Kaitlyn Tiffany | Vox

Patti Smith’s new memoir is a dreamy recollection of a terrible year

2019-09-20T19:38:03-04:00

Patti Smith at the Beach Goth Festival in Santa Ana, California, in October 2016. | Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

The Year of the Monkey, the third memoir by singer, artist, writer, and New York counterculture icon Patti Smith starts in San Francisco, at the Fillmore at midnight, with a stranger barfing on her boots. “Happy New Year,” Smith says to them, to kick off 2016.

Her longtime friend, the beloved rock producer Sandy Pearlman, is nearby on life support. She spends the book’s opening pages waiting out the end of his life, coasting through grief at a surprisingly-not-fictional motel by the ocean called the Dream Inn, and heading into an almost-definitely-fictional mystery: The beach, she says, is covered in thousands of empty candy wrappers, all of them a little bit odd (wrong spellings, weird colors), and nobody will tell her why. She drifts from diner to diner, occasionally overhearing what sounds like a clue. One day, the candy wrappers are on fire, creating a beautiful line of “toxic bonfires” full of “artificial autumn leaves.”

“What was needed was a bit of geometric thinking to lay it all out,” she tells herself, as if to kick off something cinematic, like a montage in a dusty reference library.

From there, Smith takes us through her life in the year of 2016 from start to finish. We follow her, as we always do, on a series of misadventures that she retells with enviable calm. She hitchhikes through the desert and gets left for dead. She meets weirdos and mystics in diners up and down the coast, then takes off for Kentucky to help the playwright Sam Shepard finish his final project, a novel called Spy of the First Person, which is about an old man wasting away. (Shepard died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in July 2017, and Smith eulogized him in the New Yorker.)

Smith’s decades-long friendship with Shepard — along with their tumultuous love affair in the 1970s — is a part of her mythology, one of the many connections she’s made by chance in some bar in Chelsea and that came to define the trajectory of her career. But it’s not often that she’s spoken of it in such personal and frank terms as she does in this book, setting down an image of one of the country’s greatest playwrights while he struggles to use his hands. She makes no effort to play up or explain her devastation, which is obvious: “He looked more like Samuel Beckett than ever, and I still harbored the hope that I would not be destined to grow old without him,” she confesses, before moving quickly forward.

This is Smith’s modus operandi. She unfurls a long dreamscape of a scene: the blue light of a country house at night, the horses, the rocking chairs. Then she punches you in the gut with the emotional point — even the people you can’t live without are, in fact, people you might outlive — and pulls you into another dream.

We follow Smith, as we always do, on a series of misadventures that she retells with enviable calm

In plainer places, Smith grounds The Year of the Monkey in the physical by running a very charming “but first, coffee” bit through it. The pursuit of coffee or the consumption of coffee comes up about once every 10 pages, and she pays special attention to establishments where the coffee is so good that it seems its makers are “in touch with God.”

Food was also a central focus of her 2015 memoir M Train — which dwells beachside in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy — as a device to tamp down some of Smith’s dreamier and more meandering trains of thought. (The city is disintegrating, but she can still get a bowl of soup, and here’s the soup.) In addition to granting some levity to her isolation, food serves a similar purpose in this book. Smith’s physical obsession with coffee drags her out of the unsolvable candy wrapper mystery and into a Venice Beach restaurant she’d rather not be in, ordering kale and yams even though she wants steak and eggs.

“The thing about dreams,” Smith recalls some random man explaining to her in a restaurant, “is that equations are solved in an entirely unique way, laundry stiffens in the wind, and our dead mothers appear with their backs turned.” Then she has coffee with cinnamon toast. On April Fool’s Day, she alludes to the presidential race, bringing up “the candidate” in the middle of a wandering prose poem about Alice in Wonderland, dwelling on the Mad Hatter and the end of time, conceding that her logic is full of holes. Then she explains how humidity has ruined her last can of Nescafé — coffee snatched away again, like Wile E. Coyote denied a bird dinner.

All three of Smith’s memoirs make it feel more possible to live a rich and moral life

Smith’s first memoir, Just Kids, which begins more or less with her arrival in New York City in the late 1960s and focuses on the years she spent living and collaborating with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award in 2010. When I first read it, I appreciated Smith’s skill with detail and mood, but resented her experience of the city: To me, it was another story about a New York I didn’t get to participate in. The one where rockstars roamed freely and starving artists could still afford studio space in Manhattan. The one with CBGB.

But the problem with getting mad at Smith for having lived a life so much richer than the average person’s is that she’s also so gifted at sharing it. When she describes the best plate of huevos rancheros she’s ever had, for example, she tells a glittery, mythic story about nearly drowning in Acapulco in 1972, which also involves a ring of red hawks that may or may not have been about to kill her. (She was saved by a local chef, who proceeded to serve her the aforementioned eggs.) Someone does ask her if she’s making the story up and she tells them, emphatically, no, she didn’t even embellish.

Imagine a life you don’t have to embellish! Even reading about one makes the world shimmer with possibility, briefly, the way it seems to have done for Smith on cue. In a flashback, she remembers Pearlman telling her she should front a rock band, which she found far-fetched and “extreme” at the time. Then she remembers relaying the suggestion to Shepard, who looked her in the eye and said she could do anything. “We were all young then, and that was the general idea,” she writes. “That we could do anything.”

“We were all young then, and that was the general idea. That we could do anything.”

But this book isn’t about being young, and it’s not about possibility. It’s about one woman’s 2016. It’s about getting older and seeing your loved ones die long before you — some of age, but more of disease and bad luck and negligence at the hands of an unfeeling country. Patti Smith is not a nostalgic narrator in the way we typically use the word; she’s much too smart to wish for the literal past. She comes off more like an artist whose life’s work was dreaming of a bolder and more interesting world, confronted now with the reality that many of the people around her did not want that world, and that they seem to have won out. To her credit, she doesn’t try to untangle why.

The Year of the Monkey, while full of riddles and fantasies and characters who appear once and never again, or twice in a way that seems impossible, makes some strange sense by the time it’s done. Grief on a colossal, national scale has a way of making the most personal, quotidian sufferings feel small and unimportant. At the same time, it makes those typical human tragedies appear suddenly of a piece with the world around them, and part of the same chain of events — as though the election of Donald Trump really did thrust us into an alternate universe in which everything ripples with the nonsense of nightmare, and all of our heroes are dead.

Smith starts the book believing in some dark magic, ends it paraphrasing the W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” which is perhaps more strongly associated with Joan Didion’s famous essay about the crumbling of California utopianism than it is its original subject matter, the prophesied return of Christ. It’s clear she is worried sick over whether events are connected, and if so, how. But on Trump himself, Smith says very little. “The bully bellowed,” she writes of election night.

By contrast, she writes beautifully of her friends, who have left her — as she expresses it in the epilogue — holding the bag.

Was Etsy too good to be true?

2019-09-04T17:13:59-04:00

A crafting station at Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters.

As a stockholder, Jeni Sandberg loves Etsy. As a vintage homegoods purveyor selling midcentury glassware and linens on Etsy’s platform, she can’t help but feel like she’s being played.

In July, the company announced it would be encouraging sellers to offer free US shipping on all orders over $35. Or rather, it announced that sellers who didn’t offer free shipping would be de-prioritized by the site’s highly competitive search algorithm, which — on a platform with more than 60 million things to buy — can be the difference between regular sales and functional invisibility.

There was a good argument for the new policy on the company’s end: Right now, customers add things to their cart and balk at shipping costs, then bounce from the site for good. We, as a consuming public, do not like to be forced to reconsider. We don’t stand for being disappointed even for a moment. We are, frankly, skittish. And people who make lightweight products — jewelry, pins, embroideries, T-shirts — can afford to eat a couple of dollars in shipping cost if it’s going to boost their sales overall.

But can a furniture maker? Can a woman who makes ceramic planters shaped like Frida Kahlo? Can a man who sells (heavy!) replicas of human skulls? The directive from the company has been to staple the cost of shipping onto the item’s price, which sellers have pointed out is not actually free shipping. It doesn’t help that Etsy changed its transaction fee from 3.5 percent to 5 percent last June — fair enough, it had been flat for 13 years, but still, the timing. Back-to-back summers!

“I’m like yeah, damn straight. Make everybody get free shipping,” Sandberg says, as a stockholder. “Believe me, I can’t wait for fourth-quarter earnings reports. It’s going to look like their gross sales skyrocketed. It’s going to look awesome on paper.” Then she adds, as a vintage homegoods purveyor, “But they’re screwing sellers to get there.”

When Etsy went public in 2015, it offered a participation program that let Etsy sellers buy stock before the offering. Sandberg bought $2,500 worth then, and she bought more right after the IPO, and she bought even more after Etsy announced its free shipping push. The cognitive dissonance she experiences every time Etsy announces a move that wrings additional revenue out of its sellers is the product of a tension that isn’t exactly Etsy’s fault. Have you heard of Amazon? In 2005, four months before Etsy launched, Amazon decided that everyone wanted things delivered fast and for free, and announced a service called Amazon Prime. Now, after a while of getting things delivered fast and for free, we agree this is something we need, the same way we agreed we needed phones that could access the internet or televisions that could record football games we missed or highways that could connect major cities.

What choice does Etsy have but to try to thrive in the new normal? It’s advertising on television now, gearing up for a marketing push around free shipping in mid-September, and implying to sellers that all of their financial concerns will vanish once Etsy is a true household name.

“Why would you expect free shipping from the nice lady in Iowa who hand-knits afghans? Why would you think that she would be able to do that for you?” Sandberg asks, hypothetically, of the customers Etsy says it has polled in robust surveys over the past few years. “If I were sending something to her, it would cost me $12. I understand that. I’m a grown-up.”

The lady hand-making afghans in Iowa has enough working against her, you know? Plus, as Sandberg explains, channeling the sentiment of Etsy’s 2 million sellers: “Etsy was supposed to be different.”

Etsy was founded in 2005 by Rob Kalin, a construction worker and bookseller in New York City looking for a way to sell handmade furniture on the internet. Most of his friends were looking for a way to sell handmade things too. None of his friends knew how to make an online shop, but he did. It was clear: He should make one shop for all of them and set them up to be, as he often says, “the protagonists of their own lives.”

The timing was perfect. E-commerce was just getting off the ground; Martha Stewart was getting out of prison! Women were running enormously popular and newly lucrative personal websites, where they posted their DIY projects and wrote about the value of their labor. “The new crafter wave is fueled by an intriguing alliance of the oldest and newest of social technologies, the sewing circle and the blog,” craft historian Glenn Adamson wrote shortly after. “In a sense, the 21st century of craft is beginning the way that the 20th did: by finding in tradition the possibility for social change.”

The timing was perfect. E-commerce was just getting off the ground; Martha Stewart was getting out of prison!

The mid-aughts conception of Etsy was heavily informed by Kalin’s friendship with New York University professor Jean Railla, creator of the early online crafting community Get Crafty, who wrote often about the handmade as an act of resistance against capitalism and patriarchy. Kalin’s vision for Etsy, as he told the Wall Street Journal in 2010, just 16 months before he would be ousted from his own company, is this: “Instead of having an economy dictate the behavior of communities, to empower communities to influence the behavior of economies.”

Crafters have tried to take down mass production before. The Arts and Crafts movement that took place in England and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. There was a boom in DIY-ism in the US after World War II, jump-started by the founding of the American Craft Council in 1943 and the sprawl of the suburbs, where there were always home projects to be done — a backlash, once again, against assembly-line goods and the American dream’s emphasis on cookie-cutter conformity. Feminists manipulated crafts to make various statements about gender and power from the 1970s all the way up through the riot grrrl movement in the 1990s, and continuing even now, with, most famously, thousands and thousands of (controversial) hand-knitted “pussy” hats.

But dreams of unmaking, by hand, what the Romanticist scholar and furniture designer William Morris called “the terrible organization of competitive commerce,” have historically been only that: dreams.

In the beginning, by all accounts, Etsy was the epicenter of the internet-age craft movement and its attendant community. About 90 percent of the early sellers were women — today it’s still 87 percent — and they were all making certifiably handmade objects: paintings, sweaters, porcelain bowls. Also, infamously, crocheted tampon holders. The buyers were other people like them. The company’s employees were people like them too.

The site’s first in-house counsel Sarah Feingold started selling jewelry on Etsy after graduating from law school, then bought herself a JetBlue ticket and explained to Kalin that his company needed at least one lawyer. The earliest Etsy office rented out spare desks to the editors of Make Magazine and a soon-to-be creator of the 3D-printing company MakerBot, as well as the co-founders of sewing community site BurdaStyle, Benedikta Karaisl and Nora Abousteit. Hanging out in the first Etsy offices, in a beat-up building in downtown Brooklyn, Kalin taught Karaisl and Abousteit how to use Adobe Illustrator, helping make the wireframes for the first version of their site.

Abousteit got a front-row seat to how things worked in Etsy’s earliest days. “There was this one woman who [worked there] who used to wake up every two hours just to curate the Etsy homepage,” she remembers. “It was really a passion. It was amazing. I mean, there wasn’t that much going on in the tech scene in New York, and also the whole craft-making scene was just starting, just budding.”

Soon after Etsy’s founding, the company started Street Teams: coalitions of crafters who could organize to get better treatment and fairer rent when they wanted to participate in art fairs or set up pop-ups. Kalin had plans to open “co-production” sites across the country, and he hosted public craft nights in the Etsy headquarters every Monday. In the New York Times, journalist and artist Rob Walker observed the early Etsy scene, writing, “This is not a utopian alt-youth framework; it’s a very real-world, alt-grown-up framework.” It was a gorgeous and daunting one, with the odds quite obviously stacked against it.

The press did not know what to do with Kalin, or with Etsy. Who would take Silicon Valley’s optimism to such a twisted extreme by excising the get-rich stuff that made it so sexy? Every reporter who wrote about Kalin paused for a moment to note that he made his own underwear.

Etsy grew quickly, but with strings. The New York venture capital firm Union Square Ventures put up a small amount of money in the summer of 2006, a year before it invested in Twitter. By 2008, venture capitalist Jim Breyer — a board member at Facebook and Walmart — was leading a $27 million funding round. Suddenly, a better life for crafters could not be the company’s only goal. It also had to make serious money for some people who are pretty serious about their money.

In a fit of twisted luck, that same year saw the start of a global recession that made the case for Etsy obvious. It was a moment when people were reluctant to spend money but expressed some desire to spend it in venues where it seemed as though it might directly benefit another person, and Etsy sold $10.8 million worth of goods in November 2008, up from $4.2 million in November 2007. The company was profitable for the first time the next year, and transactions doubled again between 2008 and 2009.

In a fit of twisted luck, that same year saw the start of a global recession that made the case for Etsy obvious

But the growth — and yet another round of VC funding — put even more pressure on Etsy. Chief technology officer Chad Dickerson had taken over as CEO after Kalin was voted out by the board in July 2011, and in October 2013, in an infamous town hall meeting at Etsy HQ, he announced that the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team.

Much of the community was aghast, fearing the change would ruin the culture of the site forever. But the decision was necessary; popular sellers were turning themselves into one-person factories, working 90 hours a week to make enough to keep up with demand and turn even a modest profit. It was silly not to be allowed to collaborate. It didn’t make sense to define “handmade” as “made from scratch by one person”; almost everybody has to use some kind of machine or buy supplies or incorporate something that didn’t go straight from the earth to their hands at one point or another. Litigating “handmade” wouldn’t be very modern. In itself, it seemed against the spirit of Etsy.

“I think the question of Etsy losing its way or abandoning its values is one that’s been reported five years ago, seven years ago, at many different points in time,” says Alison Feldmann, one of the company’s first employees, who started as an intern in 2007 and left the company in November 2017 as the director of brand and content. When she started, she was elated to be in the mix — filling the office with used desks from Craigslist, taking out the trash, saving the world. “As a progressive business, people are going to be taking potshots at any change that happens in terms of ‘selling out.’ You know, it isn’t a nonprofit. It is a capitalist world that we live in.”

Vania Scharbach opened her first Etsy store in 2007, soon after immigrating to Brooklyn from Brazil, where she sold handmade clothes in a brick-and-mortar storefront. At the time, she says, it was “so cool, the hipster eBay.”

Now it’s different: “I understand they’re a corporation and they need to make a profit, okay, but the thing is they went away from what they were, from the goals of the website.” A lot of the vintage clothing she sees is junk; a lot of the print-on-demand products are just a basic design that a third-party company slaps on a product and drop-ships to the customer.

“If I go buy 100 percent linen at a store in Manhattan and make a dress myself and list it on Etsy, I can’t sell that for less than $150,” Scharbach says. “Then when you’re shopping, you see these other listings for like $50, the same type of dress, it looks like the same quality. You buy it and you realize it’s not really linen, it’s made by a person but it’s made in a sweatshop somewhere. It’s hard to compete.”

Etsy refutes these kinds of concerns. “Our policies haven’t changed. You either have to be the person who made the product or the person who designed the product with a direct relationship with the people making it, or it has to be vintage and over 20 years old,” Etsy’s current CEO Josh Silverman says, asked about seller complaints that mass-produced, imported junk or boring, basically identical bridesmaid-font products are taking over the site. “If you look at the composition of products on the site, it’s the same. There is not an increase in products from bigger sellers.”

But I am looking at the site. When I typed “scarf” into Etsy, the first page of results included $6 pashminas and “custom satin edge scarves” with “Your Logo Here” photoshopped onto them ($9.99), and very few “handmade” listings that are priced anywhere near what an actual handmade scarf costs.

To me, this doesn’t read as “Etsy.” But to Etsy, in 2019, it does.

There are competing opinions about when exactly Etsy took the turn that would lead it here, but most agree that the company’s IPO was one of the stops along the way. The company had taken in a total of $97.3 million in venture money by the time it went public in 2015, and Etsy’s IPO was a big deal, imbued with surreal significance; The New York Times called it “an experiment in corporate governance, a test of whether Wall Street will embrace a company that puts doing social and environmental good on the same pedestal with, if not ahead of, maximizing profits.” But Wall Street did not embrace Etsy. Within two months, share prices dropped to about 50 percent of where they’d been when trading opened. Initially a smash hit, it soured quickly into one of the worst IPOs of the year.

“Handmade is not the value proposition — unique, personalized, expresses your sense of identity, those are things that speak to buyers”

Silverman, a former president of consumer products and services at American Express, former CEO of Skype, former CEO of eBay’s Shopping.com, co-founder of Evite, and so on, came in about two years later to put out what investors openly referred to as a fire. (“The house was burning and nobody was paying attention,” Etsy board member and Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson told the New York Times.)

Private equity firms and hedge funds were swarming around Etsy, buying up shares and giving off serious potential-hostile-takeover vibes, suggesting to the board that the company wasn’t growing fast enough, that it wasn’t focusing on profit, and that it was overspending. It wasn’t even making very smart technical operations decisions at the time, insisting on running its own servers rather than contracting with Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services. So the company fired 80 people, including Dickerson (who declined to comment for this article), and Silverman took over. Within two months he fired 140 more. He shut down major projects including Etsy Studio, a separate online store for craft supplies than had been live for less than a year.

Silverman doesn’t like the words “handmade” or “craft” because they “don’t communicate anything to buyers about when to think of Etsy.” he says now. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Gosh, I need to buy something handmade today,” he tells me, which may be true but I rarely wake up thinking I need to buy anything at all, and more commonly wake up in horror because I’ve already bought way too much.

“You need to furnish your apartment. You need to prepare for a party. You need to find a gift for a friend. You need a dress. Handmade is not the value proposition — unique, personalized, expresses your sense of identity, those are things that speak to buyers.”

Handmade is not the value proposition!

Three months before Rob Kalin was forced out of Etsy, Inc magazine ran a cover story about him, which ended up as an interrogation of whether he was fit to be the company’s CEO. The story is brutal, starting off with a parody of hipster Brooklyn and moving quickly toward the statement that Kalin is “given to eccentricities that can seem downright crazy.” Most notably, the reporter recounts Kalin pointing an “8-inch combat knife” at him for emphasis, in the middle of a sentence about his lack of respect for the tech and finance sectors.

“That was a letter opener!” he says when I ask about it, sitting at a handmade table surrounded by handmade chairs draped in pieces of wool purchased from sheep farmers located near his house and studio space in Catskill, New York.

The letter opener was made by someone on Etsy, he says, obviously, and he was just fidgeting while he was talking. He hates press. He hated that year, which “hurt like hell.” Now he has two young daughters — they picked a pint of blueberries for me before our interview — and he’s spent the past eight years dabbling in various things you might not necessarily want someone to just dabble in, like founding a school or starting a farm, but for the most part making stuff, same as always.

“It felt like my life’s work was being taken away from me,” he says. “But looking back, I’m glad that it happened. Making incremental improvements to a publicly traded company is not my bailiwick, that’s not what I would have been the best at anyways.”

(The Inc profile also quotes co-founder and early Etsy engineer Chris Maguire talking about Kalin’s management style, saying, “There would be a brand new idea every day. Usually it’d be something that didn’t even make sense. How are you supposed to teach blacksmithing over the internet?”)

He didn’t know what seed funding was when he took it, Kalin says. He didn’t really get what a startup was or understand the obligations of institutional money. Accepting the Union Square Ventures investment was probably the moment when things got away from him, he says now. “I didn’t have enough awareness of the context of what was going on there, in terms of if we take this step will it compromise the values.”

“How much money does Etsy have in its bank account and how much does the average Etsy seller have in their bank account?”

This was a long time ago, and Kalin has moved on, and it feels so far away, but that doesn’t mean that talking about it for a few minutes doesn’t bring out the hypotheticals. “Was any of this necessary? Could it have happened a different way? Do I have regrets?” he asks aloud. “I don’t know. I think I’ve gotten way too into Buddhism; I accept what happened. I have a lot of compassion for the people who are trying to run their businesses on Etsy and are being marginalized by these corporate decisions that clearly benefit the shareholders but not the stakeholders.”

He doesn’t pay attention to Etsy anymore because it doesn’t do anything he thinks is interesting. All of the news is about quarterly earnings and share prices, and he finds it boring to reduce a company to a small handful of numbers. He thought the new CEO’s name was Jason until I emailed him. He didn’t know about the free shipping push either, but the “Robin Hood in reverse” arrangement rankles him now that he’s been filled in.

Though he once dreamed of Etsy sellers making their livings selling things they made themselves, he knows now that was never really what happened for the vast majority. Even when he was CEO and things were small and maybe idyllic, only a fraction of a percentage of sellers were making more than $30,000 a year.

“How much money does Etsy have in its bank account and how much does the average Etsy seller have in their bank account? Who can afford to be more generous?” he asks, I assume rhetorically because he doesn’t pause for breath. “Yet here we are, the company is asking the sellers to be more generous with the company.”

“The world needs Etsy more than ever,” CEO Josh Silverman tells me. We’ve all been buried and desensitized by “the same commoditized products sold by these few logistics companies.” (Yes, he’s talking about Amazon.) The disposable things in life are piling up, arriving faster and cheaper every day — we buy them and they don’t mean anything to us — but on Etsy we can find the things that “should hold a place in your heart.”

Whether he means this or not is, in some ways, irrelevant: Josh Silverman’s Etsy is a runaway success. “Our sellers are selling more than a billion dollars a quarter of product,” he says, “and that’s growing at an ever-faster rate.”

The company’s revenue is up 65 percent since Silverman took over, and the share price has quintupled. The company is in the process of migrating everything to Google Cloud, which is significantly cheaper and easier than maintaining its own servers. The site has guest check-out and “buy it now” options. The search bar did not have autocorrect until 2017. In the company’s second-quarter earnings report this year, it reported a 37 percent revenue growth from the same quarter last year and listed as a highlight: “We completed the test and design phase to make free shipping a core part of the Etsy shopping experience.”

Sellers don’t have access to the same level of research as Etsy does, Silverman tells me. They’ll come to the forums and argue that the people buying their wares don’t mind paying shipping. “We talked to all of the buyers,” he says, surely a little hyperbolically, “including the ones who went away. It turns out there’s a lot of them. What we hear is that high shipping prices is one of the top reasons people don’t buy on Etsy. Most importantly, it’s the No. 1 reason they say they’ll never come back.”

The catchphrase that comes up repeatedly in my conversations with Etsy executives is “table stakes.” (A poker metaphor, although it doesn’t mean what it means in poker.) In other words, Amazon has made free shipping the bare minimum for any online retailer to be competitive, a polite way of saying it’s removed a choice. From one angle, if Etsy is forcing its sellers’ hands, it’s just a passing-down of pressure.

“At this point in e-commerce, consumers expect fast and free shipping, and so Etsy really is no exception,” Etsy’s senior vice president of people, strategy, and services Raina Moskowitz says — though, like Silverman, she doesn’t use the word “Amazon” specifically. “The goal is to make sure that we’re driving demand and bringing buyers to our marketplace so that we can drive sales and growth for our sellers’ businesses.” Etsy’s role, as she expresses it, is to bring more people to the site and to assure shoppers that they can trust any one of 2 million strangers with their money.

Yet every day since Etsy announced its intentions to tie search rankings to a seller’s willingness to offer free shipping, dozens to hundreds of confused or angry comments have flooded the site’s seller forums.

“Free shipping forced on us by blackmail is the lowest Etsy has gone to so far!” wrote one seller in July.

“Free shipping forced on us by blackmail is the lowest Etsy has gone to so far!”

“I have a large stoneware bowl that now costs $26 to ship to a nearby zone and $80 to ship to California. Who do I screw over?” another seller wrote in another thread posted the same day. “Do I add $80 to the price and screw over a buyer who lives close to me? Or do I add $26 to the price and take a $50-plus hit on shipping if someone in [California] buys the bowl?” Frustration mounted as Etsy moderators responded to questions like these with canned answers and links to a shipping strategies guide that concludes, “As always, how you determine and set prices for your shop is up to you.”

Kate Kennedy, who started a line of quirky doormats on Etsy in 2014 (she owns the trademark for “Turn off your straightener”) and now makes a living off her brand, says she understands that the company is trying to be helpful and make everyone’s stores more attractive to customers. “I get it, Etsy as a whole needs to be competitive in a marketplace that’s completely shifted toward being convenient,” she tells me. “But it’s a financial issue for people like me whose products are extremely expensive to ship. All of a sudden my items are $10 to $15 more expensive, but I didn’t add any value to justify that pricing.”

The feeling that “free shipping” is a lie comes up often too. Amazon Prime, after all, is a paid yearly subscription. Etsy is “asking their sellers to be dishonest and roll the shipping costs into the total price, which of course means it’s not ‘free’ at all,” says Owen Johnston, who makes about 90 percent of his income selling replica skulls on Etsy but plans to look for a different platform.

The more you stare at the issue, the stranger it looks. Where once the company and its community were one and the same, they’re talking past each other now, both making sense, neither able to meaningfully persuade the other.

“We want to have their back and be by their side through this transition,” Moskowitz says. It’s not as though Etsy has shut down communication with sellers. But the terms of the conversation, many of them say, have shifted, with Etsy adopting an attitude so carefully superior, it ends up being something repugnant to the people who make the company money.

“They have this very condescending tone,” says Abby Glassenberg, who started her Etsy shop in July 2005 and her crafting and business blog While She Naps around the same time. “Like, ‘Don’t worry, we have everything under control, don’t worry your pretty little heads about money.’ It’s very paternalistic.” In addition to the free shipping change, she cites the recent rollout of a consolidated ad platform called Etsy Ads. Rather than selecting themselves how to divide their money between Etsy’s onsite Promoted Listings and offsite Google Shopping ads, the company volunteered to spend sellers’ marketing budgets for them.

Just before Silverman took over, an Etsy executive told Forbes that more than 50 percent of Etsy’s revenue comes from seller services, like its proprietary payment processing system, which takes a fee of 3 percent, plus 25 cents per US transaction (the company made it the mandatory default option in May, removing the option for sellers to use individual PayPal accounts). New advertising options and customer support features in Etsy Plus — available to sellers willing to pay a $10 monthly fee — expand on that.

“It often feels like they’re just trying to sell us more products,” says Jenny Topolski, an Etsy jeweler and a member of the board of directors for the New York Handmade Collective. “It’s almost like a pay-to-play style of business, which I think people feel insulted by.”

The divide between the company and its sellers feels new to her too. “Oh, my god, Etsy was so good to us at the beginning,” she tells me. She remembers monthly workshops, random phone calls asking for feedback on any given idea, invitations to casual catch-up lunches. Etsy continues to fund the collective’s holiday markets — while the collective is now an independent nonprofit, it originated as the Etsy NY Street Team — and lets them use Etsy branding to advertise, but that’s kind of it. “They’re still good to us, but the relationship is like night and day.”

One moment that sticks out in her mind: a tour of Etsy’s new nine-story, 200,000-square-foot offices in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, which opened in the spring of 2016. “I remember immediately getting this sinking feeling that none of it was for us,” she says. It didn’t seem like the type of place she could show up for a casual lunch. It was nice that the building was environmentally-friendly, that it was big and beautiful. It was weird that there was so much more security and less crafting, replaced by the sleek lines of a grown-up startup.

“We’re the heart of the company, creating literally all content and revenue,” she says, “and suddenly we weren’t particularly welcome anymore.”

Emily Bidwell joined Etsy as its first head of customer support in April 2006 and left the company as senior merchandising specialist just four months ago. “The mythology is that it must have been wonderful in the early days,” she says. “Yes and no. There were a lot of concerns coming from the community then too. People started their own websites to complain about Etsy.”

As heated as many of the threads about free shipping have been, they’re nothing compared to some of the old blogs, like Callin’ Out on Etsy (which was basically a public burn book about sellers that seemed to be breaking the rules), or Etsy Bitch (which gave Rob Kalin the nickname “Bozo Dick” and regularly oozed with vitriol). Etsy has hardly ever made a decision that didn’t make someone furious, and still — in spite of repeated predictions — it has never actually alienated a substantial number of its sellers to the point where they’ve walked away.

When Etsy was founded, there was no such thing as a reliable platform from which to start a small, creative business. There is still not really any other platform from which to start a small, creative business. There are the curated marketplaces of Witchsy or Bulletin, the art-focused print-on-demand site Society6, the Gen-Z-favorite vintage resale app Depop, and, of course, Amazon Handmade, a poorly designed and obvious afterthought, which charges transaction fees as high as 20 percent for some categories. There’s nothing that provides the reach and accessibility of Etsy. You can build an audience on Instagram or Pinterest, or set up a web store with Squarespace or Shopify, but Etsy remains the best place to do both.

The biggest Etsy success stories do tend to line up fairly precisely with the company’s original mission. Before discovering Etsy, Matthew Cummings was a full-time glass sculptor hustling to find enough well-off, art-collecting customers. In 2012, he came up with a simple design for a hand-blown craft beer mug, started off selling 20 glasses a month on Etsy, was featured on HuffPost, and then rocketed up to 200 glasses a month. He was working 80 hours a week and was back-ordered for months for the first two years, but the income he made from Etsy allowed him to hire five people to help with the glass studio, as well as move to the Smoky Mountains and open a brewery. To him, it’s a story of democratizing art: Nobody he knew could actually afford to buy a glass sculpture, but handmade glasses were something that could give people the experience of “quality and soul on a daily basis.”

But the shadow of Amazon looms over him too. He can’t imagine what would happen if he told someone, in 2019, that something they want to buy won’t be available until production catches up in “a few months.” He doesn’t offer 24-hour customer service because he doesn’t think there’s a way to do so that wouldn’t be detrimental to his employees’ health, and some people have not been particularly understanding of that.

“We talk about educating people about handmade, I think it’s also about educating people about good practices for small businesses,” Cummings says. “This isn’t a corporation.”

Cummings, having once depended on the platform almost entirely, now has a sturdier setup that allows him to make his own choices. He’s “empowered,” as we say. About 40 percent of his sales come from the inventory he keeps stocked at his brewery, which makes him less vulnerable to unexpected dips in online popularity. But if a business doesn’t make it to that point, it can stay entwined with tweaks to the search algorithm and homepage design and manufacturing policies and transaction fees forever. This is not so much an Etsy problem as it is the fundamental problem of any online business, on any platform.

When Etsy was founded, there was no such thing as a reliable platform from which to start a small, creative business

“I think the most important thing to focus on for sellers, for small-business owners, is the broader lesson that e-commerce stores can’t put their eggs in one basket,” Kate Kennedy tells me, shuddering when she remembers what happened to everyone who built audiences on Vine. “It’s important to leverage platforms like Etsy that give you passive access to high volumes of new customers. But you have to build it in tandem with properties that you own and have control over.”

To her, Etsy’s growth targets contribute not just to tighter margins for sellers, but also to an unsustainably broad audience for Etsy sellers who are used to catering to a more craft-aware niche. It translates into a whole lot of people buying things on Etsy without understanding exactly what Etsy is.

“My customer interaction at the beginning was so different than it is now,” Kennedy says. “People were much kinder, more flexible, more understanding, and now people are expecting things in two days and asking for coupon codes and free shipping. By cosmetically making it look more like Amazon, there’s a huge disconnect between the customer’s expectations and what the sellers can realistically provide.”

So sellers like Kennedy, who do really well on Etsy, eventually try to move their business onto a personal website. Others develop various off-platform social media presences to serve as a safety net underneath their Etsy shops should they ever need to spin away completely. Vania Scharbach keeps in touch with customers on Instagram, where she can even sell to them directly and run better, more personalized ads. It’s crucial, she says, to get the emails. You have to have a listserv. Etsy can’t allow sellers to export customer email lists, as per the European Union’s GDPR privacy law, even if they were inclined to do something like that. But if you ask people for the emails yourself and you get the emails, you have the emails. You have the customers, and they’re your customers.

Or, she says ominously, Etsy can change the rules overnight and “you can end up with nothing.”

Even Amazon, with all its might, is not a good home for an upset Etsy seller. In October 2017, Amazon expanded its Handmade section with a special category for “gifts.” In September 2018 it launched Amazon Storefronts for small and medium-sized US businesses, mimicking Etsy even more directly. Not really for any apparent reason, other than to seem like an existential threat to Etsy.

“I think I tried it for a few days, and then I was like ‘What am I doing?’ And I closed it. Because I don’t like Amazon, I actively dislike Amazon,” Topolski says. “The actual storefronts are hideous. They’re really unintuitive to use. Terms for the sellers are awful. For all of the things they’ve changed, you still run your own business on Etsy. If you sell on Amazon, you’re working for Amazon. You’re just the same as anyone selling, like, restaurant supplies.”

While we talk, she reminds herself quickly that Etsy offsets all its carbon emissions (Amazon only just announced a goal to offset half of its emissions by 2030); Etsy offers its employees great benefits and pay and parental leave and houses them in an exceptionally eco-friendly building; Etsy’s values align with her own, even when Etsy’s business interests don’t align with her own.

Seventy-seven percent of Etsy’s sellers are businesses of one, and 28 percent live in rural areas, isolated from the urban centers where makers can organize to sell together and where many of the customers for higher-priced handmade goods live. For some, it’s not even solely about money but about validation of their art: knowing that someone out there doesn’t think what they do is worthless.

“Your own website is a lemonade stand in a desert,” Kennedy says. “Etsy is the world’s largest craft fair. Which one do you want to be in?”

Even Rob Kalin, who doesn’t at all believe that Etsy has lived up to the mission statement he set out for it and largely blames himself for failing to keep the company on that path, says that Etsy might have collapsed if he’d succeeded. He is not a businessman.

When Etsy went public in 2015, long after it was first accused of selling out, the paperwork described a company largely still beholden to Kalin’s original mission. “We believe we are creating a new economy, which we call the Etsy Economy, where creative entrepreneurs find meaningful work and both global and local markets for their goods,” the SEC filing read.

“I don’t think anyone realized the state of the business, what it was before Josh came in,” former head of brand and content Alison Feldmann says. “I don’t know if Etsy would still exist today if he hadn’t come in.” Though when Chad Dickerson was fired she found it jarring and upsetting and decided to resign, knowing she couldn’t sign on to work for yet another CEO, after first working for Rob Kalin and believing in his vision and then losing that and then believing in Dickerson and losing his. “Etsy at its worst is still better than so many companies at their best,” she says now. “They try to live their values and help people succeed, and not every company can say that.”

Crafting used to have a kitschy lowbrow reputation, seashells with googly eyes glued on them, Topolski says; people used to think she was stringing beads on dental floss. (This perception is also notoriously gendered, formed by the idea that women’s handiwork is silly and devoid of value.) Etsy changed that by making crafts mainstream. That’s great, and it’s also the worst. Proving that crafts could be big business also meant passing over the niche and the creative and the strange in favor of one dominant aesthetic that could be easily marketed. Topolski has noticed the Etsy aesthetic homogenizing over the past several years, with new sellers copying what they see doing well in other Etsy shops, and big-box stores like Target and Michaels copying them, and a huge wave of customers who don’t really want to dig past the surface for the unique stuff. “It’s like, oh, god, mason jars, twinkle lights, and owls. You know what I mean? I’m an owl fan too. I don’t hate owls. There’s just always owls.”

The beloved “Keep it Weird” blog that Feldmann ran with early brand writer Michelle Traub, featuring products like gargoyle-shaped candles and ceramic planter baby heads, hasn’t been updated since 2012. One seller pointed me to an interview with Etsy chief financial officer Rachel Glaser, which stunned her, because in it, Glaser said that the company is unconcerned when it loses sellers, even high-performing ones, because there are so many people who can come in and make up the lost revenue selling something nearly identical. For people who have invested years of their lives in the platform, it can feel deflating and all-too-unsurprising to type “Namast’ay in bed” into the search bar and see more than 1,300 results. That can look like betrayal, and in a sense, it is.

But Etsy isn’t a tragedy. Etsy is, in many ways, what it set out to be: the best alternative to having no options at all. It set a new standard for what corporations can talk about in public and strive to hold themselves accountable for. You can still buy a crocheted tampon holder, and you can still sell one. What Etsy failed to do is much more abstract and beautiful, which is probably why the people who get the most angry when they talk about it are also the ones who are very sad. “Individuals gain satisfaction from either making or buying handmade products but the transition from individuals to communities to the world is not easy to accomplish,” sociologist Michele Krugh wrote in 2014. Etsy promised to crack apart the system and it could not. Who could?

“It’s just a place to sell now,” Topolski says, delineating her personal relationship with the platform that built her business and helped her find the community that makes up much of her world. “I still think the company is more ethical than a lot of big companies. I don’t feel particularly mushy feelings toward them, you know what I mean? It’s kind of just business. Whereas I used to feel a lot more.”

We may never know how many people have accidentally signed up to pay Rihanna $50 a month

2019-08-28T09:14:51-04:00

Rihanna at a Savage X Fenty pop-up shop in London in 2018. | David M. Benett/Getty Images

“Cool, I’ve actually been accidentally subscribed to a $50 monthly membership fee on Rihanna’s bra website for four months without knowing it,” a friend of The Goods tweeted recently. “I NEVER would’ve knowingly signed up for it, I don’t even have any idea what I’m paying for. Wasted so much money.”

“SAME except it’s been like six months,” was the first reply. As it turned out, my editor had also accidentally paid for a Savage X Fenty Xtra VIP membership, which allows you to purchase exclusive and discounted underwear, including special stuff supposedly hand-picked by Rihanna. To my chagrin, I realized shortly after, I had paid for a year-long membership in the fall of 2018, shortly after the brand debuted. Of course, the fact that I personally made an embarrassing error does not necessarily mean that something deceptive is happening. Nobody scammed me into not reading, I just don’t like to read, and when I’m buying underwear at work I have to do things quickly.

However, on the consumer review site Trust Pilot, Savage X Fenty has close to 1,300 reviews, 25 percent of which rate the store “average,” “poor, or “bad” — and many of those are about the membership fee. The review labeled by Trust Pilot as “Most helpful” reads in part, “I checked my account today and realized I was charged for three months, entered into an absurd contract without my knowledge and am being charged an absurd amount of money a month.”

So I retraced my steps. I went back to the Savage X website, which is absolutely covered with deals labeled “New VIP Offer,” and new arrivals that are VIP-only. A good chunk of the items in the store are only available if you’re a VIP, meaning you have to sign up for the membership before you can purchase them.

Millennial poverty is not being able to buy lunch because youre dumb and forgot about your annual Savage x Fenty membership fee.
— sexy train lenin stan 🥫🧱⚒️ (@drea_carmen) July 22, 2019

But even if you limit your browsing to other items — often simpler, less flashy underwear and bras and nighties, framed less as something Rihanna herself had a hand in creating especially for you — clicking on any VIP promotions pushes you to become a member as well. For example, click on the “2 for $29” bralette deal and a Savage X Monthly Membership is automatically added to your cart to activate the discount. You don’t pay for the membership until it’s automatically charged to your card at a later time.

In fact, even if you don’t click on anything VIP at all, and simply add a product that initially appears full price, the site will still automatically add a Savage X Monthly Membership and a VIP discount. The membership program is explained in a lengthy sidebar next to the cart, and you can delete it from your cart as you would delete any item. But if you don’t stop to read what might be considered by shoppers to be an irrelevant wall of text, you’re likely to end up with a recurring monthly charge of $49.95 for as long as it takes you to notice. There’s also no guest checkout, which means everybody who buys anything has to set up some level of an account.

Reached for comment about customers’ confusion around membership fees, a representative from Savage X Fenty told Vox, “Customer satisfaction is very important to us and we strive to provide the highest level of service to hundreds-of-thousands of customers worldwide. While complaints are a very small minority, as a new company, we are always looking for ways to listen and improve.” The representative declined to comment on whether the company might consider changing the way membership enrollment is automatically added to shopping carts.

Even once you know you’re enrolled in a membership program, the system is somewhat strange. You can opt out of paying the fee at the start of any given month, but only if you don’t plan on buying anything. If you don’t opt out but also don’t buy anything, the fee rolls over as store credit. “The choice to shop is yours!” the information page explains. “Shop, or log into your account to ‘Skip the Month’ by the 5th of each month and you won’t be charged. If you don’t ‘Skip,’ your payment method will be charged $49.95 on the 6th of each month and you will receive one VIP Member Credit valued at $49.95.”

In the site’s terms and conditions, there is an even more confusing explanation of the difference between the annual membership (which I had) and the monthly membership (which my editor had). The annual membership program is apparently “an elite club for our OG annual members only — this membership is only accessible to those who signed up between May 11th, 2018 and January 15th, 2019,” and this group of members don’t log in monthly to skip a fee because they only pay once a year, and only $49.95 total.

Annual members also get free shipping, which monthly members do not, unless they hit a minimum purchase of $49, at which point shoppers with neither membership also get free shipping. “Each year you are auto-renewed, you will receive a $30 gift toward your next purchase of $35 or more,” the description continues, again, bafflingly.

You can’t cancel a monthly membership on the Savage X Fenty website or in the customer support chat window. You can only cancel over the phone, like the Wall Street Journal!

Other Trust Pilot complaints say that customers were charged even after they canceled their membership, or charged even if they skipped a month, or prohibited from skipping a month because the website kept freezing on that page. Some tried to redeem accumulated store credit and discovered strange rules (“If it is not in increments of $49.95 the credit will not be applied”), or that all of their remaining store credits disappeared after canceling their memberships.

On Twitter, customers who complain seem to do so reluctantly, not wanting to seem as if they are criticizing Rihanna herself, or implying that she had anything to do with this bizarre business model. I understand, and it’s true that she did not invent it.

It was created in 2010 by a company called TechStyle, which refers to itself as the “brand-building platform” behind Kimora Lee Simmons’ fast fashion subscription service JustFab, Kate Hudson’s athleisure brand Fabletics, the accessories subscription service ShoeDazzle, and of course, Savage X Fenty.

In February, the company announced that it had reached 5 million active members in 2018 and hit $750 million in annual revenue. “The VIP Membership program has allowed TechStyle to build a closer, more meaningful relationship with our global customer base,” TechStyle co-CEO Adam Goldenberg said at the time. “The program’s benefits have driven customer satisfaction across our brands to levels previously unattainable in fashion[.]”

(TechStyle referred a request for comment to Savage X Fenty.)

TechStyle refers to their offerings as “proprietary FashionOS technology” and a suite of “expert services.” (This appears to mean websites and people to run them.)

A membership model is not unique to Savage X Fenty among online brands. JustFab, which uses a similar membership program, was sued by two counties in California for allegedly misleading advertising in 2014, with district attorneys from Santa Cruz and Santa Clara arguing that the company wasn’t “clearly and conspicuously” labeling its promotional deals and discounts to make it clear that they required a monthly subscription of $39.95 to access. The case was settled for $1.8 million, but JustFab is still regularly criticized for the practice. (A recent several-thousand-word profile of Kimora Lee Simmons makes no mention of the company at all, nor of the reality show Kimora: House of Fab, which is about what it’s like to be the president of JustFab. Interesting!)

Fabletics also has a $49.95 monthly membership fee and a byzantine set of rules around how to “buy or skip” in any given month. Shoemint, “an exclusive shoe collection of irresistible styles at insider prices” that vanished mysteriously in early 2016, did not use TechStyle’s platform but did have an even more aggressive $80 monthly membership fee. One rattled customer described it on Pissed Consumer writing, “BEWARE OF SHOEMINT!!!!!!!!!” and “Buying a pair of shoes automatically makes it so you are a member and they can charge my credit card every month from now on, WHO are these people, CROOKS IN MY OPINION!!!!”

forgot to cancel my savage fenty membership before i was charged 50 bucks but thats ok rihanna caught ME slipping thats on ME
— chloberticus (@largewife) August 10, 2019

None of this information was difficult to find, so I was initially surprised that these membership models haven’t been discussed more regularly, out in the open, on blogs and in more tweets. Bloomberg called secretive membership fees “the future of shopping” in 2016, in a feature about AdoreMe lingerie, yet somehow we did not consider ourselves warned. Then I remembered that there is nothing more American than being absolutely humiliated by the fact that you accidentally cut into your personal wealth in a silly way — failing to be as rich as you might have been if you had bothered to read the confusing supplementary information next to your digital underwear cart.

Of course, this is also one of the main incentives to have a beloved and endlessly charming celebrity as the face of your brand. I am so nervous about how Rihanna fans are going to receive this short piece of writing about the possibly deliberately opaque systems underlying her latest business venture, and I unfortunately feel the need to emphasize that I personally admire everything else about her.

Savage X Fenty has plenty of goodwill that it has earned by being more inclusive than basically all other lingerie brands, and its fashion shows are a delight. I would rather not have this published at all. And that shame is exactly why I imagine we’ll never know how many people have been giving Rihanna $50 each month pretty much by accident — or for how long.

Update: Savage X Fenty announced a new $50 million funding round today!

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Facebook is testing an Instagram spinoff app for close friends only

2019-08-27T12:27:36-04:00

Facebook is testing an Instagram spinoff app called Threads, The Verge’s Casey Newton reported Monday.

Threads, if it ever officially launches, would be an extension of the Close Friends feature Instagram added to Stories last fall — a simple add-on that allows users to create a select list of their followers to show the more intimate content that they’d rather not broadcast to everyone. Instagram declined to comment for The Verge’s story or to Vox.

Newton, who was shown screenshots of the app’s test version, says it looks a lot like Instagram’s current direct-messaging feature, except messages appear in a central feed alongside your friends’ Stories and a green bubble indicates they’re active. Threads has a camera, so you can share photos and videos directly to the curated group, and it’s set up to encourage automatic sharing of your smartphone biomarkers, like location and battery life.

What it sounds like is a mix of the features people most often say they still use Snapchat for — to keep track of their friends using the Bitmoji map, to post the gross or gritty or thirsty pics of daily life for a smaller audience — and a reaction to the gushing affection people have shown recently for private group chats. Location-sharing has become increasingly common among families and friend groups as well, in large part because of Snapchat and Apple’s Find My Friends. (Also, possibly, because it feels decidedly like the world is ending and we need to know where our people are!)

Snapchat has about 190 million daily active users, which is not huge when compared to the 500 million people who use Instagram every day. But as Newton points out, the people who do use Snapchat tend to spend more time on it, largely because it’s the space they’ve designated for nurturing their more important relationships.

Facebook has essentially spent all of Snapchat’s existence looking for ways to get young people to abandon Snapchat and focus on Instagram (much of Gen Z never made Facebook accounts at all!). It’s also spent the past couple of years attempting to pivot away from the public scandal around its data-collection strategies as well as the general backlash against social media sharing, and the deleterious effects of broadcasting ourselves to enormous audiences at all hours of the day and night. Threads would be a good spin toward privacy and intimacy, and it could appeal to young people.

“There are just some things that aren’t meant for everyone, and there really isn’t a great place for me to put that on Instagram”

Last month, Instagram director of product management Robby Stein was a guest on Why’d You Push That Button, the Verge podcast I co-host with Ashley Carman, and alluded to many of these concerns while explaining the origins of the Close Friends feature.

Close Friends “came about by really just talking to people and learning from users around what they were hoping to add to their Story, and at times when they felt like they weren’t going to post to their Story, why,” he told us. “The No. 1 thing that came up was, there are just some things that aren’t meant for everyone, and there really isn’t a great place for me to put that on Instagram.”

Instagram was reacting in part to the phenomenon of Finstagrams — secondary accounts made mostly by younger users so that they could have a public-facing persona with a coherent “brand” (often parent- and admissions officer- and recruiter-friendly) and a less filtered, more authentic, often strange alt-life on a separate grid. The teens, reacting to the horrors of context collapse, jerry-rigged the platform to make it work for their needs.

Close Friends was meant to make the fracturing of an audience even easier by putting control solely in the hands of the user: “You can add people, remove people, share to it, and no one really can request to join it or be a part of it. There’s no social pressure to add or remove people, and there’s no public listing of who’s on that list, either,” Stein said.

He also told us that the average Close Friends list is around 20 people, and that Instagram has noticed its users are much more likely to reply to Instagram Story posts when it’s been marked as a Close Friends post — there’s something about knowing you’re in a limited audience that signals an invitation to engage, he hypothesized. And those replies also lead to lengthy conversations more often than not. It seems likely that both of those insights were used in the justification for Threads’ existence.

Anecdotally, most of the people I know are gravitating toward private chat and in-group memes, which can feel like salves and distractions, and don’t carry the same risk as public declarations that have the potential to embarrass you, get you yelled at by strangers, or worse, get you beloved by strangers, who then put constant pressure on you to create more content. That Facebook has picked up on this is nice if you like products tailored to your emotional needs, and perhaps a little disconcerting if you’d rather Facebook didn’t figure out exactly how to tailor its business model to your emotional needs.

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The money and stress and failed hairdos of school picture day

2019-08-23T13:15:49-04:00

School photos are profitable for one big company and they cause stress for the rest of us. | Getty Images

“My school photos rarely see the light of day,” Marcos, a man from Colorado who used to be very goth, tells me in a Twitter message.

His parents were Catholic and did not approve of his long hair or spiked bracelets or Slipknot t-shirts or combat boots or trips to Hot Topic, and his dad often stole his black nail polish. But his junior year school photo features all of them — smuggled to school in his backpack — and his parents bought copies of it anyway: “It may not have been sent out in the Christmas card. But my parents still loved me and wanted to have photos of everything.”

He now wears bow ties and is known around the office as a clean-cut “crazy socks guy.” But the old photo is nice. “It’s exactly who I was and how I wanted to portray myself at the time.”

Marcos is not the only person for whom a school photo has held significance long into adulthood, and I know this because I put out one measly tweet asking for grown-ups with stories of memorable K-12 portraiture and received a dozen responses basically immediately. The stories were as fresh and crisp as a stack of wallet-sized portraits someone paid $30 for and kept in the plastic wrap for 20 years. Nobody’s memories had faded.

“I’m 25 and to this day I’ll never feel as photogenic as I did for my tenth grade student ID,” a Boston woman named Carmen messaged me. “My permanently captured youth and beauty haunts me.” Carmen was having what she calls “beginner’s luck” with hair products, pouting, and wearing a purple American Apparel hoodie — “you know the one,” she says, and I do.

“There were a bunch of wallet-sized ones, which I scribbled all over with a Sharpie. My mom was PISSED.”

“I have one that was so bad I showed it to my therapist last week,” a New York woman named Helen messaged me. “I was so embarrassed that I made myself sick so I could go home after it was taken lol.” Helen is 12 in the photo and it was taken the day before 9/11. She is wearing a purple shirt that says “Kittens!”

“I believe I got it from Pac Sun and I thought ‘Kittens!’ had to be some kind of sexual reference but didn’t know what, but I wore it anyway to be ~edgy~ And the hair was my misguided attempt at wielding a flat iron,” she says. (Her hair doesn’t really look that bad if you ask me.) “There were a bunch of wallet-sized ones, which I scribbled all over with a Sharpie. My mom was PISSED, I remember her screaming that we didn’t have the money for pictures in the first place.”

This is a horrifying memory, obviously: terrorism, mom yelling at you, too young to know what “Kittens!” might mean. But it’s also well-recounted and quite vivid, so Helen, it seems to me, knows that a good story is worth more than a good picture.

The best photo ever taken of me was taken by a student portrait photographer when I was in third grade. This is one of my less palatable beliefs — that I was most conventionally attractive when I was 7. But I was! I’m wearing a shockingly normal shirt in a flattering red-orange, I’m smiling like a person who has control of her face, I look self-possessed and happy, like I know a gap-tooth is going to be in fashion by the time I’m a grown-up, and like I haven’t yet met the fraternity social chair who would say that it makes me look like Michael Strahan.

Why do these photos feel so strangely powerful, like they say something essential about how we think about ourselves for the rest of our lives?

Unfortunately, this is not the case with any of my other school photos. In the others, my bangs are parted in the middle or I’m wearing an “authentic” shark tooth necklace or I’m slouching into an expression of pure pain and discomfort, which is still how I react to having my photo taken. I have never healed from the experience of worrying that the result will be horrible, and moments later, confirming that it was. Made all the worse by the one good photo! I had poise and it slipped away!

With back-to-school season on the horizon and in the windows at Old Navy and the “promotions” section of our inboxes, now felt like a good time to sort out some shared issues around school portraits. They theoretically serve a purpose for educational institutions (attendance software, yearbooks, ID cards, etc.) but there is also a lot of money involved, and a ton of stress that is clearly unrelated to the practical concern of having something to show the police if a kid pulls a Ferris Bueller.

Why do these photos feel so strangely powerful, like they say something essential about how we think about ourselves for the rest of our lives?

School photos are a meme, the stars of BuzzFeed lists like “55 Super Awkward Middle School Photos” and “15 Picture Day Fails That Are So Bad They’re Good,” and slightly ruder tabloid roundups like the Daily Mail’s “Say cheese! The world’s WORST high school yearbook photos range from strange and scary to just plain hilarious.”

We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!" data-portal-copyright="We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!" />

The most popular school photo internet joke is probably the Tumblr “We have lasers!!!!!!!!!!” run by writer and Who? Weekly co-host Lindsey Weber from 2008 to 2015. Weber posted submissions from hundreds of people who had coerced their parents into paying the extra fee for a special backdrop on school picture day in the 1980s and 1990s, when Lifetouch offered, well, lasers as an option. A Michigan man named Tony submitted multiple laser portraits to the blog, writing “The first one, I made my parents get the lasers because everyone else was picking that in fifth grade. The second one (sixth grade), I was the ONLY one who had lasers. What. A. Loser. Haha!” A superfan of “We have lasers!!!!!!!!!!” even dressed as a laser portrait background for Halloween in 2010.

Lasers were phased out by the time I was in school, but the option to pay extra for a background that looked like movie curtains or glittery scrapbook paper remained. I once — only once! — convinced my mom to spring for a background of kelly green, then opted for a shirt covered in red and black roses and red lace. The resultant photos show an absolutely nightmarish level of anti-taste, which bothered me for a time but now is eclipsed by worrying about my finances on a macro-level (buy a house? In this life?) and hoping my parents never die.

The delight of “We have lasers!!!!!!!!!!” is that all of the photos are equally bad, featuring, as they do, lasers. The whole ritual of school portraits is absurd, and most of the things that concerned us as children pale in comparison to the pain of adulthood. The discomfort of “We have lasers!!!!!!!!!!” is that it screams “waste of money” and dredges up the strange feeling of being a kid and not having a real grasp of how the family finances worked or why it should be such a big deal for you to have lasers if you want lasers.

The 1% all had the laser background in their school pictures.
— Jeffrey Hadz (@Hadzilla) October 27, 2011

School photos, in addition to a meme, are a scam.

According to the New York Times, “a $50 portrait package costs an independent photographer about $5.50 to print.” Typically, a share of whatever the photographers make goes to the school, which makes this slightly easier to tolerate, but even that is kind of a foggy business proposition — it’s not as though “Picture Day” is ever actively framed as a fundraiser, and as the Times points out, the money is really more like a kickback (a polite word for “bribe”).

We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!" data-portal-copyright="We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!" />

Meredith Borgdas, editor-in-chief of the parenting and business site Working Mother, has taken issue with this for years, and tells me she recently paid $90 just for the digital rights to two photographs, one each of her two sons.

“The prices parents end up paying for unflattering photos are way too high,” she says. “I haven’t been happy with a single photo that my child’s school has taken even though at least one of my children is very photogenic.” But whoever came up with the idea of school portraits, she concedes, is “a marketing genius,” making parents feel guilty if they don’t help their kids pick out an outfit and a haircut and a background and then shell out for whatever comes of it.

“It’s kind of like Valentine’s Day, they made everyone feel guilty if they didn’t buy a red card for their partner,” she says, but does anybody even carry wallets with those little photo album folders in them anymore? “No!”

Okay, but what of the system that is doing all this to us?

Lifetouch, the largest portrait photography company in the country, which also does sports team photos and church directories, reported $759 million in revenue last year. About half of all school portraits are taken by Lifetouch, according to the New York Times, including the ones taken of me at Bloomfield Central School District between 1997 and 2010, according to some administrator I spoke to on the phone briefly who did not ask why I was inquiring.

It’s so big it doesn’t even have to advertise, though it does advertise in pretty funny ways: Like with sponsored content in People magazine, in which former Disney Channel star Tia Mowry-Hardrict discusses her bond with her children and how it’s bolstered by professional photography. Or this commercial in which a young boy combs his hair in close-up nine times before the camera zooms in on his teeth.

The New York Times recently profiled a school photographer named Chris Wunder, who runs a PortraitEFX franchise in Texas and hates Lifetouch, which is very big and powerful and which supplies its salesmen with “fat expense accounts” to help steal schools away from the little guys. (Wunder is quite the businessman himself and recommends scanning local obituaries to keep track of when your competitors die. “The industry rule is you do three days of mourning before you go in and make a sales call to a new principal,” he told the Times.)

I have to say, while I found this report thrilling — and I rarely want anyone to point out good things about large companies to me, particularly when I’m not asking — there are some remarkable facts about Lifetouch’s history that I feel you simply must know. For one, it was originally called National School Studios and was started by a pair of buddies who worked together in a photography studio in Missouri in the 1930s. They supposedly invented 3”x 5” photos — which came in fancy display folders! — and traveled the country selling them to schools.

“I haven’t been happy with a single photo that my child’s school has taken even though at least one of my children is very photogenic”

According to a book that, admittedly, seems to have been published by Lifetouch itself, possibly written by a corporate ghostwriter, the company nearly went bankrupt after World War II because it decided to offer no-interest loans to all of its salespeople, who were primarily veterans, to help them buy cars and houses. In 1977, the company offered its employees not just some stock in the company, but all of it, and they didn’t charge them for it, they just put it all in a trust (this reportedly ended in disaster, but I refuse to speak ill of a rich person’s choice to mess with their own money). Unfortunately, but inevitably, the founders died, the company’s name was changed to “Lifetouch” (gross) for vague reasons, and it ate up competitor after competitor over the course of four decades, most recently CPI Corp — which operated the once-popular Sears and Walmart photo studios — in 2013.

Now it has 22,000 employees, one of whom did a Reddit AMA in 2013 who described her experience saying, “The actual work wasn’t bad. I disliked some of the questionable practices of the company. Working 12-hour days and getting only a 20-minute break (lucky to get that one of the days). But I wasn’t in a position to really complain since I needed the job.”

Lifetouch was acquired by Shutterfly for $825 million early last year, and the trust that gave current and former employees a large stake in the company was dissolved with a corporate buyout. Hope they got rich! I suspect they didn’t, and that may be why they filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

Almost certainly, no one is getting much out of school photos except for Lifetouch, and for everyone else they are just some strange thing that happened because it was the rules.

Nozlee Samadzadeh, a senior engineer at Vox Media, showed me her 10th-grade photo, which was taken shortly before she had double jaw surgery.

“I remember in this photo experimenting with smiling closed-mouthed instead of with teeth, which exposed my overgrown lower jaw / missing teeth,” she writes. “Now all I can think is how fucking adorable I look, even though my face looks very different now.” Her parents didn’t buy copies of it — “I think it was an immigrant thing, buying the photos was a bourgeois luxury we almost never took advantage of” — but she’s held on to the free promotional copy for 15 years, to remind her that she experienced herself wrong the first time.

The real power of school portraits, to me, is that we so often spend much of our lives attempting to disprove what we imagined they said about us — that we were weird or didn’t understand humidity or couldn’t use a flatiron or move about the world in the way in which we would like. A school photo is a tortured and overpriced but ultimately valuable timestamp of a moment when childhood was forced to confront the boring formalism and stifling identity rigidity of adulthood, and rebelled without having to try. Self-image is never a simple project, but that is especially true when you are young and your sense of who you are is so watery. And you only have 30 seconds to look as “good” as possible, which is hard in part because (hopefully) you don’t yet spend that much of your time worrying about what you look like.

“I’m basically a person who has embraced my awkward phase as a character-building experience but I hate this photo so much”

Yet, gorgeously, because the photos are from youth, they are also a reminder that there is time still to pivot.

My friend Julia Moser, a TV producer who recently moved to Los Angeles for reasons that don’t make sense to me emotionally, texted me about a horrible memory after seeing my tweet, including a photo of the inside of an old yearbook. She is 8 years old in the picture, and looks, to my eyes, like Shirley Temple if Shirley Temple’s curls weren’t fake as hell.

“Basically that was the photo that ushered in my really awkward phase,” Julia wrote. “I had just gotten my hair cut super short by accident, my grandma told the guy what to do and it was pre-puberty so I looked like twin brothers with the red-headed boy in my class. I wore a headband to make me look more feminine but I pushed it back and it made it look like I had horns. Also I had just gotten braces.” Julia was understandably very angry at her mother for not pointing out the horn situation. I would be too! But her mother, lovingly, did not buy any prints of the photo that Julia hated so much, which is more generous that my mother ever was with me.

“I’m basically a person who has embraced my awkward phase as a formative and necessary character-building experience but I hate this photo so much,” Julia says, and we understand.

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Hey! How would you rate our customer service?

2019-08-15T08:44:32-04:00

Glossier, the cool-girl cult beauty brand, is notorious for its emails, which are sometimes just pictures of bathtubs or goats. Now, they also want to know if you love them. | Getty Images/Westend61

Brands send emails. Brands send, by some estimates, more than half of all the emails that are sent worldwide.

The cashier at Urban Outfitters recently asked me for my email when I bought something in a physical store, so that the company might send me emails every day, which I was already getting. Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty brand, I’m sorry to say, sends an egregious number of emails, and it’s not just me noticing. I have eaten at the fast casual Mediterranean restaurant Cava only one time, in a city I don’t live in, almost a year ago, and have received an email every week, like clockwork, which is actually pretty useful because the subject matter is typically which vegetables are in season.

Brand emails can be controversial. Business Insider ran an article last year about how “Stores ‘bludgeon’ their customers ‘to death’ with emails.” LinkedIn settled a lawsuit for unwanted emails in 2015, paying out $13 million to complainants. Glossier, the cool-girl cult beauty brand, is notorious for its emails, which are sometimes just pictures of bathtubs or goats, and other times are aggressive reminders that the recipient left items in their online shopping cart, and shouldn’t they go back to buy them? As someone on Twitter put it last summer, “glossier needs to cool it w the spam. i gave u my email so u could let me know when ur overpriced items r on sale not for this shit!!!!!!”

(The emails have recently gotten even more cryptic and faux-urgent, and often have subject lines that are just “Oops” or “Testing” or “Last call,” like a double-text you might send to someone who seems to be ghosting you.)

Glossier emails: um… hi bitch 👋 are you forgetting something?? 🤔 yeah how ‘bout you get your ass back to our website and purchase the items in your cart, k?? ✨💅🤗💫💕
— emily (@emilyyc96) August 13, 2018

Brands you’ve ignored for a while are fond of shouting “WE MISS YOU!” in their subject lines. Or, as Eliza Brooke described for Racked last year, “trying to dupe people” by putting “FWD:” or “Re:” in the subject line, making it look like the message is coming from someone you’ve intentionally started a conversation with.

Then there’s the follow-up emails. “How did we do?” and a request to evaluate the way a customer service rep handled your question about returning a pair of weirdly shaped jeans. “How did you like your order?” and a request to rate whichever bulk hand-soap you order for pickup from Target. “Re: your eyeballs,” and “We missed you,” when you skip a Warby Parker appointment. “Would you recommend us?” Glossier asked in July, a few weeks after emailing out a set of free downloadable phone wallpapers with the subject line “We made these for you.” How do you feel about us? the brands seem to plead with increasing frequency.

The obvious question is: do you really think we feel anything? The second-most obvious question is: if everyone is doing this, does that mean it works?

In the European Union, there is a law about sending people emails. The General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in May 2018, required brands to re-do their email lists and obtain consent to continue corresponding with anyone who hadn’t actively opted in (e.g. they’d been automatically added to the list after making a purchase, or been lightly conned with a pre-checked box).

In the US, however, the 2003 CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act bans misleading subject lines and requires that brands provide an opt-out message in their emails, but that’s it.

“You’re allowed to legally spam people in America,” Brad Goodfriend, director of marketing at the furniture store France and Son told me. “You can just buy an email list, add them to a list, send emails every single day. But I don’t think it’s a good method. It hurts your click-through rate, your spam rate, and decreases the chances of people actually opening your email.”

“You’re allowed to legally spam people in America.”

(The FTC has published a discouragement of this practice, known as list brokering, warning that these lists are often assembled “using illegal means.”)

All of this arguably unwanted correspondence is actually part of what’s called “relationship marketing.” This is a style of marketing that assumes it is more cost-effective to hold onto a customer than to get a new one, and also takes as a given that the way to hold onto someone is to pop up in their inbox every day. Also, more people use email than use Facebook and Twitter combined. In other words: email is important to brands because email is intimate, and email is cheap.

According to a 2015 study conducted by the Data and Marketing Association, email’s return-on-investment is 38 to 1. And according to Mailchimp, one of the largest email marketing companies, “Email is not dead, and the toolbox has expanded to make it even more compelling to brands.”

Though email might seem old-school and boring, the technology behind email marketing gets more sophisticated — and arguably more obnoxious — all the time. Take, for example, Drip, a customer relationship management (CRM) software company founded in 2013 in the Twin Cities and acquired by Leadpages in 2015. Drip sells brands a back-end automated system that puts individual tags on their email subscribers when they perform certain actions (visiting specific pages of the brand’s website, clicking a link, adding something to a cart, etc.).

Mailchimp offers similar tools, and insists that they work: “With an abandoned cart email series, [our customers] see an average of 34 times more orders per recipient than with bulk email alone.” So, email blasts aren’t actually always email blasts at all. The tags decide who gets which emails and when.

This ability to personalize means… more emails. Dave Charest, director of content at the online marketing company Constant Contact, tells me that two-thirds of brands his company surveyed planned to increase their use of email marketing in the next 12 months, and added that this is great news. Specifically, “The great thing about email is that the potential customer has willingly shared their contact info and invited you to stay in touch!”

While I was writing this story, one of my editors forwarded me a whole bundle of emails she’d gotten from brands in the last few days. Each one was a follow-up email asking about a customer service experience. As it turned out, each conversation was initiated by her! She just loves customer service! And of course, a brand is going to follow up for feedback with someone who emails customer service to ask the weight of a coffee table before she comes to pick it up. (“Well, it’s like, do I need to bring a boy?” she defended herself to me.)

Those pleading “how do you feel about us?” emails are also a product of creeping anxiety about high customer service expectations.

The [Amazon Prime] standard bleeds over into all of our expectations of what we think brands should be doing for us.”

“Businesses have a habit of thinking about the way they compare in their industry, but they need to benchmark against things like Amazon Prime,” says Katherine Kelly, senior director of product marketing at the customer support software company Zendesk. “The [Amazon Prime] standard bleeds over into all of our expectations of what we think brands should be doing for us.” That means everything has to be super-fast, and most customers expect a response within four hours of filing a customer service complaint. They expect to talk to a human being, but they want human beings to have the efficiency of corporations.

Zendesk was founded in Copenhagen in 2007, moved to San Francisco after its series B funding in 2009, and went public in 2014. Last quarter, it had close to $200 million in revenue, 37 percent higher than the same quarter last year. It’s used by well over 100,000 businesses, including Airbnb, Fossil, Birchbox, Dollar Shave Club, Peloton, and even the ACLU.

Brands, Kelly says, want customer support emails that are part of a highly-automated system on the back-end but don’t look automated to you. They want a “conversational” appearance, which serves their goal of maintaining customer loyalty. Everything is direct-to-consumer and subscription now, she points out, and those are relationships you have to tend to with frequent surveys and follow-ups.

Mike Chi, CMO of the wedding registry startup Zola, says his company sends a follow-up email after every customer service interaction. Once a month, the whole company reviews the feedback, “including messages from customers talking about how much they appreciate the follow-up from the team.” (For Zazzle, on the other hand, the reaction to follow-up emails is “truly situational.” Renaud says, frankly, “Whether they appreciate the follow-up is very dependent on the reason for contacting us. But we do find that people appreciate having the opportunity to let us know how things went.”)

According to Constant Contact, the average click-through rate for a brand email is 7 percent, and brands are highly encouraged to offer editorial content (like tips, how-tos, interviews, etc.) in addition to discounts and product recommendations, in order to keep things conversational and helpful — like a friend would be.

When I spoke to France and Son’s Brad Goodfriend, whose name I didn’t make up, he was startlingly frank about how he assumes I, and many like me, feel about furniture. “It’s hard to make people care about furniture on a daily basis,” he said. “We don’t get that many sales from Instagram. Not everyone is really in the mood for furniture all the time. We do see a good amount of revenue attributed to the email.” (France and Son uses a platform called List Track, which works similarly to Drip.) Though all of France and Son’s emails contain “a little bit of salesmanship,” Goodfriend says they also try to provide information about “what’s hot” in interior design. “No one wants to be just sold to every single day.”

“It’s hard to make people care about furniture on a daily basis. We don’t get that many sales from Instagram.

Email is back in fashion, in part because advertising on Instagram has gotten more expensive and less effective, in part because users are turning on platforms Twitter and Facebook (Christopher Best, chief executive of the venture-capital funded newsletter startup Substack, told the New York Times he founded his company in part because he felt “this growing sense of despair in traditional social media”). But largely, I think, because it intertwines so nicely with the strangest consumer trend of our lifetimes, which is the erosion of the divide between commerce and personal interaction.

Take, for example, the success of Girls Night In, the self-care editorial platform best known for its email newsletter — which is a mix of blogging, editor recommendations, and sponsored content — which recently raised $500,000 in a pre-seed funding round. Or Man Repeller, the fashion and beauty site known for its staffers’ enormous Instagram followings and brand deals, which also publishes a highly-designed daily newsletter, and makes the bulk of its revenue from affiliate links and native advertising. Both brands have loyal readers who not only open their emails but love to open their emails, and identify as fans of their emails, and will pay to hang out with them in real life because of their emails.

In the inbox, the line between personal correspondence and sales pitch gets blurrier and blurrier. Notes from your friends — the brands you like — are beautifully designed and full of content you actually like and written in a voice that is not so different from the notes you receive from your other friends — your actual friends.

When Meredith Schwartz, VP of experience at Birchbox, says her brand strives to write emails as your “all-knowing, reliable friend, not talking down, but just saying ‘here, this is what this is, here’s why you might be interested in it,” I do not bat an eye. They need to be “magnetic,” and make people laugh, and make people want more, she tells me.

In 2019, brands basically are people, so this makes perfect sense. Maybe it would be weird to get an email from a friend asking how well they did during your last interaction — but if you really loved them, you would probably answer.

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FedEx won’t deliver Amazon packages in the US anymore

2019-08-08T13:53:47-04:00

Amazon has been building out its logistics business for years, and now its politely thanking FedEx for ending their longtime contracts. | Paul Hennessy/Getty Images

FedEx won’t be renewing its ground delivery contract with Amazon when it expires at the end of the month, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. This news comes just two months after FedEx announced that its domestic Express service would no longer carry Amazon packages by plane.

“This change is consistent with our strategy to focus on the broader e-commerce market,” FedEx told Bloomberg, highlighting the fact that Amazon provided just 1.3 percent of FedEx’s income last year. (Vox has reached out to FedEx for comment.)

On the record, the two entities have never expressed anything but vague corporate friendliness towards each other. Amazon told Vox, “We are constantly innovating to improve the carrier experience and sometimes that means reevaluating our carrier relationships. FedEx has been a great partner over the years and we appreciate all their work delivering packages to our customers.” Still, the two companies have engaged in something of a shipping arms race for years.

In May, FedEx announced that it would start offering service seven days a week, starting next January (as did UPS). This was just a few months after announcing its Extra Hours service, which promised next-day local delivery or two-day shipping anywhere in the US for orders placed as late as 2 am the night before. In February, it started trials of an autonomous delivery robot named SameDay Bot.

Amazon, for its part, is growing into a logistics behemoth, with hundreds of fulfillment centers in the US and Europe, a leased fleet of 40 Boeing cargo planes, two regional air hubs, a new staff of thousands of full-time delivery drivers, and a growing freight shipping arm.

In October 2017 it launched Amazon Key, an option for customers to let couriers open their front doors using smart locks. Six months later, this expanded to delivering packages directly to the trunks of people’s cars. This April, the program expanded again to let Amazon delivery drivers directly into garages. The company is also still working on its Prime Air delivery drone; a new version will supposedly start making limited deliveries soon.

Amazon can fill gaps in its own system with UPS or the US Postal Service. FedEx will also still make international deliveries for Amazon.

Amazon does have its work cut out for it, having promised one-day shipping for more than 100 million Prime members earlier this year. (It’s reportedly spending $800 million to make this a reality.)

The one-day shipping announcement came on the heels of reports that Amazon was struggling just to meet consumer expectations for two-day shipping, often encouraging them to bundle small items together into less frequent shipments, choose one day each week to receive all of their Amazon packages, or have orders sent to centralized lockers rather than their homes. In July, workers at Amazon warehouses in Minnesota went on strike during the company’s annual Prime Day sale, protesting the move to one-day shipping, which they said would effectively double their already strenuous workload.

But Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of the business intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, told Vox, “To me, this whole thing is Amazon flexing their ability to do this. This renders Prime shipping much more valuable, because even if some orders are delayed, the perception of one-day shipping is very valuable, because no one else can do it. That’s what’s going to keep people subscribing to Prime.” He also called one-day shipping “borderline impossible” for “everyone else” for at least the next five years.

One-day shipping began earlier this summer for 10 million products on the Amazon website, but it remains to be seen if the company will pull it off in the long term.

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The story behind the best-known local jingle in America

2019-08-08T13:11:05-04:00

For me, childhood is a blur. But it has an extremely memorable soundtrack. I can still hear the unshakable and baffling sung-through invitations: “Make your car a kidney car!” “Seabreeze, come get your summer!” The promises: “The sweetest dreams happen on a City Mattress.” Most importantly, the legends: “There’s a place I know in Ontario where the sea lions kiss, so the story goes!” My coworkers, who have widely varying geographical heritages, can sing to me about Stanley Steamer, Empire carpets, Kars4Kids, and assorted boring back-of-phonebook services.

When I pose my theory of the local jingle — that repetition creates nostalgia; that jingles call us back to a time in our lives when we were powerless to make our own consumer choices; that nobody knows their best friend’s number but everybody can phone a used car dealership in their hometown; that this is sinister but comforting, incorporating the absurdity of advertising and the myth of community — to legendary western New York jingle writer Ken Kaufman, he tells me I’ve only discovered what the Catholic Church figured out hundreds of years ago. “I mean, people hear these hymns from when they’re in vitro up through when they’re rolling on their backs.”

Kaufman knows from music theory and religion. He trained at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, and worked as a music director at several Catholic churches (although he emphasizes that he’s Jewish, excluding the handful of years that he was a Scientologist). Kaufman is an artist, who has studied the way music works since childhood (his favorite teacher at Eastman taught theory based on Beatles songs).

After school, he became a piano player in a Buffalo, New York, rock band after meeting the band members at the Scientology center. And then he started writing jingles to make money. “The band wasn’t making much money, but jingles … [with] jingles, I could make money.”

And he’s written quite a few. “If I played you every jingle that I’ve done back-to-back, you’d go to the moon three times, you know? I’ve got a demo reel that could make you go crazy.” He tells me to go to his website, AdSongsJingles.com, and “bathe in the wealth” of western New York state commercial music.

But I’m most interested in one he wrote more than 20 years ago: the Cellino & Barnes jingle, and how a local commercial for two dubiously useful personal injury lawyers has gotten so famous, it is now a meme.

It was a central joke in a Saturday Night Live sketch called “Legal Shark Tank” this March. Broadway actors including Katharine McPhee have somewhat spontaneously decided to release covers of it, dubbing it the “Cellino & Barnes Challenge.” In 2017, the New York Times ran the headline “Cellino Sues Barnes. Who Gets the Jingle?” as if the import of this question were self-evident.

You can scroll through tweets about the Cellino & Barnes song for hours, though most of them have a similar tone, summed up recently: “Thinking of walking down the aisle to the Cellino and Barnes jingle on loop.” The jingle — which goes “Cellino and Barnes, injury attorneys, call 800-888-8888” — can’t be this popular because of the content, but its place in the cultural imagination can’t be an accident either.

In 2015, the US Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform published a report on the state of law firm advertising spending, writing that even while the broader TV advertising industry was in decline, lawyers were spending $892 million a year, up nearly 70 percent since 2007. And Cellino and Barnes’s TV ad is arguably one of the most memorable legal advertisements of all time, largely because of that little song.

“It echoes in your head. You hear it in the middle of the night when you least want to hear anything.”

“It’s simple, it’s simple, it’s simple,” Kaufman says, explaining why the jingle works so well. “Something sinks into the public mind. A song sinks into your mind through repetition, and as soon as you’ve heard something several times, it becomes part of what in the industry is called echoic memory. Sound memory is echoic memory. Sight memory is iconic memory. Icons, just like on your computer. … Echoic memory is exactly what it sounds like. It echoes in your head. You hear it in the middle of the night when you least want to hear anything.”

Kaufman often works with lyricists, but Barnes came to him with all the words ready to go. “They’re the injury attorneys. Not just some of the injury attorneys or some of the guys. It’s a preemptive slogan, which was brilliant. I have to hand it to them.” In 2017, the New York Post reported that Cellino and Barnes had spent $4.6 million on TV and radio plays of the song linking them inextricably with the idea of injury attorneys.

“They are not afraid to spend piles of money, as they did in Buffalo when they first did their billboard campaign,” Kaufman says. “Long before I did the jingle, there was, believe me, a multimillion-dollar billboard campaign throughout western New York. It was amazing. Everywhere you looked, there were Cellino & Barnes billboards. In the poorest neighborhoods there were Cellino & Barnes billboards. They were everywhere.”

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Kaufman remembers his mid-’90s meeting with Steve Barnes fondly, and refers to him as “probably one of the most famous bald heads in America.” Barnes wanted the jingle to be “friendly” and straightforward: just their name, what they do, and the phone number. At the time, it was 854-2020. Years later, when Cellino and Barnes expanded from Buffalo to Rochester, they wanted a separate phone number for the new city — 654-2020 — so they called Kaufman back.

“I had the same two vocalists drive all the way to Rochester to record in my studio, to record one single word, ‘six,’ which I fit in there perfectly,” he says. (By the time I was in high school, the number was, for whatever reason, 454-2020.)

“Probably one of the most famous bald heads in America”

Once well-known in only the Buffalo and Rochester areas, Cellino and Barnes spent two decades hustling with those billboards and that jingle, moving into New York City and much of California. Each attorney reportedly makes tens of millions of dollars per year. But Cellino and Barnes have also been embroiled in a years-long legal battle, which started with various nepotism- and workload-related disputes and escalated with the removal of Cellino’s name from all the law firms offices in California. Cellino has been trying to dissolve his partnership with Barnes completely, but the trial has been postponed several times. (Barnes has accused Cellino of trying to burn his career “to the ground,” and of being a lazy lawyer who is more concerned with “building a lake home [and] running a tree farm.”)

This drama — far from being confined to the pair’s home city — has been the subject of New York magazine rundowns and Brooklyn independent theater productions. The New York Post reported in August 2017 that Cellino was suing Barnes to prevent him from using the signature jingle in California. By October 2017, Barnes had seemingly acquiesced, launching an ad campaign for the Barnes Firm without what Buffalo News called “the sweet, sweet sounds of 800-888-8888.” His new phone number, 800-800-0000, reportedly cost more than $900,000, and the jingle, unfortunately, is not as catchy.

Arguably, the first big commercial jingle was for Wheaties, and Wheaties did not ask for it. In the 1920s, the wheat and bran cereal became the second product offered by the Washburn Crosby Company, which had previously sold only flour. Two years after launch, Wheaties sales were still bad everywhere, except for in St. Paul, Minnesota, for reasons that were not immediately clear to advertising managers who had no access to things like Twitter.

As it turned out, 60 percent of the cereal’s sales were coming from the Minneapolis and St. Paul region because that was the only place where the company-owned radio station was regularly broadcasting a quartet of jazz singers performing “Have You Tried Wheaties?” to the tune of the 1919 hit “Jazz Baby.” The singers were paid $15 a week for three years to sing the song live on air, a national campaign was launched, and Wheaties was saved.

“Media was so non-fragmented at that point, and radio was the only true broadcast media,” jingle writer Yeosh Bendayan, co-founder of Push Button Productions in Orlando, Florida, tells me. “So, to develop a piece of music for a brand, if you pushed it out enough on the radio, you were going to get attention.”

The jingle that really kicked off decades of jingle mania was Pepsi’s in 1939, according to Tim Taylor, author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. “That one got so much attention that a lot of companies decided they had to have a jingle.” At the same time, the Pepsi jingle was mostly the word “nickel” said over and over, and it was extremely annoying; New York Public Radio’s WQCR banned it from its airwaves, followed by banning all jingles, period.

The Pepsi jingle was mostly the word “nickel” said over and over, and it was extremely annoying

Jingles have always drifted around and on the border between “good marketing that helps people remember your name” and “horrible nuisance that makes everyone hate you.” (See: Meow Mix.) The heyday of the jingle was the late 1950s into the ’70s, Bendayan says. Brands used to invest real money in a “showstopping” piece of music recorded with live instrumentation in a fancy in-house studio. Both he and Taylor point to the 1971 Coca-Cola ad “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” as perhaps the most famous jingle of all time — two different bands did versions of it that became global hits in the early 1970s.

But the ’80s and ’90s have big-deal jingles you can pull out of the recesses of your brain too. Band-Aid. Burger King. Kit-Kat. Huggies. Folgers. Cotton! Oscar Mayer’s jingle dates back to 1965, but it was just as big for ’90s kids as it was for their parents.“Wanta Fanta” started in 2002. McDonald’s “I’m Lovin It” feels timeless but was actually used first in 2003 (and was written by Justin Timberlake). And now, brands can play on nostalgia and capture the current moment by hiring pop stars to record new takes on old tunes.

Bendayan says the jingle business has never really gone away — “If you want something remembered, you sing it” — but it’s obviously gone through phases of being less than cool. The American Association of Advertising Agencies conducted a survey of national TV ads in 1998 and found a jingle in about one of every 10 ads, then conducted it again in 2011 and found that the number had fallen to more like two in every 100. (The survey was not conducted again.) In 2016, the Atlantic declared the jingle “dead,” citing marketers’ shift to the much less risky choice of just licensing preexisting music, which they had spent $355 million doing the year before. But local businesses are not in a position to cut deals with top recording artists.

Local jingles are more interesting than national jingles. Local jingles are the radio-born memes that make up the culture of small and unspecial areas. Ken Kaufman also wrote the jingle for Tops Friendly Markets, a regional grocery store chain with locations mostly in upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania. It goes “Tops never stops / saving you more!” but everybody I ever met sang, instead, “Tops never mops / just look at the floor!” A local jingle is built to last, small-business owners being far less likely than Coca-Cola to pay for a remix — and it is typically not under pressure to be “relevant” to anything other than a community’s anodyne mythology.

“For many, many people, music that makes up their childhood isn’t just what was on the Billboard charts; it’s also what was playing on their television, what was playing on their radios, in local markets,” Bendayan says. “It’s as identifiable as a piece of pop music, a jingle for a local car dealership or a jingle for the fair — it makes up the tapestry of local communities, which is something we really love about the jingle-writing business.”

“It’s as identifiable as a piece of pop music, a jingle for a local car dealership or a jingle for the fair — it makes up the tapestry of local communities”

Kaufman says he prefers local jingles too, because they’re the ones that tend to have the most impact. He wrote a jingle for Hamburg Overhead Door, a garage door company based in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg. The company’s big issue was that it was named “Hamburg,” so everyone thought they only installed garage doors in Hamburg. He wrote them a song that went “Overdelivery all over western New York, Hamburg Overhead Door. Hamburg Overhead Door, overdelivery, all over western New York.” He remembers it because their business “exploded.”

(Jen Kuhn, the owner of Hamburg Overhead Door, confirmed this story to Vox via email, adding, “I can tell it is successful by the number of people who come up to me in public and sing the jingle to me ;) I do not have any hard numbers to share.”)

Saturday Night Live in March. | Will Heath/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Will Heath/Getty Images" />

“My favorite jingle is the jingle that works for my client,” Kaufman says. “When I see my client, when the needle has moved, and they are now more profitable than they were the year before and more profitable than the year before that, that’s the jingle that I love.” (He also calls himself an “unabashed capitalist.”)

To him, local jingles are special, if not always in form then at least in craft. “If somebody says to me, ‘Oh, my god, you’re too expensive for me,’ I say to them, ‘Go on the internet.’ There are other people that do what I do,” he says. “I mean, look, when I want a cello recording, I hire the first chair of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. He ain’t cheap. There are probably 10,000 cello players in western New York, but I hire the best, that’s all. I don’t play around with this stuff.”

Bendayan tells similar stories, saying a credit union he recently wrote a jingle for called him to say that the VP of her company had just heard an entire school bus of kids singing along to it. “We find Facebook pages sometimes for jingles that we’ve written,” he adds. “For fans of jingles, or for people who say, ‘I can’t stand this jingle.’”

Ken Kaufman has a Steinway grand piano and a Hammond B3 organ. “My Steinway is just gorgeous. I have a wonderful set of drums,” he says. “They’re miked up with some of the best mics you can buy. My vocal mics are pristine.”

A beautiful sound, but not necessarily a cool sound. In fact, the Cellino & Barnes jingle, Kaufman’s most famous work, is a decidedly uncool sound. That is, possibly, the point: A slightly dorky ad makes a pair of lawyers with a seemingly horrible personal relationship and several reportedly shady business dealings seem actually charming.

Idfw anyone that can't recite the cellino and barnes jingle
— amanda (@rollandfan1) December 5, 2016

“These modern styles, EDM, hip-hop, alternative rock, it’s harder to align a jingle with those styles. Cellino & Barnes brings you back to a different era,” says Josh Rabinowitz, a former ad agency music director and owner of the Brooklyn Music Experience consultancy. “Cellino & Barnes, their target is not necessarily someone looking for a lifestyle brand. You don’t need to do something super cool or super relevant or hip.” I ask him if he has actually heard it, and he sings it. “Yeah, totally, I mean, I watch cable television.”

“Cellino & Barnes, their target is not necessarily someone looking for a lifestyle brand”

Brands have gotten too cloying. They’re pretending to be your friend. They’re pretending to entertain you. They’re pretending they just want to help you be cool and happy — they’re companies! Jingles, Bendayan agrees, can make a comeback by returning advertising to a less duplicitous time.

“The more modern thing to do is to be straightforward about your product and what you’re selling,” he says. “Most people want you to be direct about it; they don’t want you to pretend like you’re not selling.” The injury attorneys, and where to reach them. A new garage door, and what region of the state it is available in. Used cars, and their address. Come buy them! This is a useful piece of information if you’re in the market, and if you’re not right now, maybe you will be later, at which time you’ll remember that you still know exactly which exit to take to get to the discount furniture store and the region’s fourth-best cheeseburger.

There are other reasons to believe the jingle could be important again. With artificial intelligence from IBM, Sony, Google, and others getting better and better at writing music, a jingle could get cheaper and cheaper. (Although it won’t have the same spirit as Ken’s work. Kaufman is, decidedly, wary of technology, and of the internet. “We were warned not to bite the apple, weren’t we? We were warned, and Steven Jobs knew exactly what he was doing when he created that logo,” he tells me, a little cryptically.) Analysts are jumping out of their socks to put up estimates about how many tens of billions of dollars voice shopping will be worth once there’s an Alexa or a Google Assistant device in every single home; everyone is listening to podcasts, and streaming ad-supported music, and attempting not to look at screens. We love audio again. What a time to be alive and writing jingles!

When I ask Kaufman if he remembers what he charged for the Cellino & Barnes jingle, he says, “If I told you what it was, you would go, ‘Oh, my god, did you undercharge him.’ But it’s always privileged information between me and my client. It’s like HIPAA.” (In 2017 the New York Post reported that Kaufman charged a one-time fee of $5,000. A year later, Inside Edition said the figure was actually $3,500.)

Just heard the Cellino & Barnes jingle with the new number and my heart broke
— Desus MF Nice💯 (@desusnice) October 23, 2017

In any case, after Cellino & Barnes broke big outside of western New York and changed their phone number to the nationally famous string of 8s, they had one of Kaufman’s competitors rerecord it — “with fake strings,” he adds, not with focused disdain, but with soft regret that it had to happen that way, to his song. “Why [Steve Barnes] didn’t call me, only my competitor knows,” he says now. “My competitor alleges still to this day to be the writer of the jingle, and that is a false allegation, okay? It’s something that I have to have out with him one of these days.”

He’s not dwelling on it. He wrote the melody. They bought it, used it. They changed to 8s and fake strings, that’s their business. In his opinion, Ross Cellino is a great guy and a humanitarian who gives away a ton of money. He doesn’t know anything about Steve Barnes these days, he says. “I don’t know whether he gives or takes. I don’t know. He may be a wonderful man for all I know, but all I do know is he was running the show and he gave the jingle over, for some reason or another, to my competitor and I never found out why. Maybe he lost my phone number.”

It is impossible to imagine a time when Cellino and Barnes will not be the most famous personal injury attorneys in all of America. They lost Kaufman’s phone number, but he made all of us remember theirs — forever. So, that’s it: a few thousand dollars to make one of the most well-remembered pieces of music in modern America, for one of its most famous bald heads.

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What to know about Apple’s new credit card for iPhone owners

2019-08-06T11:04:00-04:00

Apple’s new Goldman Sachs credit card launches this summer. | Apple

The credit card Apple announced in March from its Cupertino, California, campus is rolling out Tuesday to a randomly selected group of iPhone users (who had signed up to be notified when the card became available). By the end of the month, any US iPhone user will be able to access the app and apply for the card.

The March press event was all about the company’s ever-expanding suite of services — which currently bring in about $10 billion per quarter and have only become more important to the company as it’s reached what looks like a plateau in iPhone sales. In addition to the new Apple credit card, CEO Tim Cook announced a subscription gaming service called Apple Arcade, a new streaming service called Apple TV Channels, and a subscription news service called Apple News+ (in which Vox is participating).

First, an audience of press and developers watched an animated faux-movie title sequence featuring several of Apple’s most famous ads and referring to its employees and fans as “misfits, rebels, and troublemakers.” Half an hour later, Cook announced that his company was launching a credit card with Goldman Sachs.

“While we all need them, there’s some things about the credit card experience that could be so much better,” Cook said, after standing briefly in front of a title card that boasted a projected 10 billion transactions this year through its instant-payment app Apple Pay. The crimes of credit cards are fairly obvious, and Cook is not wrong about them — the rewards are confusing and hard to redeem, the rules around fees and interest rates can be deceptive, the apps and websites affiliated with major credit card companies are bafflingly hideous and difficult to use.

The Apple credit card will supposedly change all this. You sign up directly on your iPhone and get a usable digital version immediately. You can use it directly from the Wallet app of your phone, powered by Apple Pay. The application process is meant to be lightning-fast: Just type in your address, birthday, income, and the last four digits of your Social Security number, and Apple promises that Goldman Sachs will approve or deny you within a minute.

There is a physical Apple Card as well, which was introduced in March with a music video about spray-painting a titanium credit card and etching an Apple logo into it with a laser. It has no number and requires no signature; payments can only be validated through your iPhone (using Touch ID and Face ID), which makes it more like a totem of a credit card than an actual credit card. Oddly, using the physical card results in a penalty of sorts, as the cash-back rate diminishes to 1 percent for those purchases. Presumably this will incentivize making payments through your iPhone (and more people making payments through their iPhones means more businesses accepting Apple Pay).

The Verge’s Nilay Patel writes Tuesday morning:

I got to hold the card itself and it is very nice, although it is fairly thick and felt a little bit heavier than the typical metal credit card. You can use the card without your phone nearby like any other card, but it doesn’t support contactless payments — Apple obviously wants you to use your phone or watch for that.

The Wallet app also does a lot of simple financial tracking for you — displaying a breakdown of your spending in soothing pink and teal gradients — and tying each purchase to its location in Apple Maps. It can supposedly make “financial health” recommendations for you and calculate various monthly payment options, while showing you how much interest each will result in over time. You can also text for help in iMessage (“You don’t have to wait on hold or remember your mother’s maiden name”).

Most importantly, Apple boasts the card’s rewards program, which is called Daily Cash. “It’s cash, like real cash,” vice president of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey explained. Apple Card holders get 2 percent back on all purchases made with a digital card, and 3 percent back when they’re spending money in an Apple Store or on an Apple service. Apple hasn’t said exactly how many people will be approved for the card — historically, cards with perks this good have required extremely high credit scores — but has said it would like it to be “accessible,” and that it doesn’t intend to compete with any well-known high-end cards like American Express Platinum or Chase Sapphire.

Apple has been emphasizing privacy in all its recent advertising for the iPhone and did so again in justifying the existence of its credit card. “Apple doesn’t know what you bought, where you bought it, or how much you paid for it,” according to Bailey, and all the tracking and sorting of purchases happens on your phone itself, without being sent to Apple servers. Goldman Sachs won’t be able to sell or share your data either, she announced in March.

While a huge chunk of Apple’s service revenue comes from in-app purchases in free-to-play games, which are notorious privacy nightmares, this credit card seems fine. (Albeit cosigned by one of the largest banks in the world, with a storied history of alleged gender discrimination, undue political influence, and shorting the American economy.)

In fact, it’s not much of a surprise. Apple has been in the payments game for a while already, and it has been a long time since this was a company of “troublemakers” working out of a garage. Apple Pay has been around — and increasingly commonplace — since 2014.

As Medium editor Micah Singleton pointed out on Twitter, Apple also partnered with Barclays to offer exclusive rewards on a widely criticized Visa card in 2014, but this did not come up during the initial presentation. Apple Card is its first full-blown financial service — assisted by MasterCard and “a bank that was willing to do things that had never been done in the industry before.” Goldman Sachs, that is.

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Update: Updated August 6, 11 am ET, to include details of Apple Card rollout.

EBay is suing Amazon for “racketeering” and anti-competitive practices

2019-08-02T12:47:16-04:00

EBay last sued Amazon less than 10 months ago. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

EBay is suing Amazon for an alleged “conspiracy” to steal high-volume sellers off its platform through its user messaging system, the New York Times reported Thursday. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California, says Amazon exhibited “a pattern of racketeering activity” and its employees conspired to “infiltrate and exploit eBay’s internal member email system using fraud and false pretenses.”

The alleged scheme — of Amazon employees creating fake eBay accounts and then messaging successful eBay sellers and recruiting them to Amazon— is nearly identical to the one described in the lawsuit eBay filed against Amazon in the same court in October of last year, which is currently in arbitration.

The previous lawsuit took care to paint Amazon as metastatic and insatiable, a big bully eating everyone’s lunch. (EBay’s current market cap is around $33 billion, while Amazon’s is about $887 billion.) It pointed out that 2017 was the first year in which more than half of products sold on Amazon were listed by third-party sellers — what they feel is a mimicry of eBay’s business model and raison d’être. This time, eBay’s lawyers underlined their argument with the same CNN quote as they used in the previous suit, referring to Amazon as “an 800-pound gorilla with a hand grenade.” Amazon declined to comment on the new lawsuit.

The difference here is the level of coordination eBay is alleging. The first suit couldn’t prove that individual Amazon employees were acting at the direction of any higher-ups, but this one mentions three mid-level managers by name — the highest ranking being Sonja Boch, currently head of global seller recruitment at Amazon.

The previous lawsuit also didn’t say whether Amazon had succeeded in stealing sellers, while this one does: “The racketeering conspiracy that the Defendants and other Amazon managers directed was a success. Amazon representatives satisfied significant portions of their seller recruitment quotas through the illegal activity, and filled holes in Amazon’s product offerings[.]”

“Amazon representatives satisfied significant portions of their seller recruitment quotas through the illegal activity”

EBay’s terms of service explicitly prohibit this kind of recruitment, as well as exchanging emails and phone numbers over their messaging system, and Amazon employees agreed to those terms of service when they made the eBay accounts in question.

The suit quotes several seemingly damning messages from Amazon employees, including one in which an employee identifies himself as a member of a “hunter/recruiter team which actively searches for sellers” and several in which they type out email addresses with strange formatting (e.g. spelling out the words “dot” or “at”) and expressly saying that they’re trying to avoid detection. The managers listed in the suit are accused of training sales reps “on how to solicit eBay sellers … referred to internally as ‘prospecting.’”

The rivalry between eBay and Amazon is openly bitter, and has only escalated in recent months. Last week, eBay announced plans to launch its own fulfillment service next year, which will provide its sellers with the two-day delivery service that Amazon long considered its calling card. During Amazon’s annual Prime Day super-sale event just 10 days before that, eBay ran a “Crash Sale” — named to poke fun at the fact that Amazon’s website crashed repeatedly during its 2018 Prime Day.

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