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Amanda MullThe Atlantic |
What would it take for shoppers to get tired of cheap junk? In all the years I’ve spent covering American consumerism, I’ve heard one type of...
We’re in a golden age for food storage. So why is America’s paradigmatic container brand failing? For the first several decades of my life, most...
This is what happens when wealthy shoppers run headlong into actual scarcity. Should you want to own an Hermès Birkin handbag, there are two main...
Fans are doomed to keep paying more for merchandise they want less. Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a...
The company’s ad strategy: bludgeon you into knowing its name. Last night, the shopping app Temu, which is not quite a year and a half old, ran its...
The traditional diamond industry is thought to be under threat from lab-grown stones. But that’s not how luxury works. Last year, a funny thing...
No one can truly explain the cup’s feverish popularity. And no one has to. The world can be a baffling place. That’s true in many important...
Restocking season is getting out of hand. Now that the frenzy of the holidays has spat you out into the harsh light of the new year, you might be...
We’re in a golden age of gadgets for girlies. Every time I see a high schooler on TikTok flying through a tutorial of how she gets perfect beach...
An open embrace of cheap foreign products has helped Amazon take over the world. It also might guarantee Amazon’s eventual obsolescence. When...
I ventured into the belly of the holiday-returns beast. When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly...
The diamond industry achieved what is arguably the most successful corporate-marketing campaign of all time. This is an edition of Time-Travel...
Please, at least make me type in my shipping address. I’ve made many impulse purchases in my life, but the first one that I found genuinely...
TikTok’s experiment in shopping has quickly become another place to hawk products. TikTok would like to sell me a brush. Or, more specifically, an...
Please, not another “unexpected item in the bagging area.” When self-checkout kiosks began to pop up in American grocery stores, the sales pitch...
The quality of knitwear has cratered. Even expensive sweaters have lost their hefty, lush glory. In much of the United States, you can already feel...
Ballet flats are back. Are you old enough to know better? Ballet flats are back. Everyone’s saying it— Vogue , the TikTok girlies, The New York...
Make my brain function: check. Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people. Philosophically, the concept is a nightmare. Americans invest...