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Tag: commerce

  • A president touting Musk’s cars from the White House shows this: the Tesla boycott really irks him – The Guardian

    Personally I’ve always had my doubts about consumer boycotts, which at best tend to make the non-buyer feel good without achieving very much and at worst hurt ordinary employees with no power to grant whatever the boycotter wants. But Magaworld evidently believes in them, judging by the way Bud Light’s sales plummeted after it featured a trans influencer in a marketing campaign. And while there’s no justification for violence against car dealers, peacefully not buying stuff is the safest form of protest imaginable for anyone fearful of retaliation by this regime. You don’t have to risk getting arrested, fired or deported; you don’t even have to wave a placard. And for all Trump’s talk of campaigners “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla, you can’t be sued for not wanting to buy a car. That boycotts get under the president’s skin where nothing else – not court orders, not the barely disguised horror of old allies abroad – seems therefore to make a strange kind of sense. To a president who sees everything in terms of making money, it’s consumers who matter. And now their wrath is spreading well beyond Musk’s companies.

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  • I went to Homebase’s final day closing down sale and I was not ready for what I saw – Express

    As I walked into Homebase for the final time on Saturday afternoon, it was like seeing an old friend’s house being cleared after they’d passed away in hospital. The place is unrecognisable, what was once a store that’s been in the backdrop for several key moments of my life now reduced to a desperate fire sale … Staff were looking on forlornly as displays were ripped down, shelves were dismantled and the aisles themselves were taken apart. It was just a giant empty warehouse, bereft of any branding, with a miserable selection of a few last items on a table near the front, like a sad jumble sale. It was so desperate in there, people were buying the shelves themselves. Nothing was spared a price sticker. I saw one person buying what I can only assume was the microwave from the staff kitchen, since it was used and had no packaging. Others were loading up on wooden boards from the displays, shelving units, and you could buy a set of staff lockers for just £20.

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  • AI ‘inspo’ is everywhere. It’s driving your hair stylist crazy. – Archive Today: The Washington Post

    When a potential client approached event planner Deanna Evans with an AI-generated vision for her upcoming wedding, Evans couldn’t believe her eyes, she said. The imaginary venue was a lush wonderland, with green satin tablecloths under sprawling floral arrangements, soft professional lighting and trees growing out of the floor. “It looked like the Met Gala,” Evans said. The idea would have run the client around $300,000, she guessed, which was four times her budget. Evans delicately explained the problem — and never heard from the woman again.

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  • The future is too easy – Defector

    There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it. The air is all wrong, there’s simultaneously too much in it and not enough of it. Everyone I spoke to about the Consumer Electronics Show before I went to it earlier this month kept describing it in terms that involved wetness in some way. I took this as a warning, which I believe was the spirit in which it was intended, but I felt prepared for it. Your classically damp commercial experiences have a sort of terroir to them, a signature that marks a confluence of circumstances and time- and place-specific appetites; I have carried with me for decades the peculiar smell, less that of cigarette smoke than cigarette smoke in hair, that I remember from a baseball card show at a Ramada Inn that I attended as a kid. Only that particular strain of that particular kind of commerce, at that moment, gave off that specific distress signal. It was the smell of a living thing, and the dampness in the (again, quite damp) room was in part because that thing was breathing, heavily.

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  • Amazon’s Temu competitor Haul is an AI image wasteland – Modern Retail

    In Hensell’s view, the proliferation of these shoddy images is indicative of the type of seller Amazon has been recruiting for Haul. “A lot of these Chinese manufacturers, they’re built for volume,” she said. The fact that Amazon has so far allowed these listings to remain up, she went on, is a bad look for brands on Amazon’s dominant marketplace. “It degrades Amazon as a platform when you allow that kind of stuff to happen.”

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  • Introducing Amazon Haul—a broad selection of products $20 or less, with most under $10 – Amazon

    Building on this longstanding partnership, we’re introducing an experience in the Amazon shopping app and mobile website called “Amazon Haul” that provides customers in the U.S. a place to discover even more affordable fashion, home, lifestyle, electronics, and other products with ultra-low prices and typical delivery times of one to two weeks. Amazon Haul offers a wide selection of products—all priced $20 and under—backed by Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee, which protects customers when they buy in our store whether they are sold by Amazon or one of our selling partners.

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