This isn’t going to be some in-depth thing because I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and also I’m currently in Montauk having a nice time. BUT!
Grift surrounds us, but sometimes even I am surprised at how literally everything is a scam these days. Online shopping, in particular.
There are a few different types of online shopping scam. One is the one where people gank photos from high-end fashion company sites and send garbage, possibly toxic-chemical-laden knockoffs to customers. You’ve got the ones that are just people buying a bunch of shit off AliExpress.
Another is the kind that is perpetually “going out of business,” a tactic used for decades by storefronts in touristy parts of Manhattan. (All three of these examples came from a single Facebook session in December.)
The weird t-shirt companies that use an algorithm and your personal data to come up with shirts that you either buy as a gag gift for a friend or buy because you’re a shitty garbage person and the other weird t-shirt companies that mash up “geeky” things because god forbid you not tie your identity to a Pop Culture Thing.
There’s a sameness to all the sites, a likely product of the Squarespace/Wix model of website building. Sparse, clean, full of stock art.
One that keeps popping up in various Facebook-owned feeds is “For the Minimalist.” The site is clearly attempting to capitalize on the Marie Kondo-ing of a certian segment of the Netflix-watching, social-media-browsing populace. None of its products are particularly innovative or interesting, or even of a particularly high quality. It’s just another wholesaler jacking up the prices of backpacks and sunglasses you can find literally anywhere, with a late-2000s hipster wrapper.
Ah, yes, “Facebook-owned.” None of this would be possible without Facebook and Instagram (which Facebook owns, in case you’ve forgotten). It’s easy enough to set up a website and stick a “pay with PayPal” button onto it. But without Facebook’s rock-bottom-cheap advertising, most of these places would never be able to make any money. The click-through rates on these ads, especially around the holidays, are probably the kind that make TV advertisers drool.
Who are the people who set these “shops” up? What are their lives like? Is it their main source of income, or a side hustle? Are they based in America, or is this another one of those “Macedonian teens” ad scams? If I had time and money, I would figure that out. As it stands, no one pays for freelance journalism these days, so I’ll probably just wait for someone else to do the work.