard time controlling. A TikTok spokesperson told me that the app uses a combination of algorithmic and human moderation to remove problem listings, which is a typical approach for marketplace retailers. But some listings go unnoticed until buyers begin to report problems. Listings sometimes use stock images that don’t depict the product they’re actually selling, omit important details on sizing or material composition, or offer counterfeit (and potentially unsafe) products. Even legitimate listings from scrupulous sellers can make for a confusing or scammy-feeling shopping experience, because sellers create a lot of duplicate listings for the same products. That’s especially common on TikTok, where sellers rush to meet demand for the handful of products that have captivated the platform at any particular moment.

All of these issues are immediately apparent when you open TikTok Shop. The particulars of what you see will be tailored to the videos, links, and accounts you’ve interacted with in the past, but if your experience is anything like mine, you are likely to encounter an endless scroll of duplicate listings of dubious legitimacy, most of which advertise products you’ve already been pitched a zillion times on your For You Page. Earlier today, I spent about 20 minutes swiping through my For You Page, which is the primary way that users interact with videos on the platform. In that time, I flipped through 274 TikToks, and more than a quarter of them were recommendations or livestreams linking to products in TikTok Shop.

If a particular recommendation goes viral, its creator stands to profit handsomely. In a follow-up to her original video, the creator behind one of the UNbrush’s most popular reviews posted screenshots of the results in the affiliate system’s user interface. After its first 11 million views, her video appeared to have generated a little over $100,000 in sales, from which she said she’d earned more than $13,000 in commissions. The review now has more than 32 million views, of which I must account for at least a dozen—the video has been pushed into my feed over and over again, as though the algorithm has somehow detected that I have long, curly, ultrafine hair that tangles if you look at it the wrong way.

FHI’s UNbrush seems to be a genuinely useful and well-liked hair tool. But when I toggle over to my account’s Shopping tab, the listings for it are bewildering. Some of them price the brush at $18, the same as you’ll pay at traditional beauty retailers. Others advertise discounts to $14 or $16. Still others price it as low as $2, which strongly suggests that what you’ll receive is a knockoff. Sometimes the listings eventually include, tucked away at the end, an image of the actual product you’ll receive. Confusion over the real UNbrush has launched another round of videos about it, whose creators test the fake and real versions on either side of their head or warn viewers that they’re being scammed, promising that their links will lead to the genuine article.

This cycle isn’t unique to the brush. Last month, the most widely discussed problem was with a popular snail-slime skin-care serum. Next month, it might be Stanley insulated cups, a line of colorful tumblers omnipresent in my Shop-tab recommendations. When I search TikTok Shop for Stanley cup, most of the first dozen or so results have at least a couple of markers of a potential fake product: They come in color combinations or holiday designs that Stanley appears never to have made. Their prices are less than half of those charged by authorized retailers, which get their inventory from the brand itself. The handle is attached lower than it is on a version of the cup I own, and the safety warnings on the cups’ base are printed in a different font. A spokesperson for TikTok said that the platform expressly forbids counterfeit products from being sold on its platform and disputed the idea that counterfeits are nevertheless common in its product listings. (After I reached out, TikTok removed five of the seven suspected-counterfeit listings that I had sent to them, but it did not comment on why.)

The irony, of course, is that the enormous amount of guesswork required to navigate this kind of shopping is the reason TikTok’s review and recommendation videos were so popular and influential in the first place. When you have little confidence that you’re making the right choice among a slew of options, when you suspect that what you think you’re buying might not be the product that will ultimately show up, there’s real value to watching someone hold up the results of their purchase in front of a camera and tell you whether their new eyeliner smudged immediately, or if their new leggings stayed up at the gym.

[Read: What happened to Wirecutter?]

That TikTok would give in-house sales a try wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but it was pretty close to one. Shopping on social platforms is already popular in China, where TikTok’s parent company was founded. That’s less the case in the U.S.: In 2019, Instagram launched, with limited success, an in-app shopping feature called Instagram Checkout, which allowed established brands and retailers to list their products within the app. Many American shoppers just don’t seem to trust the idea of buying something on a social platform, even if the experience is pretty slick. But people very obviously do trust shopping recommendations on social media, as TikTok has demonstrated for years. There is a fortune to be made if a platform can cut out the middleman of a well-known retailer and get people to buy directly from those recommendations instead. TikTok, still early in its shopping experiment, might eventually figure out how to do that. Right now, though, TikTok Shop is far more effective as a reminder that a lot of the things that can be made to seem glamorous or ingenious in a two-minute video would be better off delivered directly to the Goodwill to which you will inevitably donate them. At least you’d save your future self an errand.

Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment

2023-10-18T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

When self-checkout kiosks began to pop up in American grocery stores, the sales pitch to shoppers was impressive: Scan your stuff, plunk it in a bag, and you’re done. Long checkout lines would disappear. Waits would dwindle. Small talk with cashiers would be a thing of the past. Need help? Store associates, freed from the drudgery of scanning barcodes, would be close at hand to answer your questions.

You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot—wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly you’ve scanned it two or three times. Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory. If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction—not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine—well, maybe don’t do that.

All is not rosy in the world of self-checkout, and some companies seem to realize it. Walmart has removed the kiosks entirely from a handful of stores, and is redesigning others to involve more employee help. Costco is stationing more staffers in its self-checkout areas. ShopRite is adding cashiers back into stores where it had trialed a self-checkout-only model, citing customer backlash. None of this is an indication that self-checkout is over, exactly. But several decades in, the kiosks as Americans have long known them are beginning to look like a failure.

Before self-checkout’s grand promise could be sold to the general public, it had to be sold to retailers. Third-party firms introduced the kiosks starting in the 1980s, but they didn’t take off at first. In 2001, when the machines were finally winning over major retailers in masse, K-Mart was frank about its motivations for adopting them: Kiosks would cut wait times and allow the company to hire fewer clerks. Self-checkout is expensive to install—the average four-kiosk setup runs around $125,000, and large stores can have 10 or more kiosks apiece. But write one big check up front, the logic goes, and that investment eventually pays off. Human employees get sick, ask for raises, want things. Computerized kiosks always show up for work, and customers do the job of cashiers for free.

Except, as the journalist Nathaniel Meyersohn wrote for CNN last year, most of this theory hasn’t exactly panned out. The widespread introduction of self-checkout kiosks did enable shoestring staffing inside many stores, but it created plenty of other expenses too. Self-checkout machines might always be at work, but, on any given day, lots of them aren’t actually working. The technology tends to be buggy and unreliable, and the machines’ maintenance requires a lot of expensive IT workers. Much of the blame for that can be placed on the systems themselves. During the years I spent processing purchases at big-box and chain retailers in the 2000s, every point-of-sale system I used felt more intuitive and less error-prone than the ones I’m now regularly tasked with navigating as a paying member of the public.

There’s little evidence that self-checkout is reliably faster than the old cashier system, and that feel of convenience has always been largely a trick of perception. “Trained cashiers can scan and bag goods faster than even the most aggressive or enthusiastic shopper,” conceded a 2002 New York Times story about the machines’ growing popularity. “But actual checkout speed tells only part of the story. Self-checkout has a psychological effect: as long as the shopper is taking an active part, it seems to go faster.”

Perhaps an even larger issue than the problems that self-checkout directly creates is the set of behaviors its presence can enable—from executives, from employees, and from customers. Retail executives, looking for any available corner to cut in order to juice short-term profitability, took self-checkout’s proliferation as a license to trim store staffing to the bone. Many stores are now messier, their shelves go unstocked for longer, and customers have a harder time finding the products they’re looking for or employees to answer their questions. Retail jobs, which have long been low-paying, precarious, and unpleasant, are now even worse. Forget staffing up to the levels required for a good customer experience; in some instances, stores have reportedly had problems staffing their floors to a minimum level of employee safety. Self-checkout is far from solely responsible for this doom loop, but it has contributed to the way certain stores have rotted from the inside.

And then, of course, there’s theft. Not only does the act of bagging up your own stuff create new opportunities to make it out the door without paying for everything, but understaffed stores also enable theft overall. The most reliable way to deter shoplifting is to make thieves think they’re going to get c aught, but when even customers who want to pay for something struggle to flag down an employee, the store has already forfeited that battle entirely. Theft, as well as the losses from the unscanned and mis-scanned items that poorly designed kiosks create, is a trade-off of which retailers are well aware. (Companies contacted for this story, including Walmart, CVS, Costco, and Kroger, either did not respond or declined to comment on self-checkout’s relationship to theft.)

[Read: The great shoplifting freak-out]

But, of course, stores don’t really mention self-checkout when they panic about retail theft. Instead of hiring enough people to run a functional store, companies push the task of deterrence onto customers who are already doing the scanning and bagging work of a cashier. By generating widespread fear of a retail-crime spike, stores that rely on self-checkout can deputize the public and put pressure on law enforcement to become more visibly involved: People become more suspicious of the shoppers next to them, local police feel obligated to change patrols to ensure that stores are safe, and governments pour additional public money into theft prevention. Not that there is a lot of data to suggest that this oft-discussed recent spike in retail crime is even real. In an earnings call earlier this year, for example, the CFO of Walgreens admitted that his company had perhaps “cried too much” about theft, and that its product losses had actually declined in the previous quarter. (Walgreens declined to comment for this story.)

Some retailers seem to realize that they may have overcorrected in their swing toward unmanned checkout, and are adding more human labor back into the checkout process on a trial or permanent basis. Still, self-checkout kiosks as they are currently constituted are likely to persist for years to come, because the machines were so expensive to install in the first place. Kroger is forging ahead by testing a store format that relies entirely on self-checkout, but the grocer has said that the move isn’t expected to result in any labor savings over its standard checkout structure, which suggests that there won’t be fewer cashiers. More and more, self-checkout has begun to refer to the style of kiosk instead of to the expectation that everyone who uses it will conduct the transaction alone. There is now less “self” in self-checkout.

The kiosk technology, as it stands, just isn’t good enough to support the level of autonomy from the vagaries of paid human labor that retailers wish their stores could have. Within the industry, there are great hopes for its eventual improvement; Amazon, for example, continues to tinker with its Amazon Go store format, which requires you to check in to the store from the company’s app but lets you leave with no checkout at all. Perhaps that is the future, but for now, a familiar limitation of many grand tech-industry promises endures: At the bottom of all the supposed convenience, you do actually just need a lot of people to operate a store.

Your Sweaters Are Garbage

2023-10-10T10:33:00-04:00

In much of the United States, you can already feel it. There’s a hint of a chill in the night air. The morning light looks somehow more golden. The pumpkin-spice latte has finished its annual transit across the cosmos and returned to its home at your local Starbucks. Sweater weather approaches. Cooler temperatures bring rich textures and many layering opportunities. What this time of year no longer brings to most people, though, is amazing new sweaters. Or even good ones.

With apologies for describing a tweet, the comedian Ellory Smith made much the same point a few weeks ago on the platform formerly known as Twitter: With side-by-side photos of Billy Crystal wearing an ivory cable-knit fisherman sweater in 1989’s When Harry Met Sally and the actor Ben Schwartz re-creating the image in a similar outfit, Smith sounded an alarm: “The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last twenty years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.” Her tweet racked up a couple hundred thousand likes because she’s exactly right. So let’s have that conversation.

The phenomenon that Smith is alluding to is clear from the photos, even if you’ve never before had a single thought about the state of American knitwear. Crystal’s sweater is timeless and lush—fuzzy, generously cut, and extravagantly cabled, with a tall collar and close-fitting cuffs designed to keep warmth in. Schwartz’s sweater is roughly the same color, and it is indeed a cabled sweater, but that’s about where the comparison ends. Some of the differences are intentional, and not necessarily bad—it’s designed to fit closer to the body than Crystal’s, and the detailing is more varied. But Schwartz’s sweater also has an odd sheen, flat cabling, and loose cuffs. It lacks the heft of Crystal’s version; it looks cheaper. It was probably machine-knit. Crystal’s is more likely to have been handmade. This is despite the fact that, by the mass-market standards of 2023, Schwartz’s sweater is a nice sweater. It appears to be a Polo Ralph Lauren design that costs almost $400.

As the sheer quantity of clothing available to the average American has grown over the past few decades, everything feels at least a little bit flimsier than it used to. Seams unravel after a couple of washes, garments lose their shape more quickly, shoes have to be replaced more frequently. The situation might be the worst in knitwear. Good sweaters, gloves, beanies, and scarves are all but gone from mass-market retailers. The options that have replaced them lose their fluff faster, feel fake, and either keep their wearers too hot or let the winter wind whip right through them. Sometimes they even smell like plastic.

The most obvious indication of these changes is printed on a garment’s fiber-content tag. Knits used to be made entirely from natural fibers. These fibers usually came from shearing sheep, goats, alpacas, and other animals. Sometimes, plant-derived fibers such as cotton or linen were blended in. Now, according to Imran Islam, a textile-science professor and knit expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the overwhelming majority of yarn used in mass-market knitwear is blended with some type of plastic. Most commonly, this means polyester, polyamide, or acrylic. Islam and I spoke on one of the first chilly fall days in New York, and he had just finished conducting an informal test as part of a knitting lesson: He asked the students who had come to class wearing a sweater to check what it was made out of. Every sweater, he said, had some plastic in it.

Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Alamy; Getty.

Knits made with synthetic fiber are cheaper to produce. They can be spun up in astronomical quantities to meet the sudden whims of clothing manufacturers—there’s no waiting for whole flocks of sheep to get fluffy enough to hand shear. They also usually can be tossed in your washing machine with everything else. But by virtually every measure, synthetic fabrics are far inferior. They pill quickly, sometimes look fake, shed microplastics, and don’t perform as well as wool when worn. Sweaters are functional garments, not just fashionable ones. Wool keeps its wearer warm without steaming them like a baked potato wrapped in foil. Its fibers are hygroscopic and hydrophobic, which means they draw moisture to their center and leave the surface dry. A wool sweater can absorb a lot of water from the air around it before it feels wet or cold to the touch, which goes a long way toward explaining why high-quality wool sweaters are still made in particularly damp, cold regions of the world, including Scotland and New Zealand.

Some major retailers do continue to carry all-wool sweaters. If you’re fastidious about checking tags, you’re sure to find them once in a while. But don’t rely on price to guide you. A significant amount of polyamide or acrylic is now common in sweaters with four-digit price tags. A $3,200 Gucci “wool cardigan,” for example, is actually half polyamide when you read the fine print. Cheaper materials have crept into the fashion industry’s output gradually, as more and more customers have become inured to them. In the beginning, these changes were motivated primarily by the price pressures of fast fashion, Islam said: As low-end brands have created global networks that pump out extremely cheap, disposable clothing, more premium brands have attempted to keep up with the frenetic pace while still maximizing profits, which means cutting costs and cutting corners. Islam estimates that a pound of sheep’s wool as a raw material might cost from $1.50 to $2. A pound of cashmere might cost anywhere from $10 to $15. A pound of acrylic, meanwhile, can be had for less than $1.

To make matters worse for people who just want to buy a decent sweater, Islam said that few checks and balances exist to ensure that knitwear marketed as, say, pure cashmere or merino wool actually is, unless a brand voluntarily adheres to a high standard of traceability. Retailers rarely face penalties for driving materials costs as low as possible, even if it means that sweaters don’t look and feel quite as nice as they once did. And they don’t need to. When almost all of your competitors are using the same sad plastic blends, no one is going to single your company out for being particularly miserly with the materials.

This race to the bottom had been going on for years, but it accelerated considerably in 2005, Sofi Thanhauser, the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, told me. That year was the end of the Multifiber Arrangement, a trade agreement that had for three decades capped imports of textile products and yarn into the United States, Canada, and the European Union from developing countries. Once Western retailers no longer had meaningful restrictions on where they could source their garments from, many of them went shopping for the cheapest inventory possible. They found it largely in Asian and Latin American countries with few protections for garment workers or environmental regulations on the textile industry, which allowed them to slash wages and use more synthetics.

That changed the unit economics of mass-market fashion—and of sweaters—in profound ways. According to Islam, if you push down retail prices with cheap labor, they’ll no longer bear the use of quality materials. If you push down retail prices with cheap materials, they’ll no longer bear the wages of garment workers with more skill and experience. If you push down both as much as possible, you stand a pretty good chance of gaining market share. Either way, the conditions of the industry and the products on the shelf degrade in tandem. Knitting, in particular, is highly skilled labor, even at its cheapest. For genuinely impressive detailing and finishing, Islam said, manufacturers need to pay up for highly experienced workers. When manufacturers forgo those costs, designs get simpler—they get boring. And when demand for that kind of skilled labor craters, those skills aren’t passed to new workers, and they eventually wash out of the labor force. The same thing happens in production of the raw materials necessary to make a better-quality garment. Eventually, even if your company wants to produce something nice, durable, and well-made, your ability to do so at all—let alone at a price that anyone will pay—is greatly reduced.

The majority of clothing sold in the U.S. now includes at least some plastic content. Brands generally rely on consumers not to be interested enough in fabric content to check the tags before buying. But Thanhauser said brands have also gotten more adept at marketing synthetic fabrics as a consumer advantage, whether or not they actually are in any particular garment. They do enable more sweaters to be labeled as machine washable, she said, and the popularity of “performance” fabrics in athleisure has helped improve the public perception of all kinds of synthetic textiles, even if those materials offer few advantages outside of the athletic pursuits for which they were designed.

Over time, these phenomena become self-reinforcing. Hand-washing and line-drying a few garments is no longer a normal part of laundry day in many homes, Thanhauser pointed out. Once the apparel market changes so much that those kinds of care tasks are more of a nuisance than a necessity, people avoid garments that require them. These market changes also reflect other shifts in how people live, suspects Andre West, a former knitwear manufacturer and a professor at the North Carolina State University Wilson College of Textiles. Wool is most comfortable and effective when layered, especially for relatively affordable wool sweaters, which tend not to be super soft. Life has gotten more casual for most Americans over the past 50 years, and a button-down with a sweater on top now exceeds the expectations of many office dress codes and can feel a little formal to people more accustomed to T-shirts or polos. Indoor climate control has also gotten more sophisticated. People spend less time in drafty old buildings and more time at a constant 72 degrees. Outside, the country’s temperatures are trending warmer, and more people are moving south.

The end result of all of this—the changes to trade regulation, the decline in garment-industry wages and working conditions, the rise of synthetic textiles—is abundance, but only by a definition of the word that includes an abundance of junk. A good sweater is hard to find, but it’s not impossible. People are still raising heritage-breed sheep and spinning pure wool yarn and knitting sweaters that look and feel and perform a lot like the ones that were de rigueur a couple of generations ago. You can find them if you’re fastidious about checking fiber-content tags, and if you can pay prices that reflect the value of the materials and skill that went into their creation.

That doesn’t always mean paying far more than big retailers demand for polyester blends. O’Connell’s, a Buffalo, New York–based clothing store that’s famous among American sweater lovers, sells a beautiful, Irish-made fisherman sweater in pure wool for $198—half the price of the cheaper-looking Polo blend that Schwartz appears to wear in his When Harry Met Sally reenactment. Scotland-based Jamieson’s of Shetland will sell you beautiful wool sweaters in the same price range, or the yarn they manufacture so you can make your own. At the very high end, Silicon Valley tech moguls obsess over four-figure Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli sweaters as important status symbols. For everyone else, plenty of garments gesture at what used to be widely available, but few hold a candle to the garments that were once the norm. And, in fact, please don’t get candles too close to a poly blend, which is much more likely than wool to go up in flames.

Millennials Have Lost Their Grip on Fashion

2023-09-21T12:00:00-04:00

Ballet flats are back. Everyone’s saying it—Vogue, the TikTok girlies, The New York Times, Instagram’s foremost fashion narcs, the whole gang. Shoes from trendsetting brands such as Alaïa and Miu Miu line store shelves, and hundreds of cheap alternatives are available online at fast-fashion juggernauts such as Shein and Temu. You can run from the return of the ballet flat, but you can’t hide. And, depending on how much time your feet spent in the shoes the last time they were trendy, maybe you can’t run either.

The ballet flat—a slipperlike, largely unstructured shoe style meant to evoke a ballerina’s pointe shoes—never disappears from the fashion landscape entirely, but its previous period of decided coolness was during the mid-to-late 2000s. Back then, teens were swathing themselves in Juicy Couture and Abercrombie & Fitch, Lauren Conrad was ruining her life by turning down a trip to Paris on The Hills, and fashion magazines were full of Lanvin and Chloé and Tory Burch flats. The style was paired with every kind of outfit you could think of—the chunky white sneaker of its day, if you will.

How you feel about the shoes’ revival likely has a lot to do with your age. If you’re young enough to be witnessing ballet flats’ popularity for the first time, then maybe they seem like a pleasantly retro and feminine departure from lug soles and sneakers. If, like me, you’ve made it past 30(ish), the whole thing might make you feel a little old. Physically, ballet flats are a nightmare for your back, your knees, your arches; when it comes to support, most offer little more than you’d get from a pair of socks. Spiritually, the injury might be even worse. Twenty years is a normal amount of time to have passed for a trend to be revived as retro, but it’s also a rude interval at which to contemplate being punted out of the zeitgeist in favor of those who see your youth as something to be mined for inspiration—and therefore as something definitively in the past.

Trends are a funny thing. Especially in fashion, people see trends as the province of the very young, but tracing their paths is often less straightforward. Take normcore’s dad sneakers: In the mid-2010s, the shoes became popular among Millennials, who were then hitting their 30s, precisely because they were the sneakers of choice for retired Boomers. But in order for a trend to reach the rare heights of population-level relevance, very young people do eventually need to sign on. In the case of dad sneakers, it took years for Zoomers to come around en masse, but their seal of approval has helped keep bulky New Balances popular for nearly a decade—far past the point when most trends fizzle.

The return of ballet flats is a signal of this new cohort of fashion consumers asserting itself even more widely in the marketplace. The trends young people endorse tend to swing between extremes. The durable popularity of dad shoes all but guaranteed that some young people would eventually start to look for something sleeker and less substantial. The ballet flat fits perfectly within the turn-of-the-millennium fashion tropes—overplucked eyebrows, low-rise jeans, tiny sunglasses—that Zoomers have been tinkering with for several years.

Ballet flats are an all-the-more-appropriate sign of a generational shift, in fact, because they are the folly of youth made manifest. Wearing them is an act of violence against podiatry, yes, but their drawbacks go further. Many ballet flats are so flimsy that they look trashed after only a few wears. They’re difficult to pair with socks, so they stink like feet almost as quickly. Ballet flats are impractical shoes that sneak into closets under the guise of practicality—hey, they’re not high heels!—and prey on people who do not yet know better.

What does that mean, then, for the people who do know better? For one, it means that the extended adolescence that some Millennials experienced following the Great Recession is finally, inarguably over. We’re old, at least relatively speaking. Every generation eventually ages out of the particular cultural power of youth and then watches as younger people make mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight, and the ballet flat is a reminder that people my age are no longer the default main characters in culture that we once were. When I was a middle schooler begging for a pair of wooden-soled Candie’s platform sandals in the mid-’90s, I remember my mother, in a fit of exasperation, telling me that I couldn’t have them because she saw too many people fall off their platforms in the ’70s. This is the first time I remember contemplating my mom as a human being who existed long before I was conscious of her: someone who bought cool but ill-advised clothes and uncomfortable shoes, who went to parties where people sometimes had a hard time remaining upright.

Even the cool girls with the coolest shoes at some point grow to regard parts of their past selves as a bit silly, and they become the people trying to save the kids from their own fashion hubris. This sensation is undoubtedly acute for Millennials, because this hubris is displayed most prominently in an arena they used to rule: the internet. On TikTok, the world’s hottest trend machine, the over-30 crowd is more onlooker than participant, and the youth are using the platform to encourage one another to dress like they’re going to a party at the Delt house in 2007. Someone has to warn them.

If you’re realizing that this someone is you, my advice would be to not let the generational responsibilities of aging weigh too heavily on you. The upside of losing your spot at culture’s center stage, after all, is freedom. You can look around at what’s fashionable, pick the things that work for you, and write off the rest as the folly of youth. (The Zoomers are right: The lug-soled combat boots that I wore in high school actually are very cool.) In place of chasing trends, you can cultivate taste. When you fail at taste, at least you can be aware of your own questionable decisions. In the process of writing this article, I realized that French Sole still makes the exact same prim little flats that I must have bought three or four times over during the course of my first post-college job, in the late 2000s. They’re as flimsy as ever, but whatever made me love them 15 years ago is still there, buried under all of my better judgment. I haven’t closed the tab quite yet.

The Only Productivity Hack That Works on Me

2023-09-14T07:00:00-04:00

Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people. Philosophically, the concept is a nightmare. Americans invest personal productivity with moral weight, as though human worth can be divined through careful examination of work product, both professional and personal. The more practical questions of productivity are no less freighted with anxiety. Are you doing enough to hold on to your job? To improve your marriage? To raise well-adjusted kids? To maintain your health? What can you change in order to do more?

Anxiety breeds products, and the tech industry’s obsession with personal optimization in particular has yielded a bounty of them in the past decade or two: digital calendars that send you push notifications about your daily schedule. Platforms that reimagine your life as a series of project-management issues. Planners as thick as encyclopedias that encourage you to set daily intentions and monthly priorities. Self-help books that cobble together specious principles of behavioral psychology to teach you the secrets of actually using all of the stuff you’ve bought in order to optimize your waking hours (and maybe your sleeping ones too).

Underneath all of the tiresome discourse about enhancing human productivity or rejecting it as a concept, there is a bedrock truth that tends to get lost. There probably is a bunch of stuff that you need or want to get done, for reasons that have no discernable moral or political valence—making a long-delayed dentist appointment, picking up groceries, returning a few nagging emails, hanging curtains in your new apartment. For that, I come bearing but one life hack: the humble to-do list, written out on actual paper, with actual pen.

First, cards on the table: I’m not an organized person. Much of the advice on these topics is given by people with a natural capacity for organization and focus—the people who, as kids, kept meticulous records of assignments and impending tests in their school-issued planners. Now they send out calendar invites to their friends once next weekend’s dinner plans are settled and have never killed a plant by forgetting to water it. They were, in my opinion, largely born on third base and think they hit a triple. I, by contrast, have what a psychiatrist once called a “really classic case” of ADHD. My executive function is never coming back from war. I have tried the tips, the tricks, the hacks, the apps, and the methods. I have abandoned countless planners three weeks into January. Years ago, I bought a box with a timed lock so that I could put my phone in it and force myself to write emails. Perhaps counterintuitively, that makes me somewhat of an amateur expert in the tactics that are often recommended for getting your life (or at least your day) in order.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to try putting pen to paper. By the time I was in the working world, smartphones were beginning to proliferate, and suddenly, there was an app for that. In the late 2000s, optimism abounded about the capacity for consumer technology to help people overcome personal foibles and make everyday life more efficient. Didn’t a calendar app seem much neater and tidier than a paper planner? Wouldn’t a list of tasks that need your attention be that much more effective if it could zap you with a little vibration to remind you it exists? If all of your schedules and documents and contacts and to-do lists could live in one place, wouldn’t that be better?

Fifteen years later, the answer to those questions seems to be “not really.” People habituate to the constant beeps and buzzes of their phone, which makes rote push-notification task reminders less likely to break through the noise. If you make a to-do list in your notes app, it disappears into the ether when you finally lock your phone in an effort to get something—anything!—done. Shareable digital calendars do hold certain practical advantages over their paper predecessors, and services such as Slack and Google Docs, which let people work together at a distance, provide obvious efficiencies over mailing paperwork back and forth. But those services’ unexpected downsides have also become clear. Trivial meetings stack up. Work bleeds into your personal time, which isn’t actually efficient. Above all, these apps and tactics tend to be designed with a very specific kind of productivity in mind: that which is expected of the average office worker, whose days tend to involve a lot of computer tasks and be scheduleable and predictable. If your work is more siloed or scattered or unpredictable—like, say, a reporter’s—then bending those tools to your will is a task all its own. Which is to say nothing of the difficulty of bending those tools to the necessities of life outside of work.

My personal collision with the shortcomings of digital productivity hacks came during the first year of the pandemic, when many people were feeling particularly isolated and feral. Without the benefit of the routines that I’d constructed for myself in day-to-day life in the outside world, time passed without notice, and I had trouble remembering what I was supposed to be doing at any given time. I set reminders for myself, opened accounts on task-management platforms, tried different kinds of note-taking software. It was all a wash. At the end of my rope, I pulled out a notebook and pen, and flipped to a clean page. I made a list of all the things I could remember that I’d left hanging, broken down into their simplest component parts—not clean the apartment, but vacuum, take out the trash, and change your sheets.

It worked. When I made a list, all of the clutter from my mind was transferred to the page, and things started getting done. It has kept working, years later, any time I get a little overwhelmed. A few months after my list-making breakthrough, I tried to translate this tactic to regular use of a planner, but that tanked the whole thing. I just need a regular notebook and a pen. There’s no use in getting cute with it. Don’t make your to-do list a task of its own.

All of this might sound preposterously simple and obvious. If you were born with this knowledge or learned it long ago, then I’m happy for you. But for people like me for whom this behavior doesn’t come naturally, that obvious simplicity is exactly the genius of cultivating it. Your list lives with you on the physical plane, a tactile representation of tasks that might otherwise be out of sight and out of mind (or, worse, buried in the depths of your laptop). It contains only things that you can actually accomplish in a day or two, and then you turn the page forever and start again. If you think of more things that need to be on the list after you think you’re done making it, just add them. If you get to the last few things on the list and realize they’re not that important, don’t do them. This type of to-do list doesn’t take any work to assemble. It isn’t aesthetically pleasing. It doesn’t need to be organized in any particular way, or at all. It’s not a plan. It’s just a list.

If you’d feel more convinced by some psychological evidence instead of the personal recommendation of a stranger with an aversion to calendars, a modest amount of research has amassed over the years to suggest that I’m on the right track. List-making seems to be a boon to working memory, and writing longhand instead of typing on a keyboard seems to aid in certain types of cognition, including learning and memory. My own experience is in line with the basic findings of that research: Writing down a list forces me to recall all of the things that are swimming around in my head and occasionally breaking through to steal my attention, and then it moves the tasks from my head onto the paper. My head is then free to do other things. Like, you know, the stuff on the list. There are no branded tools you have to buy, and no subscriptions. It cannot be monetized. Write on the back of your water bill, for all I care. Just remember to pay your water bill.

Retailers Bet Wrong on America’s Feelings About Stores

2023-09-01T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

The Bass Pro Shops is bigger than you think it will be. This is true of all of the outdoorsy retailer’s locations, but it’s especially true of the one retrofitted into a 32-story metal pyramid on the banks of the Mississippi River. Located in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, the mammoth structure once held an arena for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. Now it houses the largest Bass Pro Shops in the world, a hunting-, fishing-, and camping-gear store that has been merchandised with Disney-level production values and expanded to encompass a hotel with more than 100 rooms, a wild-game-themed outpost of the Wahlburgers restaurant chain, several enormous lake sturgeon swimming in shallow pools between departments, and at least three live alligators, among other things.

At 535,000 square feet of retail space, this Bass Pro is almost five times the size of the average Walmart. But even that number doesn’t quite capture its almost farcical grandeur. I visited twice last week on a four-day bachelor-party excursion (long story)—once for a DJ night on the pyramid’s third-floor terrace (again, long story), and once more just to wander around the sales floor, which is full of man-made streams and faux cypress trees dripping with decorative Spanish moss. The store’s motif is “lost wilderness,” but I found that it conjured something even more distant: the old-school department store.

Around the turn of the previous century, well-stocked, well-staffed commercial cathedrals sprang up in American cities, delighting a new consumer class. Stores such as Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, and Marshall Field’s not only sold stuff but also positioned themselves as centers of city life, with in-house restaurants, lavish concerts and entertainment, even free child care. Today, most of these stores no longer exist. Those that persist lost the capacity to awe a long time ago, withered down to unkempt, sparsely staffed caverns of clothing racks and scuffed floors.

The department-store dinosaurs died out for a whole host of complex reasons: the rise of Walmart and Amazon, the economic decline of their middle-class customer base, ossified corporate management, private-equity strip-mining. The most recent tale that retailers have been spinning about their own demise is that of consumers’ widespread preference for online shopping. But that theory doesn’t exactly stand up to scrutiny, and lots of stores may have already doomed themselves by using it for too long as a pretense for quick-and-dirty expense slashing. As I wandered contentedly over the wooden-plank walkways in the Bass Pro’s fake forest, alongside crowds of shoppers with armfuls of soon-to-be purchases, it was hard to ignore one problem that retailers are loath to acknowledge: Going to a store that’s actually good at being a store is all too rare.

In the past few weeks, a handful of data points have emerged to bolster this notion. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that one bright spot remains in American commercial real estate, even as landlords and brokers try to figure out what can be done with the country’s surplus of office space: retail leases. Construction of new retail space bottomed out during the Great Recession and never really got back up to speed. But so far this year, about 1,000 more brick-and-mortar retail stores have opened nationwide than have closed, even with the loss of national chains such as Bed Bath & Beyond. Demand for shop space has stayed buoyant in spite of inflation and high interest rates. Some direct-to-consumer brands that originally forswore brick-and-mortar retail, such as Warby Parker and the bed-linens brand Parachute, have accelerated new store openings in the years since the pandemic’s peak. As it turns out, lots of people still want to try on new shoes or lie down on a new mattress in person.

[Read: You will miss Bed Bath & Beyond.]

As The Wall Street Journal notes, this spate of new openings isn’t evenly distributed. These new stores are disproportionately likely to have opened in modern or high-end malls and shopping centers in higher-income areas. In part, that’s likely because the math of building a pleasant store is just more likely to work out if you’re selling more expensive products. Consumers who are less price-sensitive can handle higher markups, and better margins mean more money sloshing around to ensure that stores always look good and are generously staffed with pleasant salespeople. On the higher end, sales require both the customers and the products to feel special.

You might not think of Bass Pro as a luxury store—its ubiquitous logo trucker hats cost a measly six bucks—but it functions under this logic as well. The Memphis store is a flagship just like grand Chanel or Louis Vuitton boutiques in the world’s fashion capitals: lavishly appointed and intended to serve as a marketing vehicle for the brand as a whole, whether or not the specific location is profitable. Bass Pro is a privately held company, so it’s difficult to determine whether any particular part of its business makes it into the black, but in a leaked 2016 presentation to lenders, the company listed 50 percent gross profit margins, and new megastores in Texas, Ohio, and Colorado are in the works. Lots of serious outdoor gear is very expensive (as is the less serious stuff for people in the suburbs cosplaying as outdoorsmen), and some stores also serve as dealerships for fishing boats, four-wheelers, and other sports vehicles. Many of the floor models on display alongside the sturgeon were priced well into the five figures. If you can’t afford one, you can still come in, look at the fish, buy a hat and a bag of store-brand saltwater taffy, and take a selfie on an ATV. (I speak from experience.)

At the low end, the math on well-run stores has gotten worse and worse with time. Companies push prices and expenses as low as possible, which means that stores tend to be understaffed, poorly merchandised, and disorganized. And at any price level, the charms and conveniences of in-person shopping have to be cultivated, which requires corporate oversight that actually understands and values the reasons that people like going out to shop in the first place—a rarer quality in high-level retail management than you might think. But the fact remains: More than 80 percent of retail purchases made in America are still made in person, and industry experts generally agree that that number won’t bottom out in the near future. If you want to sell as much stuff as possible, the internet alone will get you only so far. Eventually, you’ll still need stores, and you still need to find ways to entice people into them, even if you’re not going to invest in all of the bells and whistles.

[Read: American shoppers are a nightmare.]

The recently announced marriage of convenience between the fast-fashion elder statesman Forever 21 and the Chinese upstart Shein is one way to try to do that—and another data point in favor of physical retail’s staying power. Shein, which sells an enormous assortment of very cheap clothing and home goods that ship to American buyers directly from China, has stirred plenty of consumer interest in the U.S., but it doesn’t have any permanent stores in the country. As part of the deal, Shein will have the opportunity to stock its clothes in Forever 21 locations in the U.S., creating what’s called a “shop in shop.” (Forever 21 will also sell its wares on Shein’s website, but the implications of that are a story for another day.) This move has considerable upsides for both companies: Forever 21 has hundreds of stores across America, but the company has been struggling against more stylish and efficient foreign competitors, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Shein, on the other hand, has lots of teenage and 20-something fans and scads of ultracheap product, but it doesn’t have anywhere for Americans to interact with its clothes before they buy them. That’s a considerable roadblock to Shein’s continued expansion, because it has a reputation for poor quality and irregular fits. Shein’s temporary pop-up stores—an ever more common tactic—in the United States have been mobbed with shoppers.

People want to leave their house and go out into the world and do things. Concert tickets are in huge demand, hotels are full, flights are booked up, restaurant reservations are impossible to get. Long before the pandemic put so much of American life online, some retailers assumed that the internet would wipe out our need to buy things in person, and acted accordingly. But that was never going to be true, and the inadequacy of internet-based life has become screamingly clear for millions of people in the past few years. Now many of the stores that want those people’s business are going to need to figure out how to retrofit a genuinely good shopping experience into the real estate they’ve left languishing for years. Some of these locations are almost certainly too far gone. But if good merchandisers can put a theme-park-quality Bass Pro into a largely abandoned pyramid, they can probably do anything—as long as they have the budget for it.

Bama Rush Is a Strange, Sparkly Window Into How America Shops

2023-08-23T16:59:00-04:00

When taking inventory of their rush outfits, the sorority hopefuls at the University of Alabama typically get bogged down in the jewelry. Clothes for the week-long August ritual colloquially known as Bama Rush tend to be simple: Imagine the kind of cute little sleeveless dress that a high-school cheerleader might wear to her older cousin’s outdoor wedding, and you’re on the right track. If you had to spend all day traipsing up and down Tuscaloosa’s sorority row in the stifling late-summer heat, you too would probably throw on your most diaphanous sundress and wedge-heeled sandals and call it a day. The jewelry, by comparison, piles up—stacks of mostly golden rings and bracelets, layers of delicate chain necklaces, a pair of statement earrings to match every flippy miniskirt.

On #BamaRushTok, the informal TikTok event that has coincided with actual sorority recruitment at UA since 2021, a subset of the roughly 2,500 prospective sisters documents the experience in real time for an audience of millions. These missives frequently take the form of a long-standing internet staple: the outfit-of-the-day post, or OOTD. In their videos, the girls offer an update on the secretive rush process, plus an exhaustive—or, as the week wears on, exhausted—accounting of everything they’ve put on their bodies for the day ahead, sometimes including details as small as hair accessories or as invisible as perfume. The result is a rapid-fire onslaught of brand names local and global: Kendra Scott, Free People, the Pants Store, Cartier, Target, David Yurman, Enewton, Louis Vuitton, Shein, Francesca’s, Dior, Lululemon (not to be confused with Lulu’s, which is also popular).

To those without much interest in fashion, the lists can sound like gibberish. One RushTok star had to clarify to viewers that when she said that her shoes or bracelets were from Colombia, she meant the country of her mother’s birth and not a boutique they’d never heard of. Most of the outfits are a mishmash of brands at wildly disparate price levels; listen closely, and you’ll hear about Hermès bangles on the same wrists as those from Amazon. Bama Rush may attract a huge audience because it offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at an intensely cloistered world, but these outfit inventories are fascinating for the opposite reason: They’re a point-by-point lesson in how America shops.

[Read: There’s no secret to how wealthy people dress]

At first blush, it would be fair to think that the habits of those partaking in Bama Rush don’t have much to tell us about broader trends—in consumerism, or in anything else. At UA, rush participants come from a very narrow demographic. They’re overwhelmingly thin, well-tanned, conventionally attractive teenagers. A startlingly high proportion of them are blond. (Startling even for me, having spent a semester as a Delta Gamma at the University of Georgia in the mid-2000s.) Panhellenic sororities long resisted integration and are still by any measure white organizations, especially in the Deep South; in 2021, Alabama’s rush class was almost 90 percent white, even though white people make up about two-thirds of the state’s overall population. The University of Alabama’s admissions stats show a preference for wealthy students that isn’t much different from that of the Ivy League, and data available suggest that students from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to pursue Greek membership.

But it’s precisely this demographic narrowness that makes potential new sorority members—PNMs, in Greek jargon—a useful case study in status-seeking, and therefore in modern consumerism. In instances of extreme privilege, broad shopping trends have traditionally not been all that hard to parse: Rich people buy nice things, and a shared understanding of those possessions helps them identify one another as members of the same exclusive class. In part, sorority recruitment at schools like Alabama formalizes this process according to each campus’s chapter hierarchies. At the top of the sorority heap, you’ll usually find houses full of the most conventionally attractive girls from wealthy, socially prominent families. The potential upsides of an invitation to a good sorority—one in which your sisters’ parents have the power to give you a dream internship or write you a particularly compelling recommendation letter to your first-choice law school—are not lost on these young women, even if they also very much want to forge real friendships, meet cute frat boys, and find a sense of belonging. This mixture of ambitions would be identifiable in almost all college students, but Greek life gives it structure.

credit: Jill Frank

As is the case with any type of high-status group, the best way to gain entry is usually to demonstrate that you already belong—in this case, that you understand the norms and expectations that knit the group together. That’s why rush outfits have long been a point of emphasis among PNMs, and why they have primacy on RushTok. When you’re getting relatively brief periods of face time to make your case for joining a socially and economically elite group, your clothing and appearance really matter. A head full of obviously unnatural but perfectly toned bright-blond hair, for example, costs hundreds of dollars a month to maintain. Its presence suggests both a fluency with the group’s aesthetic standards and access to the economic resources necessary to adhere to them at all times. So, too, do $600 Golden Goose sneakers and a wrist full of $400 David Yurman bracelets (stacked with one $7,350 Cartier Love bracelet, if your parents really want to let the world know they’ve raised a queen bee).

[Read: Fashion has abandoned human taste]

Now, however, the RushTokers just as cheerfully admit to wearing unbranded Amazon junk and some of the cheapest apparel on Earth. For much of mass-market-fashion history, the very highest- and lowest-end products would have made strange bedfellows in a single outfit. Consumers have long existed in more predictable price strata and stores, which had to contend with the limiting realities of geography and real estate while serving consumer bases that were fairly well defined. There was little reason for a rich person to browse racks of clothes intended for those of more modest means. There were exceptions, but they were widely regarded as eccentric or daring; Sharon Stone’s pairing of a crisp, white Gap button-down and a Vera Wang skirt at the 1998 Oscars immediately became a milestone in fashion history. At the time, wearing high fashion with a mass-market mall brand (which wasn’t even that cheap!) was unthinkable, and particularly so in a moment of intense fashion scrutiny.

The twin forces of online shopping and garment-industry deregulation changed that. The internet has caused a kind of consumer-context collapse: You’re no longer seeking out products to evaluate and choosing which establishments you enter. Instead, those products are pursuing your attention, usually unbidden through targeted ads online and especially on social media. The mechanics of spending $10 or $1,000 through your phone feel largely identical. While Americans have been getting used to this new system, the domestic clothing market has been flooded with cheap clothes from overseas factories in volumes that would have been illegal to import a few decades ago. If you come across a cute $20 dress, of which there are now thousands available online, why not try it? Not even moments of intense, explicit status-seeking such as sorority rush can blunt the allure of fast fashion, regardless of the habit’s obvious wastefulness or the buyers’ financial wherewithal.

Cheap clothes’ omnipresence has come to feel normal to many people, and especially to those who are young enough to have known no previous reality. Under those circumstances, even the people who can afford (or, often in the case of Bama Rush, whose parents can afford) the best of everything tend to end up wearing an Amazon workout set that a friend on their high-school track team swore by, or some jewelry from H&M to make their layers of real gold necklaces and bracelets look a little more robust. By the same measure, luxury goods have become much more aggressively marketed to middle- and working-class people in the past several decades, which has helped luxury conglomerates expand their sales to a far larger market. Rich people trade down in search of quantity and ease, less rich people trade up in search of status and quality, and everyone’s buying habits start to look more similar than they ever have before. Once everyone has agreed that it’s fine to fake it a little bit, refusing to play along eventually just makes you look like a try-hard or a snob. The norms and expectations you have to live up to have shifted. Make no mistake, though. You’re still trying very, very hard.

Make the Collabs Stop

2023-08-18T10:27:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Earlier this year, while waiting for the subway, I encountered one of the most revolting pairs of shoes I’ve ever seen on the feet of a fellow commuter. They were the unholy spawn of a Gucci loafer and an Adidas sneaker. The design mushed together the noncomplementary traits of both brands: a slender black-leather upper with Gucci’s signature brass horsebit hardware, three white stripes on either side, and an inch-tall wooden heel stamped with a golden Adidas trefoil logo. They were the footwear equivalent of semiformal gym shorts. They looked like the shoes of a meathead leprechaun.

The offending loafers are a product of the ubiquitous marketing tactic (and frequent aesthetic boondoggle) known as the collab. In the case of Gucci and Adidas, a sweeping product partnership between the two companies has yielded hundreds of pieces of co-branded clothing, shoes, and accessories since 2022: Logo bucket hats, ribbed-knit sweats, brightly colored leisure suits, handbags straight out of a Pan Am stewardess’s work wardrobe, a golf bag swathed in Gucci’s monogram fabric. These products have garnered an enormous amount of attention from celebrities and fashion media. In December, the college quarterback Caleb Williams wore a plaid Gucci x Adidas suit, complete with three stripes down the body of the jacket and each pant leg, to collect his Heisman Trophy.

Not all of the companies that undertake collabs will have the juice to charge $1,100 for horrendous shoes, but many, many consumer brands have tried their hand at their own version of the gambit. Hidden Valley, a salad-dressing company, and Van Leeuwen, an ice-cream company, released ranch-flavored ice cream. Dolce & Gabbana and Smeg introduced Sicilian-print appliances. Le Creuset and Warner Bros. teamed up for a Harry Potter–themed set of Spellcasting Spatulas.

[Read: The candy you (probably) won’t get to try]

These pairings have become only more numerous, and if the concept of ranch ice cream didn’t already make it clear, their results have tended to get more surreal, more cynical, and more exhausting over time. Enough, already. Make the collabs stop.

Collab, as you have likely already surmised, refers to a collaboration. Everything about collabs is similarly obvious. When two brands love each other and want to make a baby, they draw up terms that usually entail working together on a set of new products that bear both parties’ branding. They then heavily advertise their release to their respective customer bases. If a collab meets a particularly enthusiastic response, these partnerships are sometimes extended for additional rounds of new products. But most are a one-off branding arbitrage, allowing each party to promote itself to a larger audience under the guise of their combined specialness.

Collabs happen in all kinds of consumer markets, but they’re especially popular in fashion and food because they provide a little bit of novelty and hype in markets where consumers can generally be persuaded to keep buying as long as there’s a constant churn of new products. In many cases, their primary purpose is promotional: A clothing brand or fast-food restaurant might release new products on its own to little fanfare or media attention, but when two brands collab, suddenly that’s news. And generating news is a more reliable source of consumer attention than traditional advertising by a mile. Similar motivations have long driven celebrity-endorsement deals and movie-themed lunch boxes, but collabs are distinct in that they involve two (or, exhaustingly, sometimes now three or more) established consumer brands.

The collab trend as Americans currently know it began around the turn of the millennium, in the then-humble environs of Target. In 1999, the retailer, largely regarded at the time as just another big-box discount store, hired the architect Michael Graves to design a small line of affordable housewares. The products were a huge hit, and in 2003, Target expanded into fashion collabs with a line from the designer Isaac Mizrahi; a year later, the fast-fashion behemoth H&M took a page from Target’s playbook and released a collection with another big-name designer, Karl Lagerfeld. Both companies still regularly partner with high-end brands for limited runs of clothing and accessories, and the releases are often still met with shelf-clearing consumer mania. In one particularly memorable instance, Target’s website crashed under the rush of people trying to buy inexpensive knitwear and home decor from the luxury-fashion company Missoni. That, too, is another essential element of the collab: artificial scarcity, wielded (the collaborators hope) to whip people into a buying frenzy.

Around the same time that Target and H&M were spinning up their first high-low lines and basking in the glow of their newfound association with luxury, the designer Marc Jacobs, then the creative director at Louis Vuitton, was proving that the tactic could work even when there was no promise to make anything affordable. Vuitton released its first collection of bags embellished by the artist Stephen Sprouse in 2001. More artist mash-ups would follow, including with Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami. Vuitton, which until Jacobs’s arrival had been a staid, somewhat boring luggage and handbag brand, got a dose of art-world cool; the artists got face time with the brand’s enormous, moneyed clientele. All told, the brand has been part of some of the most lucrative collabs of all time. In 2017, Vuitton’s collab with the streetwear brand Supreme—then already highly influential for its “drop” model of releasing new inventory, which milks artificial scarcity for all it’s worth—was met with only slightly less of a media blitz than the moon landing.

As with anything, there are good collabs and bad collabs. The good ones have some sort of clear internal logic for why they should exist. In fashion, an apparel company might turn over its enormous design and manufacturing resources to an up-and-coming talent, which marks the brand as participants in the zeitgeist, provides exposure and a significant paycheck to a young designer, and yields a more interesting, forward-thinking product than the company would generate on its own. Other times, there’s some kind of reasonable affinity between two different companies’ audiences, such as when New Balance designed a few pairs of shoes with the medical-scrubs brand Figs. (Health-care workers tend to be influential in the sneaker market in ways that go largely unrecognized; nurses played a notable role in popularizing Hokas, for example.) A good collab doesn’t guarantee a good product—the larger partner might not cede enough creative control, among other things—but it at least presents an opportunity for one.

[Read: Cool people accidentally saved America’s feet]

The bad collabs—which are, I would argue, most of them—are more like consumer-brand Mad Libs. They generate products that make no clear case for their own existence, such as when Kraft and Juicy Couture got together to produce some bedazzled velour mayonnaise-themed tracksuits, or New Balance’s recent collab with Blue Bottle Coffee, which is just a pair of white sneakers with the coffee brand’s logo on the back. (New Balance’s hit-or-miss collabs are a real inside you there are two wolves situation.) But trying to judge a collab on its design merits is beside the point. The primary value created in these scenarios is in the press release announcing them, which might get them written up in the media as if their existence is of real import to the reading public, or which might make them the subject of some viral social-media posts. Whether the attention is positive or negative scarcely matters. The brands involved have set up shop in a corner of your brain, even if for just a few moments, and that’s all they wanted to do in the first place.

If, say, 95 percent of this garbage vanished from the face of the Earth tomorrow, no one would miss it. You might have noticed by now that we’ve talked a lot about what the companies involved in collabs get out of their continued popularity, and not very much about what regular people get from having this constant churn of largely meaningless novelty shoved in our faces. That’s because, in most cases, actual consumers get nothing except more junk. This sort of branding chicanery is an exercise that creates value on paper, but rarely ever gleans anything meaningful in reality. Most collabs—even many of the plausibly good ones—are little more than a status hustle. A set of existing signifiers is recompiled, and their acquisition is turned into a competition to see who can shop the best and spend the most money. The prize is a pair of shoes that cost $1,100 and look so ugly that beholding them feels like a sin against God.

Drinking Water Is Easy

2023-08-14T11:24:00-04:00

Over the past few decades, what Americans want out of their beverages has swung wildly between two extremes. In the 1990s, sweet drinks were all the rage. Soda sales were on what seemed like a limitless upward trajectory. Quaker bought the then-ascendant Snapple brand for $1.7 billion in cash, a sum that made me actually snort when I read it in the harsh light of 2023. Gimmicky drinks such as Surge, Orbitz, and SoBe “elixirs” crowded grocery-store shelves. As a middle schooler in the late ’90s, my consumption patterns were practically a case study in the era’s marketing magic. I’m not sure a single drop of plain water ever touched my lips outside of soccer practice.

Toward the end of that decade, the first evidence of the coming reversal was already visible. Skepticism (most of it warranted, though some of it not) toward sugar and artificial sweeteners steadily grew. The soda giants, reading the room, began marketing their own bottled-water brands to compete with the more fashionable likes of Evian and Perrier. Dasani and Aquafina came right on time: As soda sales faltered, bottled-water sales took off. In 2016, the Beverage Marketing Corporation estimated that, for the first time, Americans consumed more bottled water—almost 40 gallons per capita on average—than carbonated beverages. Tap water, too, has found a new home in an ever-increasing number of reusable water bottles. New Stanley cup, anyone?

Americans, in short, got sold on hydration. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu recently wrote, how much water any particular person needs to drink to maintain a healthy baseline is still the subject of significant disagreement among experts. But in the absence of clear guidance—and with plenty of encouragement from the health-and-wellness industry—many people seem to have simply decided that more is more, and they shoot for as much as a gallon a day.

That isn’t to say that everyone likes drinking all this water. As the nation has disciplined itself to refill its glasses, Americans have been forced to confront the inconvenient reality that drinking plain water day in and day out can be kind of a chore. To choke it all down, they’ve returned to powders and concentrated syrups designed to make water more palatable, more healthful, or both. Sweet drinks are back again, albeit in a different form. Enter the water enhancer.

Today, products meant to gussy up your water are everywhere at grocery and convenience stores. They come in little brightly colored squeeze bottles or single-serving packets. The sales pitch is pretty simple: Throw one in your purse or laptop bag, and instead of buying a packaged beverage, you squirt a couple of drops of syrup or mix a tablespoon or two of powder into regular water. Voilà. Now water is better. This is not exactly a new type of product: Powdered mixes from Crystal Light and Gatorade were around in the 1980s. But unlike the water enhancers of yore, today’s mixes are mostly portioned for single servings instead of big batches.

[Read: You’re probably drinking enough water]

According to Phil Lempert, a grocery-industry expert and the founder of the website Supermarket Guru, water enhancers split into roughly two categories: low-calorie flavorings, such as Kraft Heinz’s highly concentrated MiO drops, and hydrating sports (or hangover) drinks, such as powdered electrolyte packets from Liquid I.V. Both MiO and Liquid I.V. debuted in the early 2010s. Within a few years, competitors including LMNT, Cure, and Buoy entered the market, along with the new entrants from old brands, Crystal Light and Gatorade among them. Most of these brands boast about their products’ low sugar content; even some of the enhancers flavored to taste like Skittles, Starburst, or other candy rely on artificial or alternative sweeteners and have few calories. Other ingredients have been incorporated into new products: Companies such as Cure now make caffeinated concentrates. Liquid I.V. has a powder that includes melatonin for sleep. Lots of other products now contain additional vitamins, minerals, or electrolytes. Many water enhancers have become, in essence, drinkable supplements.

Water enhancers’ rise can easily be charted in sales numbers. Darren Seifer, the food-and-beverage-industry analyst at the consumer-data firm Circana, told me that although the products are still a small part of the overall beverage market, they’ve seen consistent growth. In 2022, sales volume of sports-drinks mixes—the category in which the firm places most water enhancers—was up 15 percent over the previous year. According to Seifer, the growth has been much larger for some brands. A spokesperson for Liquid I.V., which was bought by Unilever in 2020, told me that the brand’s sales have nearly doubled in each of the past four years.

Like so many cultural phenomena, water enhancers also have become the subject of a viral trend. WaterTok, a subset of TikTok where users mix and match different powders and syrups into recipes inside giant insulated water bottles, flooded the internet earlier this year with tips on how to make tap water taste like, among other things, birthday cake. (Like most TikTok trends, it’s a little extreme, and it doesn’t seem to be especially indicative of how regular people end up using the products. TikTok Franken-water sounds sort of terrifying, and some health experts have expressed concern over its potential misuse as a weight-loss aid.)

The whole concept of water enhancement can be pretty easy to mock: Why, exactly, can some people not find it within themselves to drink regular water? Why do they need it to taste like Skittles? Why do some people think a random wellness company might actually be able to improve on water, of all things? Once you’ve got the water in your glass, just stop there! Drink that! And yes, drinking Jolly Rancher aspartame water does strike me as more ludicrous than just having a Diet Coke. But if you let go of your immediate revulsion at the occasional licensed candy branding and consider water enhancers as a concept on its merits, you’ll find that even the worst of the bunch isn’t functionally much different than a sugar-free sports drink or low-calorie lemonade. In most cases, they’re arguably better if your goal is to stay hydrated, have a little treat, and have some say in how much sugar or sweetener you consume in the process.

[Read: Being alive is bad for your health]

There’s little reason to believe that the people who use water enhancers are doing so at the expense of the plain water that they’d be drinking otherwise. Americans’ consumption of plain water remains, by all indications, robust. It’s mostly sales of soda and juice that are generally sluggish, which at least hints that, for a lot of the people who like those types of drinks, the trade-off that’s actually being made is between water enhancers and some kind of heavily sweetened beverage. In a lot of cases, that trade-off seems positive, on balance, especially because the enhancers allow people to control how much sweetness actually goes into a drink. This does not guarantee that people consume lower concentrations of flavorings, but it at least allows them to do so if they want.

To fully understand why people are suddenly so enthusiastic about water enhancers, you also have to look outside of the beverage market and to the kinds of vessels that are so often used to consume them: reusable water bottles and high-capacity insulated cups. According to Circana’s data, the Hydro Flasks and Yetis and Stanleys of the world are still selling like hotcakes, and they present a significant shift in the physical reality of how a lot of Americans get their daily fluids—and, potentially, how much of those fluids they intend to be drinking. If you’ve already got 30 or 40 ounces of water on your desk at work, buying a Gatorade or coconut water or other premixed beverage to lug around with it makes less sense than it otherwise would, and having a couple of packets of sweetened electrolyte powder in your laptop bag is comparatively easy.

At the core of all of this is a fundamental anxiety. Americans want to do what they can for their health, but for so many people, the most meaningful changes—easier, more affordable access to nutritious foods; taking time for exercise; less stress—are difficult to achieve or outside of their control. Swapping out sugary drinks for plausibly healthier options might not be life-altering, but at least it feels like something. “It’s a low-hanging fruit, in terms of healthy behaviors,” Caleb Bryant, a food-and-beverage analyst at the consumer-data firm Mintel, told me. The same anxiety exists for people who buy bottled water regularly, which Circana’s Seifer points out is still a huge group whose numbers have not yet shown any decline. If you’re selling water enhancers, you don’t need to convert bottled-water drinkers away from a product they already like, as you would with a bottled drink—you just have to convince them that they might occasionally like adding something to it.

The enhancers have their limits. The freedom they confer can easily mislead consumers about how much better self-mixed drinks actually are: The experts I spoke with all agreed that at least some people seem to assume that no matter how much or what kind of water enhancer they use, their beverage will end up inherently healthier than something prepackaged, just because they get to see the water first before they add anything to it. In that way, the brands behind water enhancers are still very much profiting off of the confusing hydration hype that’s been separating people from their money in dubiously healthful ways for years.

[Read: All soda is lemon-lime soda]

On balance, though, water enhancers do seem to offer something desirable to people who want their water to be a little bit more palatable and the companies who want to sell to them. They are, on some level, a rare win-win: Water enhancers’ smaller, lighter proportions have significant upsides for the companies marketing them, according to Supermarket Guru’s Lempert. The beverage business as a whole is already a more profitable, less cost-intensive category in which to operate than many other sectors of the grocery industry, he told me, which likely helps account for all the upstarts flocking to the water-enhancer category—they’re inexpensive to produce and don’t spoil quickly. When you take away the necessity of buying plastic bottles and packing, shipping, and stocking heavy liquids, the beverage math gets even better. Consumers find some advantages in those differences too: They create less plastic waste (as long as you’re not always buying bottled water to use with them), take up less room in the pantry, and are sometimes less expensive per serving than a bottled alternative.

Ultimately, the biggest driver behind water enhancers’ popularity is probably just the nature of water itself. It’s great, but drinking a ton of it every day can become drudgery. These additive products play to a tendency to tinker with water in pursuit of health, stimulation, or pleasure that humans have had for thousands of years. Teas, coffee, beer, wine, and sweetened, fruity drinks such as aguas frescas were all developed because, on some level, water—humble and utilitarian as it is—just wasn’t satisfying all of the needs and desires that our forebears had. Now that lots of people believe they need to be downing liters of water every day for their health, they’ve rediscovered an age-old problem. Yes, water is great. But maybe it could be better, or at least more fun?

You do need to drink water; any downsides of erring on the side of overhydration don’t really kick in until the volume gets extreme. But forgoing a little fun or flavor in pursuit of perfect physical health is something that humans have never been particularly good at doing. One medieval religious text even cited drinking nothing but plain water as a just punishment for swearing against God. With that in mind, it might have been foolish to expect that in the 21st century, with so many alternatives available, copious amounts of plain water would be the widespread drink of choice for long.

Sports Betting Won

2023-08-09T17:31:00-04:00

There’s no such thing as a smart sports bet, but the first one I ever made was, by any measure, particularly stupid. It was late January 2022, and mobile-gaming apps had become legal in New York only a few weeks earlier. I had successfully ignored all of them until I saw Joe Burrow, the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, walk into Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City for the AFC Championship game wearing a sherpa coat, black turtleneck, huge gold chain, and rimless sunglasses. That man is not losing a football game today, I thought to myself.

When I saw Burrow’s outfit, I knew what to do immediately, even though I’d never really contemplated betting on sports before. Signing up for a new DraftKings account got me a $100 free bet, and I put it on the Bengals moneyline. Advertisements for gaming apps had blanketed virtually every surface of the city as soon as their use had become legal. Much of the same is true in the dozens of other states that have legalized mobile sports betting, and gambling is even inescapable in the places where you can’t do it: Frank discussion of betting odds and point spreads has become a marquee feature of sports media, where the topic had long been forbidden.

The sports-betting boom shows few signs of slowing. Yesterday afternoon, ESPN made an announcement that was both unprecedented and expected. This fall, in a 10-year, $2 billion deal with the gaming company Penn Entertainment, the most powerful sports-media company in the United States by a wide margin will launch its own digital sportsbook, ESPN Bet. The partnership, which will lead ESPN and its talent to promote the sportsbook on its television networks, website, and smartphone apps, cements a transformation that would have seemed all but impossible even five years ago. Betting, once completely excluded from mainstream sports, is now inextricable from nearly every level of the business. Gaming companies sponsor television coverage, put their names on arenas, operate sportsbooks in stadiums, and partner with teams. The game is over. Betting won.

For much of the modern history of professional sports, even the vaguest acknowledgments that some viewers might be interested in games for reasons other than a pure-hearted love were largely verboten. For decades, the NFL forbade the networks airing its games from even discussing point spreads. The convention slowly began to erode as fantasy sports became popular in the 2000s, but the real turning point came in 2018, when a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to legalize sports gambling. Five years and one ferocious gaming-industry lobbying push later, 36 states and Washington, D.C., have joined Nevada in doing exactly that. Most disruptive of all have been those that now allow bets to be placed in mobile apps, moving the sportsbook into America’s pockets.

When done with even a modicum of skill, bookmaking is an extremely profitable venture; people are, by and large, very bad at gambling. Suddenly, millions of new bettors who might have never sought out casinos can make impromptu bets on their phone while at a sports bar or on their couch, including wagers on moment-to-moment minutiae in live games, such as the outcome of the next play or at-bat. Companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel, which already had robust apps and large pools of existing users playing fantasy sports, were the first to capitalize on the gaming gold rush, along with well-known casino operators such as Caesars and MGM. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one in five Americans had gambled on sports in the previous year—a huge proportion of the population, considering that some of the country’s most populous states, including California and Texas, have so far resisted legalization.

Betting has become inescapable for even casual fans with no interest in it—app commercials are ubiquitous during game broadcasts, gaming jargon is a standard part of the sportscaster lexicon, and players and coaches now regularly get in very high-profile trouble for their own gambling exploits. Some less traditional sports-media outlets were quick to partner with gaming companies once legalization began, funneling readers toward existing services or opening their own. Now even powerful broadcast networks have fewer incentives than ever to stick to their hard-line stance on the topic. They can argue that viewer demands have changed, and that failing to get into the betting business would actually be a disservice to their audience. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said as much about betting coverage and partnerships in an interview with The Athletic last year: “It’s something that our fans are expecting from us,” he said. “So it’s not a ‘nice to have,’ it’s pretty much at this point a must-have.”

Regardless of demand, all that gaming cash has caught broadcasters at an especially weak moment. Although ESPN in particular is still enormously profitable—to the tune of billions of dollars a year—the decline of cable has made continued growth look difficult, and growth is what shareholders want. No matter how creatively you do the math, streaming subscriptions are unlikely to make up the difference. Media executives go where the money is, and right now, the biggest piles of new money are available to those who encourage viewers to gamble. If even ESPN can’t hold out, and apparently has no desire to try, then no one can.

Those piles of money are not guaranteed to save the business, or even be around for very long. The lavish, years-long marketing and promotional campaigns that have filled sports media’s pockets are designed to onboard new bettors in new markets en masse, and their huge expense means that many of the mobile betting apps are not yet profitable. Pressure on sportsbooks to make money has begun to increase, and it’s already killed Fox Bet, the closest existing analogue to what ESPN plans to launch this fall.

But in entering this market, ESPN has more advantages than any of its putative competitors—and more conflicts of interest. ESPN owns some or all of the broadcast rights to nearly every major sport in America, which means that it has enormous influence over how the entire business is conducted. It’s also the country’s biggest source of sports news, and how ESPN covers the industry already affects how unaffiliated sportsbooks set odds and how regular people make bets. Now ESPN will have its thumb on all three scales: influencing the leagues, informing the public, and setting the betting lines. (ESPN says that it will maintain a strict demarcation between its journalists and its betting operation.)

If you’re one of the (many, many) fans who find it irritating to now get much of your sports news filtered through the lens of what it means for bettors, the situation can only get worse as ESPN gets more centrally involved in gaming. Or maybe it’ll just turn you into a gambler against your better judgment, precisely as intended.

America Is Drowning in Packages

2023-07-29T07:00:00-04:00

When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall. By the time the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced on Tuesday that it had reached a tentative agreement with UPS that would avoid a strike and keep hundreds of thousands of union members on the job, those workers’ role in American life had changed fundamentally.

The new contract, which still needs to be ratified by the union’s members, came not a moment too soon. UPS handles a quantity of stuff so enormous that the company estimates its workers put their hands on roughly 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and the company delivers nearly a quarter of all American packages. Internet retail and the volume of delivery services required to fill it have made America ever more dependent on the difficult, labor-intensive work of what’s known as last-mile package delivery. The country’s infrastructure and workforce are still struggling to catch up.

Even in the Amazon age, the volume of packages now delivered in the U.S. can sound completely absurd. In 2000, the United States Postal Service—the country’s biggest parcel shipper—delivered 2.4 billion packages. By 2022, that number had ballooned to 7.2 billion. UPS now handles 5.2 billion domestic packages annually, versus the 3.2 billion it handled in 2000, and Amazon’s logistics operation, which did not start delivering its own packages in earnest until 2018, has become the country’s third-largest shipper, delivering almost 5 billion (but not nearly all) of the company’s packages last year. And all of these packages are going to a customer base that has been trained by retailers to expect packages to arrive in just a few days—far faster than turnaround expectations used to be.

You might only really notice the handful of packages that come to your home each week (three to four in an average household). But every single time you get one, that same day there are more than 50 million other people in the country refreshing their tracking info and checking their doorbell-camera feeds to see if their new shoes or prescription refill has arrived too. And those packages had to be loaded onto a series of trucks, driven to an address, and then carried to a welcome mat by humans.

Spraying America with a nonstop fire hose of parcels has consequences that are tough for workers and not always visible to the rest of us. More packages require more trucks on the road, which means more semis on the country’s interstates and more oversize delivery vehicles on residential streets, worsening traffic for everyone. These vehicles put enormous stress on roads and bridges, requiring more frequent repairs. Streets built primarily for passenger cars can be too narrow or have turns too tight for even the most skilled drivers of cargo vehicles to navigate easily, and conducting so many home deliveries a year inevitably results in accidents, stuck vehicles, and injuries. These same roads tend not to have easy spots for trucks to park when it’s time to actually make a delivery, so they block streets and create more traffic. And each driver has to do it over and over again, dozens of times a day, until the country’s tens of millions of daily packages are delivered and each of hundreds of thousands of cargo vehicles is empty.

Once a package is off the truck, things aren’t necessarily much easier. Across the country, the median age of local housing stock predates the wide adoption of online shopping, which means that most homes were built before so many of us were getting stuff delivered multiple times a week while away at work. Mailboxes are mostly still the size that they’ve always been, so drivers need to chuck your stuff onto your porch or behind a bush and hope for the best. In apartment complexes, just gaining entry can be a struggle, and many older properties don’t have a mail room big enough to store everything safely. Unless you live in a luxury building, you probably don’t have a front desk with an attendant to accept packages in your stead. And when a bunch of brand-new, unsecured stuff is lying around, some of it is bound to get stolen, though assuming theft can be misguided: Package volume is so high and getting them all to the right place is such intricate work that a lot of missing packages were simply misdelivered.

And yet the size of delivery workforces at the country’s major shippers has not increased at the same rate as the boom in packages and the ever-shortening customer expectations on shipping time. Many shipping companies have hired lower-paid part-time workers to fill the gaps instead of creating new full-time jobs, and a significant portion of Amazon’s deliveries are made by gig workers who use their own vehicles and are paid by the package.

Gig worker or not, all of this work takes place every day of the year and mostly outside, so drivers are handling more parcels and doing more physical labor in a climate that’s becoming more extreme, and they’re doing it largely in cargo vehicles that lack air-conditioning. UPS drivers have died on the job from heat exposure, and in negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS, air-conditioning for delivery vehicles became a major sticking point. (The union’s new contract, if ratified, would guarantee AC in new delivery vehicles and add better ventilation to old ones.)

Still, better pay and safety improvements are only the first steps to address the larger spectrum of issues that delivery workers face in moving around so many packages so quickly. Improvements to road and bridge safety are not sexy line items on government budgets, and the trucks will keep rolling whether those improvements are made or not. It may just be impossible to fully retrofit the delivery economy that’s been foisted on Americans by tech companies into the physical reality of daily life. Shippers are going to keep trying anyway.