Comment of the Week

Over the past year, all manner of companies have been selling stuff with their brand splashed all over it. A Peloton “kitchen sink tote” by Oliver Thomas will set you back $150. A collectible bottle of Tesla Tequila is going for $250. And Stouffer’s, of mac-and-cheese fame, is selling an adult sweatsuit (we kid you not) that can be yours for $95. Welcome to Merch Madness.

Since when did every company become a merch-hype machine? It’s a question that writer Adam Bluestein investigates in his recent feature in Marker, “How Supreme-Style Merch Drops Took Over Corporate America.” “The same boredom…

Comment of the Week

Earlier this week, Marker launched: “I Read It So You Don’t Have To,” a new series by Senior Books Editor Kaushik Viswanath that gives you the TL;DR on a business book you want to read but (let’s face it) will never have time to. For the inaugural edition, Viswanath reviewed Tim Harford’s The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics, which he called “an entertaining tour through the many ways in which we can learn to ask the right questions when snuffing out data and statistics. How do you separate useful stats from misleading ones? …

Comment of the Week

Nike’s SNKRS app — the marketplace for the company’s limited-edition releases—has gained notoriety on social media among sneaker fans for creating bottlenecks and making it virtually impossible for customers to check out and snag a pair. Earlier this month, “Michael Jordan’s son Marcus released a limited-edition version of his dad’s Air Jordan I ‘Freeze Out’ sneaker that hardly any actual consumer was able to purchase,” writes David Dennis, Jr., senior writer for LEVEL and author of the forthcoming book, The Movement Made Us.

Dennis, who has repeatedly tried to purchase sneakers via the SNKRS app (to no avail) has likened…

Comment of the Week

In the past few months, no less than three EV charging companies — Volta, ChargePoint, and EVGo — have announced their plans to go public via SPAC and reach multibillion-dollar valuations in the process. Building a robust infrastructural network of charging stations will be necessary to support the increasing number of electric cars on the road. It’s been relatively affordable to “fill up” EVs when plugging in because charging companies currently supply electricity as a loss leader. “While establishing their market, these companies must more or less give away the electricity in order to get people to buy the vehicles…

Comment of the Week

After months of reporting, Courtney Rubin landed The Big Scoop: In her feature for Marker, Rubin wrote about the spectacular rise and fall of Ample Hills, the beloved ice cream company born out of Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood, which had all the trappings of a corporate fairy tale — $19 million in funding, a deal with Disney, and a cultlike following — before its implosion; the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last March, just shy of its 10th anniversary.

The brainchild of married co-founders, Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna, the ice cream company had ambitious expansion plans with dreams…

Comment of the Week

After Jeff Bezos announced his plans earlier this week to step down as Amazon’s CEO and hand the reins over to longtime Amazon Web Services leader Andy Jassy, Medium Editor at Large Steve LeVine wrote about how Bezos is the ultimate daredevil capitalist, driven by a seemingly insatiable desire to dominate one market after the next. “Why spring across one industry boundary after another, watch as blood flows on Main Street, the middle class is hollowed out, and workers teem into cavernous warehouses to work like ants and be managed by algorithms?” LeVine asks. And now Bezos, he argues, is…

Comment of the Week

Everyone’s been talking nonstop about GameStop’s improbable rally and what the battle between Redditors, the wolves of Wall Street, and hero-turned-villain Robinhood reveals about the markets and the greater economy. On Monday, Marker Editors first noted that GameStop’s stock price was going bonkers with the share price increasing by a mindboggling 2,200% over the last nine months, moving from a low of $2.80 in April to $79 last Friday. But the retail trading frenzy continued as GameStop shares climbed to an astronomical $489 and hit a $33.7 billion market cap yesterday at its peak. …

Comment of the Week

Earlier this week, Medium editor at large Steve LeVine wrote about the growing cohort of economists, journalists, and investors who believe we’re on the brink of a new period of economic expansion that harkens back to the Roaring ’20s. “No economists appear to expect anything except that Americans as a group will emerge from Covid-19 and gorge in restaurants, drink like fish, and travel with abandon,” he wrote. LeVine examined several factors that contributed to the 1920s boom, including some large technological leaps such as the commercialization of electricity and the automobile that may not be repeatable in the 2020s.

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