There are a lot of perks of working from home: the skipped commute, the chance of a quick midday workout, the lack of formal workwear. Many people say it makes them more productive, or at least just as productive as when they're in the office. But there are also some drawbacks when your office becomes your couch. Among them: You can get a little weird. A lot of alone time can result in some lost muscle memory, socialization-wise, and some slightly freaky habits you'd probably keep under wraps if other human beings were in eyeshot.

Anouska Shenn, who runs a workplace wellness agency in the United Kingdom, undertakes long, involved beauty treatments on days she's working from home and doesn't have meetings. She does a lighter version of the scary-looking "morning shed" trend popularized on TikTok. In between sending emails, she applies and removes a combination of face masks, wrinkle patches, hair curlers, and more that is very much not other-people appropriate. The getup is tough to sleep in, so she takes advantage of the ability to do the routine during the day. Plus, it's not something she really wants her partner to witness — you know, to keep a little bit of the mystery alive.

"I guess it's quite a luxury," says Shenn, who's been working from home since starting her business, The Yoga Company, in 2017. She's never been caught masked up in a spur-of-the-moment meeting, though if she were, she'd take it off. "Truthfully, I was one of those weirdos at the office who used to sit on a big exercise ball," she says, "so maybe these habits aren't such a non sequitur, but I've certainly become more shameless since I began working from home."

We're five years into the vast pandemic-driven remote-work experiment — and about three years into the return-to-office battle between employers and employees. While people aren't working remotely as much as they were at the height of the pandemic, when nearly two-thirds of work was being done at home, about a quarter of work is still happening beyond the confines of the office. That time can get strange — and make the in-office time a little awkward.

Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who focuses on remote work, has found that employees who work from home save about 10 minutes a day on grooming. It can be nice to skip a shave or go makeup-free, which remote workers do at higher rates than those in the office. But it can also be a little gross. In one of Bloom's recent surveys, 73% of respondents said they showered before working from home, compared with 85% who said they showered before going into the office. Eighty-one percent of remote workers said they put on deodorant, compared with 95% of in-office workers. For toothbrushing, the margin was slimmer: 92% versus 95%.

"Some of this is understandable, but some of it — like brushing teeth — I thought was about oral hygiene not going into work," Bloom said in an email.

Eric Mochnacz, who works for an HR consultancy based in New York, has developed what he called a "unique routine" while working from home that, if anything, sounds more over-the-top than underachieving. He gets up a couple of hours early to play New York Times games like Wordle and read on the couch. Between calls, he does chores: washing dishes, dropping off the rent check, going grocery shopping. He considers it a "clarity break," part of stress relief. Also among his at-home stress relievers is song-and-dance time that is a no-go on days he's in the office. "I'll just put a Spotify song and dance around my apartment," he says. Lately he's been on a Taylor Swift kick. He thinks the setup makes him more productive in work and in life — the built-in time-outs help him do his job better, and he keeps his Peloton streak alive.

Mochnacz's company has a hybrid setup, and he's noticed that work-from-home weirdness translates to some weirdness in the office, in that he can be a little extra chatty. Whether it's a "brain fart" about some work stuff or Matthew Lillard's potential return to the "Scream" franchise, he feels compelled to gush to a colleague. "I'm, like, hoping people care," he says.

William Chopik, a social-personality psychologist at Michigan State University who studies relationships, says that while working from home gives people a "ton of flexibility," it can also affect their behavior.

"There's something to say about being around other people that kind of polices our behavior a little bit, or at least makes us a little bit more vigilant to stuff that we do," he said. "You might be a little less likely to get distracted. You probably don't talk to yourself, you don't say weird things, you don't randomly start singing. I do all those things at home, and the truth is that I would die of cringe if I did that in front of other people."

Online, there's plenty of chatter about the habits people have developed at home that aren't really appropriate for prime time, or work time. They don't change out of their pajamas (or they get day and night pajamas). They maybe start happy hour a little early, talk to themselves, or engage in levels of doomscrolling they'd get into trouble for if their manager saw. Some people say they feel like they never take a break; others say their short breaks turn into extended ones.

Like it or not, the office provides social structure, and if you go too long without it, you may end up developing some overly unstructured behaviors. About a decade ago, when I had a fully remote job, I'd go days without talking to other humans except for the ladies in my noon spin class, where I'm pretty sure I was the only person with a job. A while back, a friend of mine got into the habit of working from the tub, reading and typing away on the computer during hourlong baths.

Strange habits at home don't stop at the front door. Remote work can also mean people get rusty on the softer skills needed around coworkers in the office. It may result in some awkwardness, whether perceived or real, when people are back at their desks.

A lot of the norms around formal communication have been maintained in remote and hybrid work. A meeting is a meeting, whether you're in a conference room or on Zoom. Messaging via email and Slack is the same. But informal, spontaneous communication — chatter on the walk to the meeting, an encounter at the watercooler or on the way to lunch — doesn't happen when people are remote. People's skills have shifted over time to match their environments. In a hybrid situation, perhaps some people's verbal-communication muscles got stronger but the nonverbal stuff got worse.

"If the environment doesn't lend itself to a normal interaction, all of these skill sets can become super challenging activities," said Hakan Ozcelik, a professor of management in the College of Business Administration at Sacramento State University.

Compounding the matter is the fact that a lot of people don't get as much practice as they used to socializing in group settings outside of work. People are spending more time alone; they're not in church groups or book clubs or community organizations as they were, say, 50 years ago. So many of our modern interactions have moved online that it makes the in-real-life ones harder.

"The rules of engagement have gotten fuzzier, and that's what can trigger awkwardness," said Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist who founded the Institute for Life at Work. Perhaps someone sees a group lunch at work and, because they haven't done something like that in so long, they're more nervous about joining than they would've been just a few years ago.

Cody Baertschi, a digital marketer who lives in Minnesota, feels like he's gotten the hang of virtual communication at work. He knows to talk to the Europeans about how cold it is there (in centigrade) and get down to business within the constructs of a video meeting. But for the normal, more "old-school situations," he feels like he needs a manual. The small talk that takes place walking to and from a meeting is a struggle. "I don't have the reps," he says. "There's not the construct of a call. There's not the comfort of being in your own space while having the conversations."

He and his wife notice it when they meet other parents — they worry ahead of time about what to talk about. During the week, work can feel never-ending, regardless of the hour of the day — a quality that's self-inflicted. It can also make him a little stir-crazy. "When the weekend rolls around, it's like I've got to get out of the house," he says. The Twin Cities, where he does his weekend-warrioring, are a two-hour drive away. But even the long time in the car is worth it to hit up the Mall of America, check out a museum, or do a hike. It's nice to go to restaurants, too — cooking his own lunch all week makes Baertschi eager to try someone else's cooking. "Who cares?" he says. "I'm out of the house."

The good news is that, just as we can get worse at socializing, we can also get better. "Social skills are truly a skill," Noonan said. "It's something you can train."

It's also worth remembering that something you think is awkward might not be awkward to everyone else. A friend recently shared that she gets anxious that people can hear her walking in the office because of the click-clack of her shoes, which I would bet a million dollars is not a thing her coworkers are up in arms about (or have probably even noticed). Clearly, some WFH behaviors that are not appropriate for the office: Premeeting pump-up time blasting Katy Perry from your speakers at your desk is a no, as is wearing the same grimy sweatsuit for four days in a row. Behavior that's appropriate for the office: joining coworkers at the lunch table next to you, or stretching your legs with a midday walk.

And as return-to-office mandates take hold, your coworkers might feel a little off about the whole thing, too. Maybe it'll give you something to talk about — or commiserate that you'd rather be home, doing your weird little habits in private.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

In 2020, it was all the rage for corporations to pledge their allegiance to diversity and inclusion. In 2025, it's very much in vogue to declare that they're no longer into that kind of stuff. Companies such as Target, Walmart, McDonald's, Google, and Meta have recently announced major rollbacks of their DEI efforts. In corporate America, nixing employee resource groups is the new version of posting that Black Lives Matter black square five years ago. On the flip side, companies including JPMorgan and Costco say they're sticking to their DEI guns despite the Trump-fueled headwinds.

It's tempting to paint an us-versus-them — or them-versus-them — picture: the DEI backpedalers versus the DEI warriors. But there's a quieter and potentially larger group of businesses taking a different course: subtly burying DEI efforts. They're not putting out press releases or big memos saying they're axing programs aimed at hiring diverse candidates or tracking supplier demographics. Instead, they've taken a look at the legal, political, and cultural landscape and made the calculation that it's better to silently pull back on DEI-related language for now.

"Many companies in America have always wanted to promote diversity in the workplace in a manner that's lawful, and that hasn't changed," said Rebecca Baker, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins in its labor and employment group. "What has changed is there's a cloud of ambiguity as to what is lawful."

Companies are hoping to fly under the anti-DEI crowd's radar at a moment when the movement feels more emboldened than ever. They're afraid to put a target on their backs, legal or otherwise. Despite some of the attention-grabbing headlines, this might be how DEI really dies — quietly, in the shadows.

While several companies have made splashy announcements about their DEI plans, others have simply scrubbed mentions of them, including in their annual 10-K financial reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For their latest filings, it appears that a lot of publicly traded companies did a CTRL+F+DELETE on "diversity."

Legally, companies have to disclose some information about their workforces in their annual reports, such as how many people work for them, but they're not required to say anything about diversity and demographics. It had become popular over the past decade or so for companies to make such disclosures anyway, especially in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020. But that's shifted as companies have become increasingly worried about being viewed as "woke" or overly progressive.

General Motors, for example, cut the DEI section of its annual report. In its 2023 report, the automaker said it aimed to be "the most inclusive company in the world" and touted its diverse board of directors and dozen employee resource groups. In its 2024 report, that section was gone. PepsiCo's latest filing scrapped a breakdown of its workforce demographics as well as a line about how it believed its "culture of diversity, equity and inclusion is a competitive advantage that fuels innovation, enhances our ability to attract and retain talent and strengthens our reputation." The soda maker did, however, retain a mention of pay equity. Disney shortened its DEI section, in part removing mentions of employee development programs and fellowships for underrepresented talent while adding a mention of Heroes Work Here, an initiative to hire and train US military veterans. Mondelez International scrapped its section dedicated to diversity and inclusion in its workforce. Philip Morris International significantly shortened what had previously been its DEI section, removing goals for gender and racial representation in its management and mention of employee resource groups. The section is now named "collaborative culture."

Some firms are taking a subtler approach. Pinterest, for example, renamed the "inclusion and diversity" section of its report "inclusion and belonging." Chipotle swapped "diversity, equity & inclusion" for "culture and inclusivity," though it continues to include breakdowns of its workforce by gender, ethnicity, and race.

The companies mentioned did not respond to a request for comment or declined to comment on the record, with the exception of Philip Morris, which said it valued its "global workforce" and was "focused on fostering a fair and collaborative workplace in an environment that provides opportunities to all employees for growth and professional development."

"Prior to Trump taking office, there was already a lot of pressure on DEI," said Andrew Jones, a senior researcher at the Conference Board's ESG Center. "Lots of companies obviously realize that DEI became a very politically loaded term, controversial term, even a slightly toxic term in terms of the legal and political scrutiny."

Last spring, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that dozens of companies were changing their DEI descriptions in their annual reports amid heightened legal and political scrutiny. A new analysis by NPR this year found that several companies were axing references to DEI altogether. Beyond the filings, data provided by AlphaSense, a financial information and insights company, indicates that mentions of DEI have sharply declined on earnings calls and in other public investor-related communications over the past couple of years.

Businesses are increasingly hush-hush about anything that might even have a whiff of DEI, lest they poke the anti-woke bear and become the next Bud Light or worse.

"If you're a CEO, you've got the general counsel in one ear saying you're going to get sued or you're going to use lose contracts," said Alison Taylor, an associate professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who wrote the book "Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World." "And then you've got the public-affairs person in the other ear saying here's who's yelling at you on social media."

Baker said companies were increasingly including mentions in their risk-factor disclosures of potential controversies around their employment practices and social initiatives. "So they're flagging that 'Hey, investors should understand that the DEI climate is in flux right now and we can't exactly predict what might happen. And some of our employment practices, although we believe they're fully legally compliant, may ultimately end up a target of litigation,'" she said.

Corporate America was nervous before the election about the political tides turning, given the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling against affirmative action in college admissions and the growing influence of conservative activists such as Robby Starbuck. Now, Trump 2.0 has sent many of them into a silent panic mode. The president positioned himself as a fierce opponent of almost DEI, determined to root it out of the federal government and, if he can manage it, private industry. The crusade is clearly having a chilling effect across the business community.

In an executive order signed on his first day in office, Trump set out to end what he called "radical and wasteful" DEI programs in the federal government. The next day, in a separate executive order, he revoked an order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 that barred government contractors and subcontractors from engaging in employment discrimination. Many government contractors are public companies. But even for those that aren't, the order lays out steps for "encouraging the private sector to end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences." It instructs federal agencies to identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of private companies. In effect, they're hunting for lists of names to sue, and no one wants to be one of them.

"There is a valid fear of companies having a target on their back based on how they outwardly promote DE&I," said Renai Rodney, a counsel in Ropes & Gray's litigation and enforcement practice group, "which is unfortunate, because while there's certain things in the executive order that companies should certainly be mindful of, the underlying law has not changed."

The chaos and confusion is part of the point. The letter of the law isn't any different — it's always been illegal for companies to implement quotas or require a certain proportion of their workforce to be a specific race or gender. The law's interpretation and enforcement, however, have clearly undergone a reversal. Federal contractors run the risk of the Department of Justice going after them to assert that their DEI policies violated the False Claims Act, which prohibits contractors from defrauding the federal government. Major companies could be accused by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The law was meant to prevent businesses from declining to hire someone because they're part of a minority group; now it's being used against businesses by people who say they're being overlooked because they're in the majority.

Jenny Yang, who served as an EEOC chair and commissioner from 2013 to 2018 and now heads the Urban Institute's Workplace Equity Initiative, said companies facing claims that they discriminated or used ill-defined "illegal DEI" practices may very well have a good case in court and win. But going to court costs money, and any battle is likely to draw attention, so they may be inclined to give up before there's even a fight.

"A lot of this really does not have the law behind it, and it's not likely to survive a motion to dismiss," she said. "But companies don't want to spend the money even defending against the lawsuit, and they don't want the reputational harm, or they don't want their board to get upset."

Employers may proactively examine programs they think could be subject to legal scrutiny, such as scholarships or fellowships aimed at underrepresented communities.

"It may not actually make it to a legal decision, but they decide, well, we'll settle this by opening up that program to everyone and not just groups," Rodney said. "Those haven't been ruled unlawful, but companies are either deciding we don't want a bad decision on the books or we don't want to use resources to fight this, so we'll just change the terms of the program."

It isn't just the federal government that companies have to worry about — conservative state authorities, legal groups, and individuals with big platforms are also freaking them out. In mid-2024, Missouri's attorney general sued IBM, alleging that it was using unlawful racial and gender quotas in employment. The Trump-aligned group America First Legal has filed several complaints, including against Southwest Airlines and American Airlines, over their DEI practices. Texas' attorney general, Ken Paxton, has told financial institutions such as BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup to watch it on DEI or face enforcement actions. A police pension fund in Florida is suing Target, saying it wasn't made aware of the risks of the retailer's DEI initiatives and potential backlash.

"In terms of what's the actual legal risk, I think we're seeing it now morph into Title VII discrimination claims from individual employees, activism by Republican state attorneys general," Baker said. "Now we're waiting to see exactly what comes out of the president's executive order."

Just because companies quietly disappear mentions of their DEI policies doesn't mean the work can't continue. They can practice without preaching, and many will. If one is to believe companies meant it when they said they cared about fostering diverse workplaces, then presumably none of that went away overnight. The issue is that, cynically, it's sometimes hard to believe these companies were that dedicated to the idea in the first place.

"Many initiatives weren't always measurable," Jones said. "There were a lot of public commitments without really thinking through how they were measured and implemented."

Corporate values often seem like a PR stunt — X supports the troops, Y wants to end racism — based on where companies calculate the "right" answer is at any given moment. What's "right" often means "whatever will generate the most cash for shareholders" or, increasingly, "what will keep us out of trouble."

"They're governed by social media," Taylor said. "They're governed by who was last yelling at them."

A few years ago, companies were worried about the progressive backlash. Now they're worried about the conservative one. To some extent, companies ended up in this spot by talking a big game and launching programs without thinking through what they were actually trying to accomplish.

"They're making decisions out of fear, likely, but they know no matter what they do, there's going to be a percentage of the population that is upset with that decision," said Naomi Wheeless, the chief customer officer at Nextech Systems and a board member at Eventbrite. "So moving silently or slowly is the strategy that a lot of them are choosing."

The strategy is not a foolproof one. Many activists and government officials are out for blood, and they're seeking to make some high-profile examples of big-name companies in order to put some anxiety in everyone else. Hiding doesn't mean you won't be found. What's more, the political winds can change, and if they do, companies may be faced with explaining their choices to a new set of constituents. Maybe next time they'll think about what they actually want to accomplish, business-wise, instead of just paying lip service to whoever's maddest at them on Twitter.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Tribeca Park Cafe would very much like customers to know that the higher prices are not its fault.

"Due to high increase in egg, dairy products, and coffee prices, unfortunately, we have been forced to accommodate those high costs," a sign taped to the glass around its deli counter reads.

To emphasize, or perhaps provide evidence for, the claim, the Manhattan deli's management has taken it upon itself to print out recent news stories about high egg prices. I know about this because one of those news stories is my own, headlined "Eggs may be expensive forever." In addition to two other articles, from CNN and The New York Times, Tribeca Park also has one last message for customers: "We remain committed to providing high-quality products and appreciate your understanding during this time."

It's an understandable explanation. Egg prices have exploded lately, due in large part to the bird flu, which has resulted in the loss of tens of millions of egg-laying chickens in recent months. (Once one chicken on a farm tests positive for avian influenza, all the other chickens at that location have to be culled, as in, killed.) The average nationwide cost of a dozen Grade A large eggs hit $4.15 in December, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from $2.51 a year ago. The average wholesale price of Midwest large eggs is $7.93 a dozen, up from $3.33 this time last year, the global commodities tracker Expana found.

High egg prices are surely cutting into the margins of some businesses, especially smaller operations such as Tribeca Park Cafe, which has an egg-heavy product offering. But given all the price increases in the past five or so years — and the evidence that big companies were able to add extra price increases just because they could — it's hard not to wonder whether all the news about egg prices gives some businesses a little extra leeway in what they charge. People have seen the headlines about egg prices, they've noticed what's going on in the grocery store aisle, and the instability of the postpandemic economy gives businesses more room to push costs onto customers.

The result: an opportunity for some eggs-cuse-flation.

The egg-pocalypse has officially hit the zeitgeist: Grocery stores across the country are experiencing egg shortages and limiting how many cartons of eggs customers can buy. Google searches about egg prices have soared. Earlier this month, 100,000 eggs were stolen from an egg farmer in Pennsylvania. Egg-related conspiracy theories have been hatched, including that drones have something to do with the bird flu's spread.

"It's crazy," said Brian Moscogiuri, a global trade strategist at Eggs Unlimited, a California-based egg supplier, joking that the egg-mania had made him famous. The day we spoke, he'd been talking to reporters about the Pennsylvania egg heist and whether it would influence egg prices. "I'm like, 'What do you mean some eggs were stolen?' It's the same if TVs get stolen: Does it affect the supply of TVs?" he said.

No, $40,000 in missing eggs is not an excuse for your grocery store or bodega to raise prices. But the constraints on just how many eggs farmers can harvest are legitimately squeezing businesses.

We're in year three of this most recent bird flu outbreak, and there's no clear end in sight. Egg prices have bounced up and down during that time, and lately, they've been on the upswing. Some businesses have managed to somewhat shield customers from fluctuations. Raising prices can be an ordeal, and many grocery stores use eggs as a "loss leader," something they sell at a low cost to get people in the door.

"The food service industry typically reacts more slowly to fluctuations in wholesale pricing because adjusting menu prices is a complex process," Karyn Rispoli, a managing editor for eggs in the Americas at Expana, said. "Restaurants have likely tried to absorb these rising costs for as long as possible, but after nine consecutive weeks of sustained increases, it's reached a point where they can no longer do so without impacting their bottom line."

Last week, Waffle House announced it would be adding a $0.50 surcharge to each egg that customers order amid an "unprecedented rise in egg prices." Blake's Lotaburger, a fast-food chain based in New Mexico, is adding a $1 surcharge to its items that include eggs. Online, there's anecdotal chatter about egg surcharges at brunch and extra-$0.50 egg sandwiches. A coworker recently noticed the local farm-fresh eggs at a store near her went up from $5 to $6 a dozen, even though the farm is, presumably, operating the same way as it was before.

Rob Perez, a co-owner of DV8 Kitchen in Lexington, Kentucky, started adding a $0.25 surcharge per egg to dishes in January, and in February, he upped the charge to $0.50. His two locations go through nearly 5,000 eggs a week, and wholesale price increases have become impossible to swallow. "The prices don't go from high to low. They inch down, and they fly up," he said. Thus far, customers have been understanding, though he recently realized his staff hadn't been consistently ringing up the surcharge on orders. He thinks it's partly accidental, partly intentional. "You never want to tell anybody, especially if you're going to get a tip," he said.

Like most of the operators implementing a surcharge, Perez said it would go away once prices came back down. In the meantime, he thinks the news coverage around eggs is probably helping his case. "Waffle House is going to provide all the education that people need," he said.

There is, of course, one big reason that many restaurants and grocery stores can get away with these price hikes: People are still willing to buy the eggs.

Alex Jacquez, the chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collective, a progressive think tank, and a former economic advisor in the Biden administration, said that while he was at the White House, they found retailers generally tried to keep eggs cheap as long as possible, given their consumer salience. But many retailers are reaching their limit.

"It really seems like the dam has broken. Inflation has persisted," he said. "Consumers have said that they're willing to continue to buy eggs, no matter what price."

Because eggs are a product people buy often, people generally know their price, but what counts as "acceptable" has been shifting. While $8 for a dozen eggs might have seemed outlandish in 2019, for today's consumers, it's par for the course. Even if people aren't thrilled about shelling out that much money, they're accustomed to some level of sticker shock. And since there's also so much variation in pricing — by store, geography, and egg type — retailers may be able to confuse people on the exact degree of the increase.

Jada Thompson, an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas, said that it's hard to tell which stores are selling at a discount and which stores are charging the actual price. It's also hard to decipher who's leading on hikes and who's following. "Bob's selling them for $4, and Fred's selling them for $5. Is Fred taking the price up, or was Bob taking a loss?"

Every operation along the supply chain is trying to mitigate its own volatility risks, which could lead to some extra padding.

Firms have taken advantage of moments of uncertainty and chaos in the recent past — namely, when inflation took off amid the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war — to add a little extra margin to their bottom line. Research by the University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Isabella Weber and others found that companies were able to raise prices beyond what was justified by actual price increases to boost their profits, a phenomenon some have called excuse-flation. The media narrative played into expectations and price setting, too. If customers have heard on the news that businesses are scrambling, they may see the sudden jump in their grocery bills as the result of legitimate issues, rather than profiteering.

"Consumers are primed to believe that things are crazy right now with prices, and they could go up, and they could go down. And they might not be as sensitive to it as they would be in a persistently low-inflation environment, giving companies the perfect opportunity to raise their prices," Jacquez said.

For companies, the chaos, in theory, provides a bit of cover to add to their coffers. Why add an extra $1 just to cover the increased cost of goods when customers are willing to stomach a $2 increase, giving you an extra $1 of pure profit? It looks good to investors, and with everything going on, are consumers really going to notice?

"Large businesses had a number of excuses to raise prices, and consumers just didn't seem to want to or care to push back," Samuel Rines, a macroeconomic strategist at WisdomTree, said. "So all of a sudden, companies that weren't supposed to have much pricing power suddenly found themselves with a tremendous amount."

Some of this is a story of market concentration — if you're Pepsi or Coca-Cola, you can increase your prices and assume your main competitor is probably going along with you. Even in more competitive markets, if everyone thinks the other guy is going to charge more, they will, too. In eggs, specifically, there has been some suggestion that market concentration is responsible for price increases — namely, that Cal-Maine Foods, which controls about one-fifth of the egg market, is to blame. The egg producer has benefited from soaring egg prices in the past, though economists say it's not clear Big Egg is really to blame here.

"I won't name names, but there were companies who were putting up really high profits, and everybody's like, 'Why are you putting up profits while everybody else is tanking?'" Thompson said. "It was only because they had eggs during a shortage, and so their farms were benefiting from higher prices."

Most of the businesses adding surcharges for eggs say that this will all be temporary — once wholesale prices come back down, they'll go ahead and pass that along to customers. But those surcharges may prove sticky.

"We saw a bunch of supply-chain-related surcharges coming out of the pandemic that stuck around for a while," Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economist, said.

Mahoney, who served on the National Economic Council under then-President Joe Biden and, among more pressing items, was tasked with looking into the egg market, said that the increase in wholesale egg prices had created a "permission structure" for firms to raise their prices. And as prices increase, every link along the supply chain sees a chance to up its fee.

Beyond surcharges and price increases, businesses may find other ways to fudge the lines on eggs. Henry Kim, the cofounder and CEO of Swiftly, a retail-technology platform, has pitched that grocers should move eggs in their stores to the meat department because when positioned next to beef or chicken, they'd look cheap. (This could also solve some of the demand problem because if eggs aren't in the dairy department, consumers won't be able to find them as easily.)

Not to be mean to eggs, but they are not really The Most Important Thing Happening in the Economy, despite all the attention they're getting. They are, however, a signal that businesses might take advantage of broader economic turmoil to pass on other price hikes. Consider the example of tariffs, which President Donald Trump has threatened and removed and delayed to the point that it's impossible for even the closest observers to keep track. If the grocery store adds a little extra to the avocado price tag, or that new car seems a few thousand dollars more expensive than it should have been, are consumers going to dig in and decipher the extent to which tariffs are to blame versus opportunism on the part of the grocery store or dealer? Think of all the surcharges and price hikes in recent years that have been vaguely blamed on "supply chain problems" without much further explanation. The tariff chaos could generate an "upward impulse on prices," Mahoney said.

Eggs, in short, might be the canary in the coal mine for what's to come in terms of a new round of excuse-flation. I should probably make an egg pun here, but I am out of them.

There is no denying that we are in an unprecedented moment for America's eggs. This bird flu outbreak is scary. The egg industry is hurting. Restaurants, grocery stores, and other businesses that depend on eggs are reaching a breaking point.

Perez, from DV8 Kitchen, at one point pondered whether it might just be easier for everyone to take a vacation than to keep seeing his margins squeezed with all his egg-heavy items. He's open only for breakfast and lunch, and he doesn't serve liquor, which is often a moneymaker in the food service industry. Beyond the egg surcharge, he's trying to get some customers to try a different dish.

"We're trying to figure out how to switch people from egg dishes to other dishes to make them more special and get them to think, 'Hey, I want to go and have a ham and apple butter on a Southern biscuit instead of that egg sandwich,'" he said.

For now, consumers should be prepared to see their egg prices go up — in the grocery aisle, at the deli, at brunch. And given all the chatter about it, people probably won't be surprised, either. Call it the Waffle House effect.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Malena DeMartini doesn't want to say that return-to-office mandates have been good for business because there's nothing good about the prospect of dogs suffering. But as a dog trainer who specializes in separation anxiety, she's recently been inundated with clients. After years of having their owners around all day, many pets aren't accustomed to being alone anymore — some have never spent any time solo at all. So when the boss says it's time to pack it in on remote work, many people are caught flat-footed, and their animals are paying the price.

"I won't sugarcoat it. It's much harder if people haven't prepared in advance," she said. "Keep your little furry friend in mind because it's a drastic transition."

Unfortunately, many pet owners have slept on the preparedness front. Their employers are demanding they come back to the office, and even the most understanding of managers may not be super open to "my dog will be sad" as a valid excuse for a permanent work-from-home exception. This has left people to scramble to figure out what to do with their pets, many of which are not accustomed to spending long stretches of time by themselves. Concerned owners are signing their dogs up for day care, rushing to find walkers and sitters, and buying treat-dispensing video cameras they hope will calm their pets' nerves (and their own). For those who have yet to get an RTO order, DeMartini recommends acting like one is coming anyway. Teach your dog to be by itself now, before you're panicked about whether your little guy will destroy your couch as retribution for your 9-to-5.

The pandemic pet conundrum has become a familiar story: Lonely people stuck at home in 2020 decided it was an opportune time to get a new dog or cat, figuring that they finally had time to dedicate to such an endeavor. In one American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals survey of US residents, one in five respondents said their household got a cat or dog between March 2020 and May 2021.

"We had more people who wanted to foster or adopt than we had pets in the shelters, which was incredible to see," said Tori Fugate, the director of communications for Shelter Animals Count, a national database for animal rescues and shelters.

Adrienne Preuss, the owner of Animal Loving Care, a dog day care and boarding facility in Brooklyn, New York, said that while the pandemic brought about a "huge surge" in people getting pets, a lot of these new owners made "spur-of-the-moment decisions" and weren't prepared for what came next. Her business started offering remote dog training and sending instructional videos to clients who were struggling with their new wards.

"We had a lot of puppies that came in during that time with behavioral issues for a number of reasons. The biggest reason was that people were not leaving them at any period of time, so they were either with the owners constantly at home or with us," she said. "There was no period of time where they were not with humans, and that's not ideal for setting up a dog to feel confident being by themselves."

Then, as the pandemic eased and people returned to their normal lives — going out to dinner, taking vacations, and easing their way back into the office — they were confronted with a crop of pets who had no idea how to make do on their own. As the return-to-office push has continued, more and more pet owners are finding themselves in a pickle. Serveral major companies are trying to strong-arm their workers back into the office: AT&T, Citigroup, and Dell are telling employees to come in full time, and others, including Apple and Starbucks, are requiring part-time in-office work. President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies to get people back into the office, too. In addition to all the other disruptions of the RTO orders, pet owners are concerned their dogs have separation anxiety, and even if he doesn't, Fido may not be jazzed about staying home alone — or able to do so responsibly.

"Dogs don't know how to dog," said Kate Meghji, the chief operating officer of the Humane Rescue Alliance, an animal-service provider based in Washington, DC.

Jacob Hensley, the founder of District Dogs, a dog day care in Washington, DC, said he sees an influx of new clients whenever a big return-to-office mandate hits the area. This year already, he saw a jump in account creations and new reservations as Amazon started requiring people to come in five days a week in January, and he's seeing even more now as federal workers are being told to show up in person. He's also getting clients as people move to the area because of RTO asks.

"Whenever we see a new customer, the majority of the conversations talk about" a return to the office, he said.

In 2023, District Dogs opened a location at Amazon's HQ2 campus in Arlington, Virginia, to help accommodate (and pick up business from) employees going into the office. Hensley is now in discussions with a large employer in the Washington, DC, area to put together some sort of dog day care benefit for employees coming back to the office. "We are living in a fur baby age," he said.

You don't have to do a deep dive into Reddit to find examples of workers fretting about what to do with their beloved pets while they spend the day putting in their time with The Man. "Anyone else concerned about what they'll do with their pets if they're gone 10 or more hours a day commuting with RTO?" one Redditor wrote in January on a forum for federal employees.

So what, exactly, is one to do?

Sending your dog to day care is a decent option for workers, but it has its limitations. For one thing, it's expensive. District Dogs in Alexandria, for example, charges $50 a day, as does Animal Loving Care, though they give discounts for packages. For many people, sending a dog to day care five days a week isn't feasible, not only because of costs but also because the dog may not want to be there. If the pet hasn't been socialized correctly, it might not take well to day care, and even if it has, older dogs tend to age out of day care enjoyment.

DeMartini said we're "only limited by our creativity" with finding people who can watch dogs at little or no cost. She suggested reaching out to retirement communities to see whether they might benefit from a furry friend from time to time or calling up a family member, friend, or neighbor who has more spare time. There are always dog walkers, but again, that can get expensive, and your walker probably isn't going to spend eight hours with your pet. You can also ask about bringing your dog to work, but your manager and your coworkers may not be open to it.

The worst-case scenario is, of course, that someone winds up renouncing their pet because they feel they can't make it work. Shelter Animals Count, which tracks animal rescues and shelters across the US, found that 5.8 million pets were taken in by shelters and rescues in 2024, which is still below the prepandemic level but a jump from the pandemic low of 5.3 million in 2020. When pets do land in a shelter, it's now taking them longer to get adopted than in 2020 when they were getting scooped up, which is leaving shelters overwhelmed.

Fugate said that it's not clear whether RTO has been a major driver of pet returns. It's often economic factors (vet bills and food are expensive) or because of housing problems — many places don't accept pets. Preuss from Animal Loving Care said that she saw an "unprecedented level" of people giving away pets in the wake of the pandemic but that things had normalized since that time.

Even those who keep their dogs now may be hesitant about adopting again if they have a negative experience. Meghji said that people generally seem "pretty committed" to working with their pets and modifying their lifestyles, even amid behavioral challenges, but she worries about "what that means the next time they're thinking about getting a dog."

No matter how unprepared your pandemic pup may be, every animal behavior expert and day care owner I spoke with for this story said it's critical for a pet to be able to be by itself for at least some chunks of time. It might take some practice and effort (or a lot) and some development of a routine, but in the long run, it's good for a dog to be able to self-soothe and have some me time.

If you're worried about your pet being at home alone, it's important to figure out whether they're actually suffering from separation anxiety, which is a clinically diagnosed condition, or the problem is something else. People have a tendency to attribute everything their animal does that they don't like to anxiety, even when that may not be the root cause.

Separation anxiety can manifest in various ways. Some dogs bark or howl endlessly. Some try to escape. Some destroy things. Others will urinate or defecate out of worry. Katherine Houpt, a professor emeritus of animal behavioral medicine at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, said the best thing pet owners can do is to get a camera so they can see how their dog is reacting when they leave. That may also help them figure out whether what's happening is even separation anxiety — your dog might tear up your apartment because it's sad you're gone, or it might do it because it's bored and destruction is fun. Houpt worked with one dog whose owners thought he had separation anxiety, but video revealed he was playing — he took a couch cushion, tore it apart, rolled around in it, and at one point grabbed a toilet bowl brush to seemingly stir the escaped couch feathers.

There are tactics people can deploy to ease their dog's stress if they do indeed have separation anxiety. Talking to a dog via video camera or leaving on videos tailored to dogs doesn't seem to do much, Houpt said. Getting your dog a friend might help, but the animals might fight, or you might just wind up with two anxious pets. It may also help to give the dog a special treat it takes a long time to eat when you leave, though if it really has separation anxiety, it might not eat while you're gone. And there are always medications — fluoxetine (Reconcile) and clomipramine (Clomicalm) are Food and Drug Administration-approved for separation anxiety.

"If the dog is good for six months, I'd treat him for another six months and then try weaning him off, and it may be fine," Houpt said of using the drugs. "He's learned that when you leave, the world doesn't come to an end and that you always come home."

If you suspect your pet has separation anxiety, you may want to get pet insurance and wait on a diagnosis if you can so the insurance will cover it and it won't be determined to be a preexisting condition.

To be sure, there are other steps between quitting your job so your dog isn't alone and medicating your dog so it can make it through the day. A lot of it is a matter of practicing alone time.

"Teaching the dog to stay, as simple as it sounds — it is really curative because many of these dogs have never had to inhibit themselves," Houpt said.

DeMartini recommends exposing dogs to small amounts of alone time so they get used to the idea that people will go away and come back. First, one minute, then three, then five, and so on, until, eventually, you can leave for varying lengths of time, though progress may not be linear.

"While it sounds like, 'Wow, it's going to take five years to get my dog to be left alone,' it's a little bit more like compounding interest," she said. "It's very similar to exposure therapy that we've used with humans."

Preuss from Animal Loving Care also pressed the importance of crate training, even if you think your dog doesn't need it. "Even if your dog is great out of the crate, it's a really essential and useful resource to have," she said. "We have dogs that come in to us who've never seen a crate in their life, so they can't even be separated in the environment to eat."

If and when you do wind up going to work and leaving your dog behind, when you get home, don't make a big deal about it. If you do an exaggerated, enthusiastic greeting and play and get the dog all excited, it'll turn that into the highlight of its day — and make the time when you're gone worse.

As an aside here, cats are a bit of a different story. If a cat has separation anxiety, it might go unnoticed, DeMartini said, because their outward behavior, something like hiding away or drooling, isn't really impactful on their owner. Houpt said she'd never seen a clinical case of a cat with separation anxiety, though people say they exist. But she noted they're generally a more solitary species and don't mind being alone a lot of the time. (If you have a cat, you probably know this.) She also recommended making sure the animal doesn't have some sort of underlying medical condition.

"Yes, the cat is pulling its fur out, but it probably has a dermatological problem, not a psychological problem," she said. "But set up your camera and see if the cat is spending four hours glued to the front door. Then maybe you do have a problem."

The push and pull between employers and employees to get work back into the office is not going away. As companies feel they have more leverage, many will do what they can to get workers back in. And workers who have become accustomed to the flexibility of remote and hybrid arrangements will continue to resist. Pets are unwittingly caught up in the battle.

But even if you think your boss will be cool with you working from home forever, it's a good idea to get around to teaching your dog to exist comfortably without you around sooner rather than later. Employers are sure to keep pushing on RTO, and regardless, you probably should be able to go to the grocery store or happy hour without your pup having a meltdown.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

It's hard to know where to look in the flurry of activity from the opening days of President Donald Trump's second administration. There's Elon Musk at DOGE, a potential trade war with Colombia, a sweeping pardon of Capitol riot participants, and the chaotic back-and-forth of the funding freeze. On immigration, the president is moving swiftly, cracking down on immigrants who entered the United States illegally. While all these moves have attracted copious attention, flying under the radar so far is one industry that stands to see a major windfall as Trump's plans fall into place: private prisons.

The president signed a barrage of executive orders and actions on his first day in office. Among them: the revocation of an executive order signed by President Joe Biden directing the Department of Justice not to renew contracts with private, for-profit prison companies to house people convicted of federal crimes. By late 2022, the Bureau of Prisons had ended all its contracts with private prisons, per Biden's order. Now, under Trump, the flip has been switched back on again. The move isn't surprising — for a decade, private prisons have been in a bit of an on-again, off-again situation with the DOJ. The Obama administration moved to phase them out, Trump 1.0 reversed it, Biden phased them out again, and Trump has once again reversed that decision. The industry anticipated as much. George Zoley, the executive chairman of the GEO Group, a for-profit prison company, said on an earnings call in November that he expected Trump to reverse all of Biden's orders on "day one."

While private prison companies won't mind getting business back from the BOP, that's really not where the opportunity is. CoreCivic, another major US private prison operator, acknowledged in an investor call in 2021 that the bureau didn't really have much of a need for private facilities anymore since the federal inmate population had declined — and less than 10% of those inmates were in private prisons. The opportunity is Trump's plans for the mass detention and deportation of immigrants. Both Democratic and Republican administrations kept up work with for-profit prisons on immigration — the Biden administration, for example, deported more people than Trump's first administration did and often detained those people in private prison facilities. But Trump says he plans to really ramp things up now, moving hundreds of thousands of migrants through the system in a way that would be a huge boon for the companies.

"This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity to assist the federal government and the incoming Trump administration towards achieving a much more aggressive immigration policy," Zoley said on the earnings call.

Despite going relatively unnoticed in the opening days of the administration, private prison companies are a secret weapon for the president in his war on immigrants, and they stand to reap some major profits in the process.

While the average American may not be aware of how good Trump's immigration plans might be for private prisons, Wall Street certainly is. The stock prices of GEO and CoreCivic have soared by 105% and 50% since the 2024 election.

"The thing that really has driven the stock price since the election basically is Trump's stance that he's going to deport millions of people," said Joe Gomes, a managing director of equity research at Noble Capital Markets.

There are three main areas in which the private prison companies stand to make money on Trump's deportation plans, said Bianca Tylek, the founder and executive director of Worth Rises, a group that advocates against the commercialization of the criminal legal system. One is detention, as in holding migrants in facilities until their court hearings or until they're expelled from the country. The second is surveillance of migrants who aren't detained, and the third is transportation around, and possibly out of, the US.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has funding to maintain 41,500 beds for detained migrants, but the president's border czar, Tom Homan, has suggested he needs at least 100,000 beds to carry out Trump's deportation plans. The recently enacted Laken Riley Act that requires the detention of migrants accused of crimes such as theft could necessitate 60,000 more beds. Private prison operators will be key to helping this expansion, though they won't be the only ones — Trump has said he also plans to use space at Guantánamo Bay to house detainees.

GEO, the largest contractor for ICE, has about 13,500 beds for migrants, but executives said it was well positioned to scale up to more than 31,000 beds in the near future. Similarly, CoreCivic told The Wall Street Journal it could get its capacity to 25,000 beds by reopening facilities it recently closed. It has also looked into sites for detaining families, and its CEO told the Journal that the company was "very willing" to discuss detaining unaccompanied children, too.

GEO also operates ICE's Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which monitors migrants as they go through legal proceedings as an alternative to detention. GEO says that about 182,500 people participate in that program daily, but that number could grow significantly. On the company's earnings call, Zoley said GEO believes it has the technology and resources to scale up the ISAP contract to "several hundreds of thousands and upward to several millions of participants."

About 11 million people are thought to be living in the US illegally. Gomes said that if the government were to monitor a certain percentage of those people, it would be a "huge positive" for GEO and could bring in others, too. "If that contract got extremely big, there would potentially be other players like CoreCivic that could potentially also benefit from that," he said.

On the transportation end, private prison companies contract with ICE to move migrants on the ground and in the air. GEO said on its earnings call that it expects its air subcontracting services to generate $25 million in annualized revenue and that it believes it could scale if need be, too.

In a statement to Business Insider, a GEO spokesperson said the company was investing $70 million toward "increased housing, transportation, and monitoring capabilities and services to meet the anticipated requirements of the federal government's immigration law enforcement priorities." A CoreCivic spokesperson said the company "stays in regular contact with ICE and all our government partners to understand their changing needs, and we work within their established procurement processes."

It's not an accident that the private prison companies wound up in this situation. For years they've been hard at work buttering up public officials, lobbying, and making campaign donations, especially to Trump and other Republicans. While many corporate executives have come around to the idea of wooing Trump in his second term, the private prisons were there all along.

In the 2016 election, GEO donated $225,000 to the pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now through a subsidiary. (The advocacy group the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, saying the money violated a ban on political contributions by federal contractors, but that was dismissed because of a deadlock on the FEC.) GEO and CoreCivic each gave $250,000 to Trump's 2016 inauguration. GEO held its annual conference in 2017 at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, and one GEO executive who lobbied the Trump administration stayed at Trump's hotel in Washington, DC. Pam Bondi, Trump's new attorney general, lobbied for GEO as recently as 2019.

Early in 2024, GEO maxed out its donation to Trump's campaign and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Trump-affiliated super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. Individual executives at GEO and CoreCivic have made large donations to Trump and affiliated PACs as well. An ABC News analysis found that private prison companies donated more than $1 million to Trump's reelection, and now they're hoping all their efforts pay off.

"We can assume, given their exuberance after the election, that they are really excited about the possibilities for making money and expanding the 'demand' that will be going up for them and their services right now," said Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director at the Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that opposes immigration detention. She added, however, that expanding detention capacity isn't something the administration can achieve overnight. "It's going to take time to build the infrastructure," she said.

Trump's plans won't just take time — they'll also take a whole lot of money. Companies such as GEO and CoreCivic are hoping to get a cut of that cash, but it's unclear where exactly it would come from. Even before the president took office, ICE was facing a $230 million budget shortfall, NBC News reported, citing two US officials. To execute Trump's immigration plans, the administration could move money around within the Department of Homeland Security from places such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It may also pull in other agencies for assistance. But ultimately it would need Congress to appropriate more money toward its project.

"That's also a huge tax on taxpayers," Tylek said. "Their entire business is reliant on the government paying for more people to be incarcerated."

PJ Lechleitner, who served as the ICE director under Biden and spent 20 years at DHS, said that adding 10,000 to 15,000 beds in a few months was feasible, "perhaps twice that many." But the numbers the Trump administration is floating, he said, would require "years of infrastructure for the high-end estimate."

"If they're going to aggressively continue to pursue this, which I have every indication that they are, they're going to need a lot more money and find places to put these people," Lechleitner told me.

Even if every dollar is approved, building new facilities takes time. That may force the Trump administration to employ the practice known as "catch and release," Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, told me. While it may not be exactly what Trump had in mind, it's a good deal for private prison companies, which will be eager and able to help with migrant monitoring.

Whatever your position on immigration, the idea of criminal detention being a commercial enterprise is uncomfortable. "What's best for my shareholders" does not always align with what's best for the community or country or public safety. Also uncomfortable is the way the stocks of private prison companies seem to ping-pong based on which party is in the White House. Back in 2016, private prison stocks crashed when Hillary Clinton had a good debate performance. Though, for what it's worth, these companies have fared quite well under administrations of both political stripes — both Democrats and Republicans have employed them for various immigration-related reasons.

"Both the Obama administration's and the Biden administration's relationships to private prisons set some guardrails," said Matt Nelson, the executive director of Presente, a national civil and human rights organization, but neither addressed the federal government's biggest use of private operators, which was immigration and ICE. "If you look at even what Trump did, he didn't have to roll back very much," he said.

Now companies such as GEO and CoreCivic find themselves at the center of what's likely to be a very lucrative storm for them. Their executives may not have been seated behind Trump at the inauguration, but they didn't need to be — they might prefer to fly under the radar anyway, and they're already on track to get what they've wanted. They need Trump, but Trump also needs them, and everyone knows it.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

There's a certain level of zen that comes with boarding an airplane. The free-for-all may be stressful, but the chaos is also predictable. If you fly often enough, you can see from a mile away how the process is going to go — especially when it comes to the battle of the bags.

It typically starts with an unenthused agent issuing what seems like a far-too-early warning that overhead bin space is running out, causing a swarm of anxious passengers to crowd the gate in an attempt to ensure their bag travels with them. Some passengers voluntarily hand over their luggage for a gate check, begrudgingly strapping on that dreaded red tag, while others hold out, betting that there's more room on the plane than the staff is letting on. If they're right and they make it past the gate agent, all's well that ends well. For those that play it wrong, well, they're in for a kerfuffle — the last-ditch attempt to squeeze the bag in, the plea with a flight attendant to come up with a fix, and, ultimately, the decision to relent. The flight eventually takes off, often delayed, with everyone slightly more annoyed than they were 30 minutes ago.

The hubbub around luggage is the "single driver of boarding time," said Samuel Engel, a lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business and a senior vice president at ICF, a consulting firm. "If you look at what is the constraint on boarding time, the element that really squeezes it is the overhead bins. It's not people finding their seats."

Given how recurrent this problem is, it seems like someone should have fixed it by now. But instead, the handling of carry-on luggage has become an inevitable pain point in flying. The airlines have made checking bags an unappealing proposition, given the cost and the risk of items being mishandled, meaning more people are trying to cram their possessions into increasingly packed planes. And while carriers try to squeeze every last dollar out of baggage, the rest of us are pitted against each other — passenger versus passenger, staff versus passenger, lenient gate agents versus strict flight attendants — which makes the flying experience just a little more miserable. Passengers have to take a "Jesus take the roller-bag wheels" approach to the situation.

A lot of people are flying nowadays. The Federal Aviation Administration handled 16.4 million flights in fiscal 2023, with an average of 2.9 million passengers flying in and out of US airports every day.

Planes are more crowded, too. The annual load factor, meaning the percentage of seats actually filled by a passenger, is over 80%. Department of Transportation data provided by Airlines for America, which represents major airlines in the US, indicates that on the average domestic US flight there are 106 passengers and 130 seats; that's a big jump from an average of 65 passengers and 92 seats in 2004. For international flights into and out of the US, there are 158 passengers and 194 seats, compared with just 111 passengers and 151 seats 20 years ago. Some of the increase is a result of bigger planes, but they're more packed, too. Engel said the American Airlines Boeing 737-800, for example, had 148 total seats upon delivery in 2000. By 2013, that number was 160. In 2024, it was 172.

"If you take a look at the same airplane 10 years ago today, it has more seats on it," said Bob Mann, an aviation analyst. "If you look at the percentage of seats occupied on average 10 years ago versus today, that percentage is higher. So more seats and a higher percentage occupied definitely means more people."

More people on a plane translates to more money for carriers. It reduces their cost per available seat mile, increasing efficiency and profitability. So airlines have reduced the sizes of bathrooms and galleys and even the space between seats to squeeze more flyers in, all in the name of maximizing the number of paying customers on board.

"The average aircraft density is up substantially," Engel said. "Even on the same plane, there's just more seats on the plane than there used to be."

All these passengers, of course, aren't flying empty-handed. They've got luggage, and a lot of them are trying to bring that luggage on board. The carry-on-bag problem is partly related to space and partly to economics. There often isn't enough room on planes to fit everyone's bags, because the planes weren't designed to handle them all in the first place. That's especially true as planes become more crowded and the mix of people flying leans more toward leisure than business. (You pack more for vacation than you do for a one-day business meeting.)

On top of all this, the incentives around bags are wacky — airlines have made checking a bag so undesirable that more people try to carry theirs on. The spark of the carry-on-bag conundrum dates back to 2008, when American Airlines became the first major US airline to start charging passengers to check a bag, thanks in part to skyrocketing oil prices. It was followed quickly by United Airlines. Sure, the budget carriers had done it first, but it was a big deal for the big guys to start charging, too.

"Jet fuel was increasing dramatically, and airlines were looking for ways to cover those higher costs without having to hike airfares, because they knew that if they raised airfares too much it would further dampen demand," said Henry Harteveldt, the president of Atmosphere Research Group, a travel industry consulting firm.

The move was followed by a proliferation of fees across the airline industry. Today, charges for checking bags and choosing seats are among the largest ancillary revenue generators for airlines. They make billions of dollars from checked-bag fees each year. But not every passenger is eager to hand over $50 to not have to worry about their suitcase until they reach their destination.

"If you are extremely price sensitive or on a very tight budget, or if you are a family traveling, all of that, you don't want to have to pay for a checked bag," Harteveldt said.

There are ways to avoid the fee if you have airline status or a special credit card, though many travelers aren't so fortunate. Beyond that, there are other reasons people aren't so jazzed about the idea of checking their bags. They don't want to wait to pick it up after the flight, they've got stuff in it they want to use midflight, and, perhaps most importantly, they don't trust the airline to get the bag to their destination.

"The more bags you handle, the more bags you lose. That's just math," Mann said. The airlines' economic motivations for charging for checked bags were understandable, he said, "but the real end-to-end consequences were not understood."

What this all adds up to is a persistent crisis at the gate. Smaller planes especially don't have enough space for everyone to store their bags in the overhead bins. There are, of course, the dreaded bin hogs — the guy who ignores the one-overhead-item-per-person rule and takes up an entire bin with his roller bag and backpack and giant coat while leaving his fellow passengers to duke it out over dwindling space. A flight attendant could argue with him (and sometimes does), but the ensuing battle holds boarding up more. Other small issues can add up to a large backup, such as flight attendants taking up some bin space for their own bags or passengers using less-than-perfect tactics to get their luggage in.

"People don't load the bags the optimal way either, so we're not actually maximizing the available space," said Gary Leff, who writes at View from the Wing, a website dedicated to flying and travel.

Gate agents are increasingly stretched thin and under pressure — their primary objective is to get the flight to depart the gate on time, and if there are too many delays they get dinged. So to avoid the bag drama on the plane, they start asking for people to gate check their bags almost as soon as the flight starts boarding. The result: angry passengers, not only because they don't want to check their bags but also because if they do relent, they often get on the flight and see there's plenty of space available.

"Gate agents aren't checking in with crew in real time over when bin space is actually full. And even if they did, that wouldn't give them the information they need," Leff said. "After all, full bins with passengers still on the jetbridge with carry-on bags would still mean having to bring bags off the aircraft to be gate checked. So gate agents require it long before overhead bins actually fill up."

To passengers, this can seem unfair and arbitrary. People can feel like they're being picked on by staffers who seem to select them at random to check their bags while others breeze by. Perhaps they're asked to fit their bag into a sizer that supposedly lines up with the bins on the plane, but they're convinced it's too small and not representative of the real thing. Or they've been sold luggage that's marketed as fitting the carry-on standard, only to discover that airline standards can vary or that their bag is on the larger side for the carrier they picked for that trip. Leff said bag sizers at gates are usually slightly larger than the published dimensions of what's allowed on the plane, but he added that "many carry-on bags are larger than the sizes they're advertised at."

It's worth mentioning that, as easy as it is to complain about US airlines, they are often more forgiving about luggage than foreign carriers. Generally, when European airlines tell you how much your carry-on can weigh, they mean it. US carriers can be a bit more random on the rules, which may or may not work out to a passenger's benefit. Also, I'm not addressing the issue of paid carry-ons here, which we'll leave for another day.

When I asked aviation analysts and consultants about solutions to the carry-on-bag dilemma, their responses were not super optimistic. On a positive note, airlines are adding bigger bins — United and Alaska have announced plans to increase bin space, which in theory should mean every passenger can bring on and store a standard roll-aboard suitcase. These tweaks won't address the aforementioned bin hogs, though. On a negative note, one of the main drivers of the problem — more and more passengers being fit onto planes — is not going away.

"Airlines are doing everything they can to cram as many seats on a plane to make as much money as they can," Harteveldt said.

Airlines could do more to get passengers to check their bags. Leff said Southwest, which allows for two free checked bags, avoids the carry-on drama more than other airlines. Other airlines could follow suit, though they may not be eager to give up that baggage-fee cash cow. Charges aside, if airlines were better at getting bags out faster — and reassuring passengers that their bags won't be lost — that might inspire some more checking, too. Some carriers are trying to put passengers' minds at ease by making it possible for them to track their bags as they travel.

Still, it seems like we're doomed to perpetually experience some level of chaos over baggage at the gate. So I asked the various aviation gurus I spoke with for their own approaches to carry-on luggage and for any tips or tricks.

Engel told me he packs light and gets on early. If he can get into an exit row, even better, because there are fewer seats and therefore more bin space. Leff employs a similar strategy, though he admitted that on one occasion he cheated the system. An agent asked him to tag his bag for gate check and leave it at the end of the jetbridge. He complied with the tagging, but he took the bag on the plane anyway. He acknowledged it would have been a problem if everyone did it, but they didn't, and the flight was already delayed anyway.

Harteveldt said sometimes he finds it's worth it just to pay to check the bag to avoid the bin-space stress. I confessed my personal workaround to him: I ask to check my bag the minute I get to the gate, regardless of whether it's been requested. The gate agent almost always says yes, and I get to skip the checked-bag fee. Harteveldt told me it's a "well-known hack" and described another "dirty little secret" I might want to use to adjust my approach: If you check your bag at the last minute, it's loaded at the last minute, meaning it has a better chance of being the first off the plane. "Not always, it's not guaranteed, but sometimes," he said.

It seems that the battle of the bags is here to stay. Passengers may not win the war, but they can at least come armed with a couple of tactics for the fight.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

I wish I had good news about eggs, but alas, I do not. Egg prices are soaring again as the bird flu sweeps the US for the third straight year, cutting into supply. On the other side of the equation, seasonal factors have pushed demand up (all that holiday baking and cold winter weather makes people into egg-heads), and consumers have been buying eggs more than normal for the past couple of years. Those conditions aren't changing anytime soon, especially on the supply side. If I'm searching for a silver lining here, I guess it's that once you scare yourself enough about the potential implications of the bird flu for humans, you're not so worried about the price of eggs. But for now we'll focus on egg prices and the bad news on that front: Supercheap eggs are not on the horizon.

If there's a single product that epitomizes what consumers hate about high prices nowadays, it's eggs. People buy them regularly and therefore know their exact cost. They're ingredients in a lot of foods. And if you're looking for a protein source, they're one of the healthier alternatives out there that won't break the bank. Except they're not so inexpensive anymore.

The cost of a dozen grade-A large eggs hit $4.15 in December, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from $2.51 a year ago. The average price of eggs hasn't been below $3 since June, and it hasn't been below $2 since the start of 2022. Wholesale prices paid by entities such as restaurants, grocery stores, and schools are much steeper: According to the global commodities tracker Expana, wholesale Midwest large eggs are $7.27 a dozen; the five-year average is $2.10. There's a lot of variation depending on where you live and where you shop — eggs can be a loss leader, meaning grocery stores discount them to get people in the door, and big-box stores in particular price them quite low. Citing data from Circana, Expana said the average cost of large eggs among smaller retailers was $5.31 a dozen. They're probably cheaper at Walmart and Costco. If you're in a state with laws about cage-free eggs, you might see higher prices than you would in a state without them. No one knows when prices will come back down. This interminable bird flu might not be an aberration, and other factors, such as the push to move toward cage-free eggs, may keep prices up, too. The acute causes of this price spike — a drop in supply, a jump in demand — point to long-term structural issues that might stick around.

"We are all in uncharted territory," said Brian Moscogiuri, a global trade strategist at Eggs Unlimited, a California-based egg supplier. He added that the industry had lost 26 million birds since October, more than 7% of the total flock. "It seems as bad as it has ever been," he said, "and the producers don't really have a recourse."

In other words, there's not much relief in sight.

"It seems highly unlikely we'll see a $2 egg market anytime soon," said Karyn Rispoli, a managing editor for eggs in the Americas at Expana. "There's no way for sure to say this is going to go on in perpetuity, but in the near term there doesn't appear to be any resolution."

The bird flu — or, as it's formally called, highly pathogenic avian influenza — is not new. A bird-flu outbreak in the US in 2015 led to a spike in the prices of eggs. But that bout of illness lasted only a season; it showed up during a migration period, as wild birds moved across the US, so it hit in the spring and died out in the summer. The problem with the current iteration is that it's not going away. It's continuing to spread, in birds and elsewhere — in dairy cows, in cats, and in people.

"By any metric, you look at animal epizootics, basically animal-based-pandemics, this is the largest one we've ever had," said Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine who focuses on highly pathogenic avian influenza and disease modeling. "It's in the environment. We see it in dairy lagoons. We see it in human wastewater. So it's ubiquitous at this point."

Typically chickens pick up the bird flu from waterfowl — think ducks and geese. But now they're getting it from a lot of sources. Sick cows can get the chickens sick because of shared equipment. An infected turkey farm up the road can infect a chicken farm as the airborne pathogen spreads in strong winds. Because it's been dealing with the issue for so long, the poultry industry is better prepared for a bird-flu outbreak than, say, the dairy industry, but there's only so much egg farmers can do to prevent it.

"US egg farms have the most stringent and comprehensive biosecurity of any poultry farms on the planet," Emily Metz, the president and CEO of the American Egg Board, a nonprofit that promotes and markets eggs, said in an email. "Unfortunately, even the best biosecurity isn't foolproof."

Once one chicken tests positive for the bird flu, the entire flock has to be culled (as in killed). Some farms have been wiped out several times over the past few years, and so many places have been affected that repopulation — getting new chickens to get the farms up and running again — is increasingly difficult. Given the scale, there's not a clear playbook for turning things around.

"Not only are we worse off now than we were three years ago, but I have not heard from any state or federal agency what the 'plan' is other than they keep doing the same exact thing," Pitesky said.

After an outbreak, producers get indemnification from the government, meaning they're paid back for their losses so they don't go out of business. They quarantine and clean and disinfect. And then everyone waits to see if they're hit again.

"Those are all good things, but those are after-the-fact things," Pitesky said. "We don't have anything that's really been employed that tells people — almost like a red light, green light — here's where we're having outbreaks, here's where we think the virus is moving next."

There is no single answer for why this bout of bird flu is so bad. It's partly a development issue and partly a climate-change issue. Some of it is that this strain appears to be more infectious than others, and in many more species. States such as California have lost most of their natural wetlands, meaning waterfowl are using different habitats closer to farms than in the past, which is more conducive to disease transmission. Migration patterns are changing. This all means there's no single solution or way to be sure it won't just keep happening.

"The thing is there really isn't another silver bullet that can be implemented to potentially stop it," Moscogiuri said.

Meghan Davis, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies environmental epidemiology, said some changes were making animals more susceptible to the virus as well. They may be more stressed because of climate change and resource availability, which could exacerbate their vulnerability. And then there's just the way we farm — animals packed together in giant facilities stacked on top of one another.

As for solutions, better surveilling and tracking of where the virus is headed is an important start. "You can literally rank and triage where you need to harden and improve your husbandry and biosecurity by doing that," Pitesky said. "That's a very scalable solution."

A lot of these investments — in tracking, surveillance, improving biosecurity, implementing rodent control for pests that may carry the bird flu, hiring more workers, and more — cost money, though, and can be a tough sell for farmers who are already hurting and may not want to pony up. And if they do, well, that increased cost is going to show up in your egg prices.

Moscogiuri said he wasn't sure producers had much recourse besides hoping a vaccine is approved for mass use for poultry in the US, but even that's complicated. Which birds are we talking about? Egg-laying chickens? Turkeys? Others? What if they need boosters, or the virus mutates, or the animals still get the virus?

"Sometimes vaccines can actually mask things and make things worse down the road as opposed to identifying which animals are diseased, depopulating them, and preventing further disease transmission," Pitesky said.

There are also trade issues, particularly for chickens exported for consumption, which are called broilers. Some countries don't want to import vaccinated birds because they worry that vaccines make the virus harder to detect.

"We have a lot of trade agreements that can be impacted if a country can't differentiate infected from vaccinated animals," Davis said.

Beyond the fight against the bird flu, plenty of other factors are helping push prices to this uncomfortable level. A not-insignificant part is on the demand side, which might mean some relief is ahead. The holidays are always a big time for eggs because of all that holiday baking. Cold winter months can lead to higher demand, because when bad weather hits and people panic-buy, they grab eggs. And then comes Easter, which is also egg-heavy.

Demand usually cools off in the summer, which is good to know, but it may not be enough to help with prices. Metz, from the Egg Board, said the volume of eggs sold in stores had been up year over year for 22 consecutive months. American consumers seem to have been heavy on eggs for a while now. Even at higher prices, eggs are still a budget-friendly option for protein, especially in the recent inflationary environment. They're also viewed as nutritional, so if you're on a health kick (and not a vegan), you might be incorporating eggs into your diet more than you used to.

Metz emphasized that the industry had seen four years of "extraordinary circumstances," including the pandemic and accompanying supply-chain challenges, high inflation, and the bird flu. "While no one can predict the future, egg prices are anything but static," she said, adding that none of these factors was permanent.

There are some non-bird-flu supply factors that could make higher egg prices sticky, too. A push to require eggs sold in certain states to come from cage-free chickens is contributing to increased prices in those places. California and Massachusetts, for example, have had cage-free laws in place for a few years, and such rules just went live in Colorado and Michigan. To put it plainly, it's expensive to be nicer to chickens.

"Large eggs on the West Coast right now are $8.86, and that's because California and the Pacific Northwest mandates cage-free eggs on shelves," Rispoli said, adding that bird flu was exacerbating the issue. "Any state where cage-free supplies are mandated are going to face additional challenges just because of the amount of cage-free production that's been lost to the bird flu," she said.

If you're annoyed by the price of eggs, you're not alone — a lot of people are. Inflation and persistently high prices have made grocery shopping an ever more frustrating experience, and looking at the price tag on a carton of eggs is like a mini punch in the stomach every time. Eggs are a commodity, meaning the price is always going to bounce. But given the broader context, the overall trend might be upward to a not-so-eggcellent extent.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Jessica DeBenedetto has only been on compounded tirzepatide for a couple of weeks, but she already feels like it's a life-changer. Her doctor prescribed the cheaper, generic version of the weight-loss drug after her insurer refused to cover Zepbound, the brand-name version made by Eli Lilly. DeBenedetto, now 43, tells me she's been prediabetic since her 20s, and after going through hormone injections with IVF, she's put on a worrying amount of weight she just can't take off. As we talk, she marvels that she's had a box of chocolates on her desk all day that she still hasn't touched, which is probably the result of both the drug and a psychological shift, since she hasn't been taking the injections that long. Still, the optimism is palpable. Those chocolates would "normally be gone in an hour," she says.

DeBenedetto's excitement has been stunted, however, by recent developments that will make compounded tirzepatide no longer widely available. The FDA has removed the drug from its shortage list and set a timeline for pharmacies to stop making compounded versions of the drug — meaning the only version available will be the FDA-approved, pricier type. She feels like the rug has been pulled out from under her.

"I'm so devastated that this option is going away," she says.

For now, her doctor is going to switch her over to compounded semaglutide — the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk. The problem is, that's a temporary fix, too. While semaglutide is still on the shortage list, the FDA is expected to eventually end that designation, and compounders will have to stop making it, too. Lots of people could be in DeBenedetto's situation: The perfect candidate for a miracle drug whose miracle will no longer be easily accessible.

GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide and tirzepatide are at the center of a weight-loss drug revolution. The biggest development in weight-loss medicine since bariatric surgery (not to mention less invasive), the medications, which were initially approved to treat type 2 diabetes, have exploded in popularity in recent years. People say the drugs help them drop pounds by cutting the "food noise" — making them feel fuller longer and quieting their appetites. Recent research suggests these drugs could help treat a variety of other conditions, from sleep apnea to heavy drinking.

The drugs became so popular so fast that manufacturers began running out, and patients scrambled to find Ozempic or Wegovy (the brand-name versions of semaglutide) and Monjauro or Zepbound (tirzepatide). There were other barriers to access: The brand-name versions of the drugs are expensive, in most cases costing thousands of dollars a year without insurance, and insurers have been hesitant to cover them. Moreover, not everyone who wants to lose weight has a clinical need to — a doctor saying no to a prescription doesn't always quell the desire to get one.

Some of these access issues were alleviated when the FDA put the drugs on its shortage list in 2022. This allowed compounding pharmacies to get into the GLP-1 game by creating their own versions of the injectible drugs using active ingredients obtained from chemical wholesalers and manufacturers that they could dispense when prescribed by a provider. Even though the FDA warned patients about the potential dangers of getting non-FDA-approved, compounded GLP-1s, the cat was out of the bag. Compounding pharmacies and telehealth companies saw an enormous opportunity to meet the demand for these copycat medications and offer them at a lower price point. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, obviously, didn't love the setup, but there wasn't much they could do to stop it, given the shortages.

The thing about shortages is that they don't last forever. After some legal wrangling, the FDA pulled tirzepatide from its shortage list in December, giving compounders a short grace period to wrap things up. That means people taking the copycats will soon need to switch to the name-brand version, find another drug, or stop taking anything altogether. The party is over — or at least it's supposed to be.

"We all knew when semaglutide went into shortage and then when tirzepatide went into shortage that this was not a permanent status. Eventually, those drugs would be available in quantities sufficient enough to meet demand," said Scott Brunner, the CEO of the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, an industry group. Since October, when the FDA first determined the shortage was resolved, they've been warning members that "the end was near," he said.

Compounders aren't eager to pack it in. The Outsourcing Facilities Association, another industry group that represents compounders that produce large batches of medications, has sued to overturn the FDA's decision. Eli Lilly has since joined the FDA as a defendant to try to make sure the shortage stays resolved — it wants people taking and paying for its Monjauro and Zepbound, not cheaper copies.

In a statement to Business Insider, an Eli Lilly spokesperson said the FDA has "correctly determined" that tirzepatide is not in shortage and that it was "clear that compounders must immediately begin transitioning patients taking compounded tirzepatide knockoffs to FDA-approved tirzepatide medicines," adding that the company will "vigorously defend" the FDA's decision. The spokesperson said the best way to ensure patients get tirzepatide is for "employers, insurers, and the government to recognize that obesity is a chronic disease and to increase coverage of medicines to treat it."

The OFA did not respond to a request for comment on this story. The APC has not joined the suit in defense of the compounders, but Brunner expressed concerns that Eli Lilly's brief had gone too far, and if the court agrees, it could end compounding by smaller pharmacies of common drugs, such as lidocaine or amoxicillin, if they were to happen to fall into a shortage for one reason or another.

The bigger picture is that there's a lot of money on the line when it comes to GLP-1s, and the parties involved know it. Compounders have found a big revenue stream they don't want to easily give up. At the same time, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have market exclusivity — meaning no generics are allowed — for a limited amount of time and they want to make as much money as they can before it runs out.

For patients, this all adds up to a lot of confusion, changes, and, potentially, interruptions in treatment. The transition period will not be seamless.

"You're going to have a lot of very disappointed people," said Melanie Jay, the director of the NYU Langone Comprehensive Program on Obesity.

Many providers have begun to switch patients from tirzepatide to semaglutide or, when they can afford it, to the brand-name drug. The telehealth company Ro, which in the past offered compounded tirzepatide, in December announced it would be offering single-dose vials of Zepbound to patients with obesity. (It comes at a lower price point than the medication when delivered in an injection pen.) "We'll follow the FDA's guidance on compounding, and we'll work to ensure our patients have the best treatment options available," a Ro spokesperson said in an email.

Some compounders and telehealth companies may try to find workarounds and loopholes, especially once semaglutide is no longer in shortage. John Hertig, an associate professor at Butler University's College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, explained that much of this depends on what's determined to be "essentially" a copy of the GLP-1 in question, meaning it's too close to see it as anything other than a duplicate. Compounders can make patient-specific (and prescription-specific) versions of medications if, for example, a person is allergic to a dye in the FDA-approved version or has trouble swallowing something in pill form. But they're only allowed to make "essential" copies in very specific circumstances — say, a drug shortage.

"There is a space in this world where compounders are important when things go on shortage or if there's a supply chain issue or you need a patient-specific alteration of a medicine because of that patient's condition," Hertig said. The problem, he added, comes when compounders are "playing games" and "skirting that essential copy regulation" by adding a minor ingredient to make the drug technically different or changing its form of delivery.

The question now becomes what counts as too close a copy to be allowed and whether a small alteration is really different — some entities might try to add vitamin B12 to their drugs or deliver it in oral form and argue that it's OK. This could very well become battleground territory.

GLP-1s are a golden goose no one wants to give up, and investors know it. When the FDA took tirzepatide off of its shortage list in December, the stock price of Hims & Hers fell amid concerns about the telehealth company's GLP-1 business. In January, Citi downgraded its rating on the stock based on the assumption that semaglutide would be off the shortage list within the next year. Hims & Hers has not offered compounded tirzepatide in the past, a spokesperson for the company said, but it does offer compounded semaglutide.

The spokesperson said it's heard from patients who are "unable to access branded GLP-1 medications" and that over half of its customers couldn't access GLP-1s they were prescribed because of its price. They added that compounders serve a "critical purpose" and pointed to part of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that "permits the compounding of medications to address patients' clinical needs irrespective of whether a particular drug is subject to a shortage." When I asked whether that meant they would keep compounding semaglutide, the response was vague. It indicated that, at the very least, they're going to keep trying but in a way that's "personalized" for patients, though it's unclear how they'll achieve that for thousands of individuals.

"Many patients benefit from the standardized dose of GLP-1s, and right now, in this current shortage, we are committed to unlocking access to these life-changing medications," the spokesperson said. "With that, many patients can benefit from something different than the standardized dose, they need something more personalized, and this is an option that we make available on our platform and plan to do that for the long term."

A spokesperson for the FDA said the agency recommends patients use FDA-approved drugs when available and that compounded drugs should "only be used to fulfill the needs of patients whose medical needs cannot be met by an FDA-approved drug." The agency also warned that compounded drugs pose a higher risk to patients.

To further complicate things, the new presidential administration means new leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA, and Donald Trump has picked Ozempic-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the health department. In January, Hims & Hers donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund.

In the short term, this is going to be a mess. The spigot is turning off for patients on compounded tirzepatide, and compounded semaglutide's days are numbered, too. Some providers will try to find workarounds, but it's not clear how successful they'll be — or how successful regulators will be in stopping them. Patients can access the brand-name drugs, but insurance coverage and affordability remain problems. Once more reputable compounders leave the market, people might resort to sketchier operations, which could lead them to scammers, counterfeiters, and unsafe concoctions.

On the flip side, this could also be a moment for a reset. It could lead to the healthcare industry taking a better approach to GLP-1 access and care.

"Up to 70% of people with obesity who start these meds are not on it at one year anyway," Jay said. "There's a lot of reasons why people go off of it. Certainly insurance and costs, but also because I don't think people really know what they're getting into or don't have the support to really stay on them, or they think that somehow once they lose weight, they can go off of them, which is not true."

"If you're Eli Lilly, you're also looking at, how do we work with patient access?" Hertig said. "How do we work with insurers? How do we manage the cost here where we're then incentivizing more patients to go to the manufacturer, which is FDA-approved? My hope would be that the manufacturers are also looking at that patient access."

Generic versions of Ozempic and Monjauro won't be available until their patents expire. What happens with compounding is unclear, but once these drugs are no longer in shortage, compounders are supposed to stop making them, except under very specific circumstances. Within that framework, "the real thing is expensive" is not a valid reason for copying, as much as many patients wish that was the case.

It's impossible to untangle exactly who's to blame here, to the extent any one party is at fault. It's the result of how the American health system is set up. Brand-name GLP-1s are much cheaper in many other parts of the world than in the US, and the drugmakers could slash their prices, but the profit motive dictates that if they don't have to, they won't. Compounding pharmacies have been filling in a legitimate gap, though some have overstepped — it's quite easy to get GLP-1s from many providers without much of an examination. Both the big guys and little guys are pushing these drugs onto consumers through ads on television and online. Of course, people are clamoring for drugs that will improve their health, help them lose weight, and reduce the stigma around their weight.

DeBenedetto said it's "ridiculous" that the government would take compounded tirzepatide away from her, even though the government is just doing what's outlined in the law. But like many other people, she didn't realize that. For the most part, the drug makers and marketers have papered over the fact that while the medications are ubiquitous, they're not widely available at a price point patients can easily afford.

"It's always about money," DeBenedetto said. "Everything's always about money, and it sucks."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

I had no idea about patio heaters before the pandemic. I mean, I knew they existed, but I hadn't really thought about them. During the pandemic, I thought about them too much — where they were, where they weren't, whether they worked. Where there's a will, there's a way, and in 2020 and 2021 I had All The Will to leave my apartment and socialize on cold New York City days. That meant any trip to a restaurant or bar entailed careful consideration of the outdoor heat situation. I kept mental rankings of the various types. The best outdoor heater I experienced was a little propane guy at a restaurant in Philadelphia that was sneakily effective. The worst was one of those tower ones at a wine bar down the street — the owner had put it under an umbrella in the rain, and it caught on fire. That glass of pinot grigio came at a very cold, wet expense.

As the pandemic subsided and people returned to the great indoors, I assumed patio heaters would largely disappear, like toilet-paper hoarding and clapping for essential workers. But they've stuck around, becoming fixtures at restaurants and bars and hotels and people's homes.

Shutdowns of gathering places and lockdowns that kept people at home fostered a new appreciation for the outdoors. It sparked a greater openness to spending more time outside even when the temperature isn't a perfect 72 degrees Fahrenheit. And a lot of homeowners rethought the utility of their spaces, which led to a pandemic-driven surge in renovations featuring new patios and decks they'd very much like to take advantage of year-round. Your mileage may vary on how effective these devices are — no heater is going to get you sitting outside comfortably in Chicago in February, and there's a lot of variation in quality across products. But heaters are ubiquitous, and they're not going away.

For establishments such as restaurants and bars, keeping patrons warm outdoors was a key part of survival. For people bored at home, a patio heater became a way to keep themselves from going stir-crazy. While businesses and consumers aren't scooping up patio heaters at the rate they were four years ago (or enduring the accompanying price gouging), they're still buying them more than they were before the pandemic.

Adobe, which tracks online sales during holidays and major shopping events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, found patio and outdoor heaters were still a hot seller last year. Spending on the items ramped up earlier in 2024 than it did in 2023, likely driven by deeper and earlier discounts on appliances. Cyber Week sales of outdoor heaters were up by 314% over daily average sales in October, compared with 262% for appliances overall. Tabletop and portable models in particular were popular. Vivek Pandya, a lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, says it's not just first-time buyers scooping patio heaters up — it's repeat purchasers.

"If we think about the pandemic, we're about four years outside of that," he said. "You then have a cycle where maybe consumers are replacing certain items or interested in getting certain items."

Google Trends suggests that searches for patio heaters usually pick up in the fall as people prepare for the cold months ahead. While search interest is well below where it was in the fall of 2020, it remains elevated from where it was before the pandemic.

Eric Kahn, the founder and director of Alfresco Heating, which specializes in patio and outdoor heating, saw sales fall after 2020 as consumers shifted their spending toward traveling and dining out rather than beefing up their homes. He thought 2024 would be his third consecutive year of a decline in gross sales, but a big bump in the fall salvaged his year. The season was "even pandemic-level strong," he said, and business remains above the pre-pandemic level.

"Our overall numbers are about halfway between what they peaked out at the pandemic and what they were before that," Kahn said.

Leah Langford, a marketing manager at Bromic Heating, told me the company saw a "huge boom" in sales of its outdoor heaters during the pandemic. It's always done solid business on the commercial side, but residential interest in heaters took off, too — and it's stuck. "Residential is where we're seeing the biggest boom, and really our focus right now is homeowners and educating on the different types," she said. "It just really shifted the awareness that they exist."

The greater awareness of the possibilities of outdoor spaces (and the importance of heating) has shifted Tara L. Paige's life and career. During the pandemic, she created a Facebook page for Black women who love outdoor living spaces. It now has nearly 250,000 members. Paige grew up as what she described as an "outside girl" — her dad always had a fire burning outside — but she's aware that's not true for everyone.

"The pandemic opened up everybody's world and to being able to extend their inside to their outside. And now it's like, OK, patio heaters are essential, fire pits are essential," she said. "People started sitting outside and feeling like, man, this is freedom, this feels good. And just because it's cold outside, I don't have to stop."

Paige created an outdoor-living lifestyle brand, The Patieaux Chick, and is launching her own line of patio furniture. She's not doing heaters, but she's got thoughts on them, especially living in a windy part of Texas. "I'm looking for one that's really sturdy," she said. Otherwise, the right wind gets it, and "it'll knock the whole thing over."

While people are still buying patio heaters, what's not clear is whether they're buying good ones. There's a ton of variation — propane or infrared, portable or permanent — and it's tough to know whether you're getting bang for your buck.

To learn the lay of the land, I reached out to Thom Dunn, a writer for Wirecutter, The New York Times' product-recommendation section, who focuses on home heating and cooling. He said there are generally two options for heaters he focuses on: the propane ones, where you sort of see actual flames, and the red radiant ones. The former keep you warm "as much as a fire could keep you warm," he said, so they do better when you're huddled around it. The latter feel better when they're directly on you, like the rays of the sun, but they warm only the parts of your body they hit. He prefers the kind with an elongated, vertical glass tube and flame that shoots up the middle — it's nice to gather around for parties. "With the fire tube, it feels more welcoming, to be like, cool, let's sit out here," he said. But maybe a red heat lamp on the wall is fine if someone wants to stand outside for a bit to smoke a cigarette or something. "That's fine to get a little warmth on you," he said, "but I'm not going to stay outside."

Kahn, from Alfresco Heating, told me he doesn't usually recommend the tube ones. While the aesthetic is nice, they don't do much heat-wise, in part because the glass acts as an insulator. But the real bane of his existence is the cheap portable heaters people buy online. He jokingly refers to them as "disposable lighters." The low-quality options often end up breaking after a year or two, meaning consumers get stuck in a cycle of buying bad product after bad product instead of just investing in one decent one. "They think they're junk, so they're buying junk," he said.

"Overall, if people are wanting a good experience for a long period of time, then investing in permanent — particularly overhead — patio heaters can be a very worthwhile investment," he said.

Almost everyone I talked to acknowledged that a lot of the heaters that popped up at restaurants in the pandemic — the tall mushroom-topped ones that shoot flames 10 feet into the sky — were not great. (Langford described them as "really shitty," adding, "You get one season out of them.") If restaurants really wanted to lure customers outside and actually keep them cozy, they'd invest in more effective, thoughtful installations.

Patio heating does seem to have a bit of a reputational problem. People clearly are in search of options for outdoor warmth, but many are skeptical about how well they work and feel overwhelmed by all the types. I talked to one person who's been in the market for a heater for two years and hasn't landed on one — all the options have left her paralyzed with indecision. But the confusion could be beneficial to the industry, too. It gives companies the ability to educate consumers, market to them, and sell them nicer options than the ones they're acquainted with. Perhaps someone with a bad experience will swear off the devices altogether, but maybe they'll decide it's worth it to trade up. And as the saying goes, hope springs eternal — including that a little heating device you plug in might make that grim February day more bearable. Indoors is open for business once again, but thanks to patio heaters, the outdoors is staying open for business, too.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

When a new year rolls around, social circles split into two groups. The dividing line: alcohol. There are the people doing Dry January, swearing off booze for the month to regroup after the holiday season's indulgence. Then there are the people who have no plans to shift gears — if anything, they're excited that all the January teetotaling means smaller bar crowds. But increasingly, the sober/drinking split is stretching beyond the confines of January into other months and across American culture.

The conversation around sobriety and sober curiosity has become louder and more open in recent years. Whereas 20 years ago a decision to abstain from alcohol was often kept hush-hush (the implication being that the abstainer had a shameful problem), nowadays people are much more open about sitting drinking out. They're skipping happy hours, going on booze-free dates, and laying out their reasoning for sobriety online. The beverage industry has been happy to cater to them, too. IWSR, which covers the alcoholic-beverage industry, said volume in the nonalcohol segment in the US grew by 29% in 2023, driven by young people in particular.

Before everyone does a victory lap about how America's given up on alcohol, it's important to note that the nonalcohol segment is still pretty small — IWSR expects it to make up 4% of the overall alcoholic-beverages market by 2027. And while the modern temperance movement is growing, so too is the high-alcohol-content segment. Americans are increasingly opting for spirits over beer, and ready-to-drink cocktails and high-ABV beers are becoming more popular than middle-of-the-road options.

Polling from Gallup suggests men, white people, college graduates, and higher-income people are among those with a higher propensity to drink. And heavy drinkers consume the bulk of alcohol volume in the US. But many drinkers are incorporating nonalcoholic options into their routines without giving up on booze altogether. They're looking at occasional abstention as a form of moderation. After all, per the market-research firm NIQ, more than 93% of nonalcohol buyers also buy alcoholic drinks.

"The people who are drinking a lot of NA stuff, they just are interested in more flavors and more beverage profiles and things like that," said Dave Infante, a contributing editor and columnist at VinePair who writes a Substack about drinking called Fingers. "So they're just drinking more interesting shit out of everything."

To some extent, drinking culture is moving toward the extremes. Sure, more people are abstaining on a given night — but when people do order an alcoholic drink, they're really going for it. They're getting an old-fashioned, not dialing down to a light beer or two. Instead of forgoing the real thing altogether, Negroni lovers are mixing in a phony Negroni from time to time.

The surgeon general's recent warning that alcohol can cause cancer reiterated for a lot of people something they already (begrudgingly) knew: Drinking is not good for you. The proportion of Americans who say drinking is bad for health has risen quite steadily over the past two decades, per Gallup, even if the amount they drink hasn't changed much. The polling also suggests that the proportion of Americans who consume alcohol has for decades remained relatively stable, at about six in 10. Per-capita consumption of ethanol from alcoholic beverages has stayed at about 2 to 2.5 gallons.

"There's just a lot of evidence that suggests even though we have more alternatives than ever, people are still happy to consume and indulge in something, especially if they feel they can do it responsibly," said Bryan Roth, the director of insights at Sightlines, an analyst group that covers the alcohol industry.

For some people, drinking responsibly means strategically turning alcohol time on and off — sometimes throughout the year or week, sometimes just in a night — and moderating without giving up the bottle entirely. They think it's healthier, even if their doctor might not entirely agree. It's a way to slow down, to get a check on how much they're drinking. And sometimes they just can't afford to be too hungover ahead of a big workday.

"If all people who were buying Athletic beers and Bud Zeros were 100% sober, that would be one thing, but what we find is a good majority of people are sort of mixing and matching," said Nadine Sarwat, an analyst who covers the beverage and cannabis industries at Bernstein.

Some people set rules for themselves about when alcohol is allowed. They eschew alcohol on weekdays and leave it only for the weekends — so they'll drink alcoholic beer on a Friday but a nonalcoholic beer at lunch on a Wednesday. Or they'll replace that bottle of cabernet with a 0% option a few nights a week to take it easy. Some drinkers take part in Damp January and reduce their alcohol intake instead of going totally dry. Or there are those who attempt a harder and longer reset with the "75 Hard" challenge, which says no alcohol (or cheat meals, or, seemingly, fun) for 75 days. (There's a "75 Soft" for those who want some semblance of joy.)

Day to day, at the bar or a party, some drinkers are doing what's been dubbed "zebra striping," where they alternate between alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages — a Manhattan one round and a mocktail the next. It's a more festive — albeit expensive — tactic than chugging a glass of water between drinks. In other instances, they incorporate "bookending," where they begin and end the night with an NA option. Or they go NA for the "fourth quarter," finishing off the night with a few alcohol-free drinks, emulating what stadiums do toward the end of sporting events.

"It then becomes a method of pacing so you can just kind of maintain," said Joaquín Simó, the global brand ambassador and mixologist for On the Rocks Cocktails. "What I am hearing anecdotally a lot more too is just people who are like, 'Yeah, I know I have to tone it down, but I don't want to give it up entirely. So I'm doing this as a means of dipping my toes not necessarily into sobriety but more into temperance.'"

Kaleigh Theriault, an associate director of beverage-alcohol thought leadership at NIQ, said that while nonalcoholic options appeal to people of many ages in many locations, higher-income people tend to favor them. Even as young people drink less overall and look for more ways to have booze-free fun, many are still imbibing. That NA IPA is combined with an 8% IPA that will knock their socks off.

"What we see with Gen Z is they want non-alc, but they also want those high-ABV beers as well," she said.

But the strongest indicator that someone will be into an NA option is that they're also an alcohol drinker, or at least a buyer. (Some proportion of NA purchasers are probably buying for parties and gatherings for other people to drink.) That many NA drinkers would also be alcohol drinkers tracks. If you don't really have a taste for alcohol, you might spring for a fun mocktail from time to time, but you may also just go with a Diet Coke, which you like better, has fewer calories, and is cheaper. And if you've never been a beer drinker, you're probably not jazzed about downing an NA one.

"No one likes the taste of beer when they first drink it," Sarwat said. "I think that's a universal truth."

For people who have given up drinking, NA options can be appealing, especially as the offerings get better in stores and at restaurants and bars. But as Laura Silverman, the founder of Zero Proof Nation, which is dedicated to the NA-beverage industry, told me, some people who have experienced problem drinking may opt to steer clear of them as they work on their sobriety.

"For people who have had problems with alcohol, many doctors and psychiatrists and stuff, they recommend not going down the path of some of these nonalcoholic beverages because they can be triggering for some people," she said. "I think it's completely individualized."

There's also a divide in the types of nonalcoholic beverages people are consuming — some categories are doing better than others. Most of the analysts and people in the industry I talked to for this story said NA beer was pretty good and close enough to the real thing price-wise that it's compelling to swap in. Many were not so bullish about wine and cocktails — Simó said that besides the sparkling options, most NA wine was "not good," and he described NA distillates as "hot trash." Silverman was more optimistic about the taste and price points.

"Where we were before, everything was sort of premium because it was the only thing that was available," Silverman said. "Not everything has an exorbitant price point anymore, but there is a wide range, and some things are quite expensive."

On the whole, Americans aren't drinking markedly less than they were in the past, but they are drinking differently. Some of the divides and distinctions are complicated to parse.

Gallup has found that while young people report drinking less than previous generations did, older people report drinking more. Gen Z is, for now, straighter-edged than the generations before them in terms of alcohol, but that doesn't necessarily amount to "the kids will be saints forever." With marijuana legal in so many states, some may be opting for cannabis products instead. Drinking is a social activity, and as young people socialize less, they skip out on imbibing, too. Many Gen Zers are still under the legal drinking age, and their consumption habits might change once they're not breaking the law. Roth, from Sightlines, told me that so far, as Gen Zers hit 21, they appear to be drinking about the same amount millennials did when they got into their 20s.

"What we see younger people do in terms of their attitudes toward drinking is very in line with how adults are shifting their attitudes and thought processes toward it as well," Roth said. "It's just a greater understanding of how it impacts you."

Consumers have more options now for drinking than ever. A lot of those options are concentrated at the bottom and at the top, with a sort of hollowing out of the middle. Instead of a 4.2% ABV Bud Light, they're going for a 0% Athletic or a 9% Voodoo Ranger IPA. Or they're swapping a six-pack of Miller Lite for a martini that really packs a punch.

"Demand is gravitating either to the high end of the ABV spectrum or the zero-ABV spectrum," Infante said.

Meanwhile, younger and older generations alike are thinking about their habits and choices — maybe never drinking, or maybe opting in sometimes and out others.

"We do see this broader trend of moderation happening across the industry," Theriault said.

In the ideal, healthiest world, Americans would probably give up on drinking, perhaps except for the most special occasions (and even the surgeon general would likely say that's a no-no). We'd also have a perfectly balanced diet of fiber and proteins and get in those 10,000 steps a day plus strength training and eight hours of sleep. But we do not live in the ideal, healthiest world; we live in the real one, where drinking is not going to "poof!" disappear. Part-time sober — or mindful drinking or whatever you want to call it — might be the best some people can do, or are at least willing to do, right now. And in an alcohol market that's increasingly split between super sober and hella boozy, it's an understandable impulse. That lunchtime beer was never a good idea anyway — let alone the lunchtime martini. Swap it out for a Heineken 0.0 or a mocktail, and leave the good stuff for Friday night.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

If you are betting on the California wildfires, I don't know what to tell you. Go outside (if it's safe). Do some reflecting. Call a gambling-addiction hotline, probably. Though I suppose the impulse to wager on destruction isn't all bettors' fault — gambling companies have people right where they want them, placing wagers on things most of us never would have imagined just a few years ago. We're days into the new year, and it already feels like the gambling boom has gone too far.

In case you missed it, the prediction market Polymarket is letting people place bets on aspects of the fires that have ravaged the Los Angeles area. The platform set various markets for questions like how long it would take the first fire to be contained, how fast the various blazes would burn, and where they would spread.

The cryptocurrency-based market — which is off-limits for American gamblers, though some try to circumvent it with a VPN — seemed to recognize that this might not go over well. In a disclaimer on the site, Polymarket says the point of its prediction markets is to "harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events impacting society." The "devastating" fires were one such event in which Polymarket said it could "yield invaluable real-time answers to those directly impacted in ways traditional media cannot." In other words, if you want to know whether your house is about to burn down, check what a group of anonymous gamblers outside the US think — hopefully in addition to the news and local authorities and, you know, your own eyes.

The idea of bettors trying to make a quick buck when lives and livelihoods are at stake is morally fraught. It's also a sign of the times: Gambling is becoming increasingly common, and in the process, the lines around what's appropriate, logical, and ethical are becoming increasingly murky. If 2024 was the year we asked whether gambling culture in the US had gone too far, 2025 might be the year we get an answer.

It's tempting to look down on gamblers who take things too far, depending on your tolerance for that kind of stuff. But the problem with blaming individuals for getting in over their heads is that you miss the forest for the trees. Betting platforms and the gambling industry are designed to suck customers in and get them to bet at higher rates and in different ways.

While Polymarket may be operating in a bit of a gray area, even the formal, highly regulated platforms in the US are enticing people to develop a deeper relationship with betting. Businesses want to cross-sell — once Caesars gets you into its sports-betting pipeline, it would very much like to direct you to the casino. DraftKings is launching a subscription service that draws in bettors with the possibility of making extra money on super-long-shot bets. Delta Air Lines also recently announced a partnership with the sportsbook that could integrate its offerings or its branding into the gaming options on airplane seatbacks, though the details are vague. These innovations don't rival something as clearly problematic as betting on fires, but they show that gambling companies are succeeding at getting into more nooks and crannies of society.

In a statement to Business Insider, a DraftKings spokesperson said that the sports betting industry is "rigorously regulated" and that the company operates in "strict compliance" with the regulations of every jurisdiction it's in. "Equating DraftKings with unregulated prediction markets — particularly those that fall outside the scope of US regulation — is not only an egregious misrepresentation but also an insult to the integrity of regulators and responsible, law-abiding operators," the spokesperson said.

It's impossible to ignore the recent cultural shift when it comes to gambling. After decades of operating in the shadows, sports gambling is everywhere: Americans are thought to have wagered some $150 billion on sports in 2024, up from about $120 billion in 2023, and ads for gambling are almost inescapable during sporting events in many parts of the country. Beyond sports, some operators, including Robinhood, offer betting on things like elections. Polymarket's bread and butter may be elections, but it's also letting people wager on whether we'll see a new pandemic in 2025 or whether Israel and Hamas will agree to a cease-fire. People are even treating areas that are nominally not gambling, like the stock market, crypto, and even restaurant reservations, as if they're a casino. However you feel about gambling — maybe you're OK with it, maybe you think it's evil — the speed with which the lines around it are moving can make your head spin.

A spokesperson for Polymarket told me that the company didn't generate fees or revenue from the fire-related markets (or any of its markets) and described the markets as "a way to distinguish the signal from the noise in a news environment starved of quantitative data." They added: "These markets address the same questions being discussed across all of cable news and X. We've proven that markets can be an invaluable alternative information source for those seeking real-time quantitative data."

The fire-related markets are small — the largest one, about how many acres will burn, had about $275,000 in it on Friday afternoon. For comparison, more than $400 million has been bet on who will be inaugurated as US president on January 20. Why do this at all then? The smaller the prediction market, meaning the less money bet on it, the less the wisdom-of-the-crowd idea holds. That flies in the face of the argument that this is some noble endeavor to get information — it's just a handful of incredibly online gawkers betting on the outcome of an event that is devastating for thousands of people.

The pervasiveness of betting — both in what you can gamble on and where you can gamble — is changing our relationship with it. In a 2024 survey of US adults by the American Gaming Association, 55% of respondents said they had participated in some sort of gambling over the past year, up from 49% the year before. And Gallup surveys suggest a healthy majority of Americans see gambling as morally acceptable. At the extreme, the gambling industry envisions a future where people will bet on everything and will be able to create markets for anything. Perhaps someday you'll be able to create a mini-market for people to bet on whether it will rain on your wedding day. On the one hand, whatever, maybe that's just an extra bit of fun to make the day more exciting. On the other hand, you could just check the weather and otherwise enjoy your wedding without making it into a money-making event for random people on the internet. Plenty of people are able to enjoy watching sports sans gambling as well, even as the sportsbooks spend a lot of money to convince people that betting really ups the fun quotient.

There are going to be a lot of "tipping point" moments for gambling in the months and years to come. For a lot of people, betting is a newfangled way to find some enjoyment and spice up life. But finding where the boundaries are — socially and legally — is a critical process where there aren't easy, straightforward answers. When we can bet on more and more things in more and more places, it's fair to ask: Just how far do we want gambling to go?

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Baby boomers, they're just like us. Or, rather, we're just like them. And by "we," I mean millennials. The inevitable march of time often means turning into your parents, no matter how much you swore you wouldn't. Millennials (and, to be fair, many Gen Xers) are no exception — now that the electricity bill is on you, you get why your dad was always admonishing you to turn the lights off.

Millennials — people born from 1981 to 1996 — have long had a "forever young" air to them. Obviously, they're not going to be young forever, and plenty of them are pushing 40 or already there, but the generation has been marked by a sense of arrested development. The stereotypical millennial is a 33-year-old still living in his parent's basement, lamenting he'll be a forever renter with no hope of retiring.

But the reality of many millennials is starting to more closely mirror their parents'. They're catching up on earnings and wealth, and while they're still behind on homeownership, they're not screwed. It may have taken them awhile to settle down, but they're getting around to it and heading to the suburbs. In short, millennials are looking increasingly boomer-esque, and in some areas, they're doing better than their parents.

Since his father died in 2022, William has spent a lot of time reflecting on how much he's turned into his old man. He followed his career path and became a lawyer. At 31, he's married, like his dad was when he was his age. He doesn't own a home yet, but he plans to buy a place someday soon in his hometown of Philadelphia. And while he's catching up to his dad in many ways, William, who asked for his last name to be withheld to protect his privacy, recognizes he's surpassed him in other areas. For one thing, he's more financially literate than his parents were, thanks to the "whole democratization of finance thing," he said. Not that he's doing anything weird on the stock market, but he knows how to buy an exchange-traded fund. Qualitatively, he's noticed similarities, too, in how he talks, his sense of humor, and how he sees the world.

"You realize that they are much more in you than you were maybe comfortable with, and you see some of the same strengths and flaws that your parents had," he said. "Everyone wants to be their own person, but statistically, I'm doing a version of the same job as both of my parents. It's like the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, to be cliché."

Plenty of millennial apples are looking pretty treelike nowadays. While many weren't dealt the best hand at the start of their independent economic lives, they've done quite a bit of catching up.

The median weekly earnings of full-time workers ages 25 to 34 were $1,045 ($54,340 annually) in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up 4% from $1,004 in 1979 ($52,208), adjusted for inflation. For the 35-to-44 crowd, wages are up by 13%, to $1,250 ($65,000) from $1,102 ($57,304).

The oldest baby boomers reached 30 in 1976, while the youngest reached that mark in 1994. They hit 40 between 1986 and 2004. Elder millennials hit 30 in 2001, and the last batch will get there in 2026. Their 40th birthdays started coming in 2021 and will stop in 2036.

Wealthwise, millennials are also doing decently, if not even better than their parents. The Survey of Consumer Finances found that people ages 35 to 44 had a median net worth of $130,380 in 1989, adjusted for inflation. In 2022, that number was slightly higher, at $135,300. Those under 35 are doing better, too, with a net worth of $39,040 in 2022, compared with $18,740 in 1989.

Like William, other millennials are more invested in the stock market than their parents. This may be in part out of necessity — the shift from pensions to 401(k)s means retirement saving requires them to play the markets on their own. The Survey of Consumer Finances found that 63.6% of Americans ages 35 to 44 had stock holdings in 2022, compared with 39.2% in 1989. That number jumped to 54.4% from 22.7% for those under 35.

Even beyond the more passive investing of 401(k)s, 20.6% of people ages 35 to 44 invested in stocks directly as of 2022, compared with 16.5% in 1989. Direct stock ownership for people under 35 hit a record 23.1% in the latest reading, well above the 10.9% of young people who owned shares in 1989. This data seems to back up the sense among some millennials that investing was one area where their parents fell short.

That's the case for Faith Bergman, a 28-year-old who works in fintech and lives in New York. She's got plenty of similarities with her mother — she uses some of the same phrases (they're both particularly fond of "six in one, half a dozen in the other"), is overly enthusiastic about keeping her apartment clean, and attributes some of her outgoing personality traits to her upbringing. But she and her sister are more focused on investing and their financial well-being in the long term than their mom was.

"Investing, especially investing as a woman, has not always been a common theme or practice," Bergman said. "I think it's more of just a lack of awareness."

Rob Williams, a managing director of financial planning at Charles Schwab, said millennials have more access to information and ways to invest than their baby boomer counterparts. A recent survey from Schwab found that millennials started investing at 25 on average, compared with 35 for boomers. (Gen Z is getting into the game even sooner, at 19.) Despite the head start, millennials still bear the scars of their early years. They're slightly less confident than baby boomers in their investing strategies, and they're less assured about reaching their financial goals compared with older generations.

Sure, millennials may have built up a decent nest egg for themselves, but if there's one trope that defines the avocado-toast generation, it's that they will never, ever own a home. It's certainly true that the 2008 crash and the pandemic-era frenzy put many members of the generation behind the eight ball: The homeownership rate for people under 35 is lower for millennials than it was for boomers and Gen Xers at the same age, noted Jessica Lautz, the deputy chief economist and vice president of research at the National Association of Realtors, citing Census Bureau data. But the situation is also more complicated. The tough early road put millennials behind baby boomers in terms of homeownership, but some are getting to where they want to be. Millennials aren't so much nonmovers as they are slow movers.

As of 2022, over half of millennials were homeowners. Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, told me millennials are pretty close to where Gen X was at their age, and they're closing the gap with boomers, too, even if they're still behind by five to 10 years.

"The baby boomer homeownership rate started to plateau when baby boomers reached the age of late 40s, early 50s. So I think that by the time the oldest millennials are in their late 40s, early 50s, that's probably when they're going to be much closer to baby boomers," Fairweather said. Boomers have been slow to downsize and give up their homes, but that will shift, too, she added, meaning more inventory on the market for younger generations.

It's not necessarily a question of no buying — it's a question of postponed buying. The median age of first-time homebuyers has reached a record high of 38 years old, the NAR says. Back in the '80s, people were buying their first homes in their late 20s. Millennials aren't locked out of the housing market forever; they're just not getting there until middle age.

I know what you might be thinking, or, at least, what I was thinking while going through a lot of this data: Not all millennials are floating through life hunky-dory, on track to catch up with their parents. As with many things in American society, the experiences of millennials are profoundly unequal, said Rob Gruijters, a sociologist at the University of Bristol who has studied the wealth gap among US millennials. Looking at medians and averages can paper over significant divisions within the generation. While wealthy millennials are doing better than their boomer parents, poorer millennials are doing worse.

"There's huge variation in wealth within generations, far more than there is between generations," he said. "Overall distribution of wealth has become more unequal within generations and also across the board."

Much like our quirks and go-to phrases, a lot of the disparity between millennials is influenced by how our boomer parents did, wealth- and incomewise. There's a high correlation between your wealth and occupation and those of your parents, Gruijters said, and in the case of wealth, it's often a matter of direct transmission in the forms of gifts and inheritance. "If your parents are wealthy, he said, "then you're also quite likely to be wealthy." Aging into your parents may be good, in that Mom and Dad have a house and inheritance to pass on to you, or bad, in that they basically tell you, "You're on your own, good luck."

On housing, Redfin's Fairweather told me that where your parents live and who they are have a big effect on millennials' experiences. Housing prices in coastal cities are a lot higher than they are in the middle of the country, thanks to differences in land costs, population density, and availability. So millennials attempting to keep up with their parents who tried their hands in larger urban areas may have a harder time keeping pace. If you're a 30-something making $150,000 a year, buying a home in San Francisco probably feels a lot more out of reach than it does in, say, Janesville, Wisconsin.

"There is a big trade-off millennials have to face," Fairweather said. "Can they really make it in the city or go somewhere more affordable and not have that city lifestyle?"

In other words, it may not be that all the millennials headed to the suburbs want to be there, but in some cases, they feel like they have no choice but to exit urban centers and swallow a longer commute in the process.

"The plurality are moving to the suburbs, but that's where the housing stock is," Lautz said. Some of it has to do with having school-age kids, for example, but a lot has to do with affordability and availability.

Redfin says Black millennials are half as likely to own a home as white millennials, which tracks with the experience of their boomer parents. But while the older generation has since caught up somewhat, it's not clear whether millennials will make the same (still short) strides. It's a case of one generation's wealth seeding the next generation in a country where a significant racial wealth gap exists.

"With homeownership becoming so unaffordable, it's widening that inequality gap by race and, obviously, by wealth as well," Fairweather said.

People buying their first homes have "substantially higher" incomes nowadays than in the past, Lautz said. "We also know that they're more likely to use stocks, they're more likely to use 401(k)s or cryptocurrency for their down payments," she said. "So that would indicate not only a higher income but a wealthier first-time homebuyer who can get into the market."

There are a lot of awkward parts to aging. You lose your cool factor. Your body starts to show more wear and tear. You realize the adult in the room is supposed to be you. It also means you start to think about your parents differently — what they achieved, what they didn't, what they were right (and wrong) about all along.

It can be uncomfortable to admit that you see more of your parents in yourself than you'd like. As much as millennials were supposed to be minimalists, they're loading up on stuff just as much as their stuff-loving predecessors. Politically, just like generations past, many are moving to the right as they age. They may have been reluctant to get married and have kids, but they're still hitting those milestones eventually.

Victoria Lamson, a 37-year-old who works in public relations and lives in San Francisco, acknowledges she was set up for success, generationally — her parents own a business, and they've instilled in her a lot of their traditional values around getting married and buying a home. Like many millennials, she wants to parent her children differently. She and her husband are also trying to travel more now instead of saving all their money for when they retire. Still, she knows her lifestyle isn't really a departure. When her children ask questions, she tries not to give the "because I said so" her parents gave her, but sometimes, she just can't stop herself. "There are definitely the moments that I have said that," she said.

While a lot of millennials may be turning into their boomer parents — just look at those Progressive commercials about it — it is, perhaps, hitting different. In modern history, younger generations have outdone their predecessors, the proverbial idea that you'd end up better off than your parents. But if they bought a home young, went to college, and had solid careers, it's hard to outdo that. Even matching it may feel like falling short.

Millennials are also weighed down by a pervasive sense of precarity. They remember 9/11, and they saw the economic bottom fall out during the Great Recession. They're also facing an uncertain future for government programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and the real winners in the economy are increasingly concentrated at the top.

"Even if they were in some ways keeping up with where they should have been had nothing changed in the economy, the massive fiscal gap that the country's facing is going to land on their heads as they reach retirement," Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, said.

Maybe it will get figured out. Maybe it won't. Millennials' experience tells them to have some concerns.

The good news for millennials, on average, is that they are generally turning out OK, despite the headlines a decade ago proclaiming that lattes would doom them to eternal squalor. The bad news is that OK does not always feel great, especially in a culture where the expectation is you're constantly striving to do more and better.

For many people, there is something at least a bit charming in recognizing their parents in themselves. Millennials' kids are now rolling their eyes when songs from the 2000s come on in the car, just as millennials did when the boomers played their '70s hits. They understand why Mom was always turning the heat down, or why Dad insisted it was very important they know how to change a tire. As much as they complain about boomers being hoarders, they're now staring down their own stack of two-decade-old high school yearbooks.

Millennials aren't the lost generation after all. They're boomers 2.0, with a side of avocado toast.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

It's generally a rare thing for the person you're interviewing to burst out laughing. But that's what happened to me, recently, on a call with Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab who in March wrapped up a three-year stint on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The question that evidently tickled Tedeschi: Was the "vibecession" fake? The vibes around the economy — as in, the way consumers and businesses say they feel about it — have been changing lately, and not because the economy itself is markedly different from how it was in the recent past. Inflation is down from its peak, but it's up a bit from where it was earlier this year. The labor market is still strong, and consumer spending is still solid.

Despite the relatively steady environment, people are feeling a whole lot more enthusiastic. In November, small-business sentiment reached its highest level since June 2021, surveys for the National Federation of Independent Business' optimism index found. The number of business owners who said they expected the economy to improve and thought it's a good time to expand increased significantly. Corporate executives' expectations soared for the fourth quarter, the Business Roundtable's economic-outlook survey found. CEO forecasts for hiring, capital investment, and sales improved.

Consumer sentiment has been on the upward slope for multiple months, surveys from the University of Michigan found, and it is continuing that trend heading into the end of the year. Underneath the top-line number, however, there's been a significant partisan shift. Republicans' expectations around the economy improved in December, while Democrats' got worse. It's part of a trend in economic sentiment: People feel a lot better about the economy and their prospects when the political party they support is in charge. So I wanted to know, was Americans' deep sense of economic pessimism over the past year — and the recent turnaround — just a politically driven mirage?

After the embarrassing-for-me chuckle, Tedeschi responded. "The short answer is no. The vibecession was not fake. The long answer is no, but … ," he said. Perceptions of the economy have to do with more than the economy itself. That doesn't mean that people were lying or that their answers didn't have some real economic motivation, but there's clearly more to it than the material conditions in front of them — it's also about their ideological leanings and how that shapes what they believe is ahead.

"Perceptions of the economy are definitely deeply partisan," Tedeschi said.

When people say the economy feels bad, they can mean a variety of things — prices are too high, the news they read is negative, the president is old. Feelings are not facts, including when it comes to GDP. Politics colors a lot of the way businesses and consumers say they see the world around them, including when it comes to money.

It's easy to say the shift in sentiment is partisan flag-waving — now that Donald Trump is headed to the White House, Republicans are going to say everything's great, and to the Democrats, it's all terrible. But that's not really what's happening, said Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. When people say their expectations are better or worse, it's not simply the outcome of the election they're responding to but the policies they believe are on the horizon.

"With the election of Trump, people have an idea of how economic policy might change over the next year and over the next four years. So people are expecting tariffs. They're expecting action on immigration," Hsu said. "The thing is that people across the population really disagree on whether or not these policy changes are a good thing or a bad thing for the economy."

Democrats are worried that Trump's threatened tariffs and promise to undertake mass-deportation efforts will make things pricier. Republicans, on the other hand, think that these policies will be good for the economy and that Trump will help bring down inflation. Independents, Hsu said, are in the middle.

To a large extent, it makes sense that small businesses and corporate executives feel sunnier about the future. The deregulation and tax cuts that are likely to result from a Trump presidency are music to the business community's ears.

"They're optimistic that policies that they like are going to get enacted over the next four years," Tedeschi said.

Businesses don't love the idea of tariffs, but many are hopeful that there are ways they can get around them or that the president-elect isn't so serious about them. Or they just plan to pass along any price increases to consumers anyway. (There may be some amount of denial going on among corporate executives and Wall Street investors, all of whom seem to be ignoring some of the potential downsides of Trump's policy promises and the instability he could represent.)

Overall, the response is fairly logical — if you think what's to come is good for you, you feel good about it. If you think it's not, the opposite.

Over the past couple of years, there have been a lot of efforts to explain the vibecession, the phenomenon where the economy, on paper, looks pretty good but consumers say it's terrible (even though in many cases, they say that they, personally, are doing just fine). No one has come up with a definite answer on what's going on, though high prices — even as inflation has cooled — are likely a big part of the equation. But the fact of the matter is that people are channeling a lot of things when they evaluate the economy, which is a nebulous concept to many people in the first place.

In a particularly polarized political environment like the one we're in right now, a person's red or blue stripes are inevitably going to influence their evaluations. As much as it may be policy-related, it is also partisan, and it's partisanship that's getting worse.

Hector Sandoval, the director of the Economic Analysis Program at the University of Florida, released a study in early 2024 looking at the impact of national elections on consumer sentiment and spending intentions. The research found a "significant boost to consumer morale" when a person's affiliated party won a presidential election. It also found that over the decades, the swings had become more pronounced.

"It actually became more extreme," Sandoval said. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected, there was some partisan change, but it's something one might "not really even bother" to note, he said. It happened in 2000 when George W. Bush was elected, but also to a relatively benign degree. "But then, I will say, 2008, 2016, 2020, especially 2016, those are where you are surprised how the gap is just becoming more and more," Sandoval said.

Michigan has been consistently asking its survey respondents about their political leanings monthly only since 2017, but Hsu said polarization had become increasingly evident in its data over the past 40 years. The gap was especially pronounced under the first Trump administration, she said.

Whether you think the economy is good, bad, or wherever in between, we can all probably agree the way that we measure people's feelings about the economy is a bit broken. It's no longer really possible to say, "XYZ economic data says this, so consumers will feel ABC." It's not clear whether this is a temporary pandemic-driven blip or a permanent shift in how people relate to the economic forces around them. What makes this even more complicated is what consumers say they feel isn't even reflected in what they do. Throughout these past years of turmoil, consumers have said everything is terrible and spent a bunch of money anyway. Many people's bank accounts, especially those in the middle- and upper-income brackets, are fine.

"People are spending as if they are much happier than they are," Tedeschi said. He added that this disconnect between the vibes and the data meant that when the vibes get better, it might not mean much, tangibly. "Even if consumer sentiment recovers, even if the vibecession goes away, it may mean that there's not much of an upside for the real economy," he said.

Economic sentiment is, of course, an economic indicator, but it's also a political indicator. In some respects, it might be a better guide as a poll of political job performance than for how people are actually doing financially. While the vibecession was not fake or some giant mirage, there's more going on beneath the surface. If you're a Republican, you're feeling real good about February. If you're a Democrat, enjoy the last of those good vibes now.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

I can tell Jess is trying to be nice about the people in her group chat, to varying degrees of success. It's not that the members are bad people. They met a year ago at a vocal workshop for aspiring musicians and artists and decided to keep in touch after it ended. The chat has become a mix of a confessional and a lovefest — people will leave long audio messages rambling about their days and texts about how much support they get from everyone. It's this "quintessential overcomplimentary, masturbatory, 'everybody loves each other so much'" space, Jess says. Plus, they're not good musicians, which is the opposite of the chat's point. She's attended various performances of other group members, and "all of them are bad, across the board," she says. But again, she's really trying to be nice. "In this group, they have so clearly found their people," she says. "I don't hate these people. I just hate being in their stupid group."

And yet she can't just quit. For each member's birthday, the group goes in on a gift together. Her birthday was first, so she felt like she had to stick around for everyone else's. She finally got through the first round of birthdays, opening the door for an exit — but it can't be an Irish exit. "I feel like I have to make a goodbye," she says. "I can't ghost. I can't ghost. It would be against the whole thing of the group." She spoke on the condition of withholding her last name for this story, for obvious reasons.

Jess isn't alone: Many people report feeling overwhelmed by group chats, saying it's difficult to keep up with messages and even comparing it to a part-time job. Many people, like Jess, also have at least one group chat they really hate. It's not just a nuisance but a place that makes their blood boil. It's like scrolling through posts from the most obnoxious people on Twitter, but you actually know them in real life. As much as you may loathe the chat, it's tough to quit — group chats may be contained in the cold, distant trappings of technology, but the contents are often warm and real.

Jess tells me our conversation has reinvigorated her commitment to leave her despised chat ahead of the new year. She's just got to think up her goodbye message first.

The group chat is a complicated invention of our modern technological existence. It can be a useful tool: a place to coordinate Fourth of July plans with extended family or stay up to speed with neighbors on the landlord's latest shenanigans. It can be a fun place: a spot for sending memes and gossip and life updates. The group chat is also often a safer space for spicy takes than social media — it's less likely to get you fired, or indicted, or canceled (though that's not impossible). Group chats can also be wildly irritating. You look away for a few hours and suddenly you've got 63 unread messages about stuff you really do not care about. And sure, you can mute it, but it's still there, haunting you.

Jeremy Birnholtz, a communication professor at Northwestern University who focuses on human-computer interaction, told me there are two features that make group chats unique (and daunting). "One is that texting is happening all the time, so you can't choose to be out of the room and not be with everybody," he said. "Two is that you're either in it or you're out of it. There's not a graceful way to ease yourself out of it as there are with social relationships."

Ignoring the group chat is less obvious than, for example, spending Thanksgiving watching TV in the living room instead of talking to everyone around the table. But eventually everyone will notice and think you're kind of a jerk for it. And if you do engage, it can be tricky to ensure you get your point across. Group texts, like all written communication, lack many of the cues of in-person communication. There's no body language, no vocal inflections or facial expressions. It's easy to misread intentions and meaning, good or bad.

"People fill in the blanks the way that they want to," Birnholtz said. If you think someone is attractive or a close friend, you fill them in in positive ways. If you think someone doesn't like you, you do the opposite.

Sharon does not have a particularly good relationship with her in-laws, a reality that has infected their group chat. She's noticed her messages in a group she's in with her mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law don't get as much attention as she thinks they should. Her mother-in-law doesn't interact with photos of Sharon's kids as much as she does with pictures of Sharon's sister-in-law's kids. In April, Sharon (which isn't her real name) made eclipse-themed pancakes — she put a dark one over a light one and then put eyes on a Mrs. Butterworth's syrup bottle to make it look as if it was watching the eclipse — and posted photos of them in the group. Her mother-in-law didn't respond, but she did pop back in when Sharon's sister-in-law posted a photo of her cat. The chilly reception led Sharon to scale back her participation, and she finally muted the chat in the fall. "I feel so much better," she says. Still, Sharon won't quit. "I wouldn't have a place if I ever wanted to communicate a message with them where I could get them all at once," she says. "So I just leave it there."

From the outside, it's hard not to wonder whether Sharon is perceiving slights where none are meant — her kids are her mother-in-law's grandchildren, after all. At the same time, Sharon is filling in the blanks this way for a reason.

"If you don't get along with somebody in person, if they're passive-aggressive or where they do weird things in person, then it's not going to work on a group chat either," Sharon says. She emphasizes that in group chats she's careful to make sure everyone gets attention for what they post and is celebrated for their achievements. She's just heart reacting away.

Group chats have gone the way of a lot of communication innovations, such as email or AOL instant messaging or, for a more modern example, Slack. It proves itself useful, and then it becomes so useful that everyone's using it all the time, and then it gets overwhelming.

"The other thing is that technologies are not designed for graceful exits for the most part," Birnholtz said. In a WhatsApp group, there's no easy way to do the Midwestern "I suppose I'll let you go" thing that subtly lets the other person know you are very much done with the conversation. You can't really slow-fade a fraternity chat the way you might your fraternity friends in real life.

I reached out to a couple of professional etiquette experts and advice givers to ask if they had thoughts about how to quit a group chat you hate without damaging relationships. Carolyn Hax, an advice columnist at The Washington Post, told me that "good protocol is always that you're in control of your own life and time," and you don't need permission for that. "Anytime you're feeling handcuffed by a group, then it's time to take a deep breath and think about that a little," she said. Group chats are about feeling connected and supported and entertained, and if you're not getting that, it's OK to "dip out," she said. Someone just quit one of Hax's group chats with college friends, explaining that she had a lot going on in her life, and no one batted an eye. "It's like, 'Hey, are you all right?' That's about it," she said. "And if people can't handle that, then that's on them."

If it's a group with essential information — updates from other parents at school, or family members — the mute button is your friend. "You let it accumulate, and then you just check in: Did I miss something important?" Hax said. "Disengage as your health demands, but keep the thread."

Hax didn't say this, but I will: It's probably fine to lie and say you're too busy to keep up with the chat and leave. It's really nobody's business to dig into what you're too busy with. Maybe it's a medical issue, or maybe you just want to peacefully scroll through Instagram reels uninterrupted by a bunch of pings.

Lisa Mirza Grotts, an etiquette consultant, said that while it's important to leave politely, in casual groups it's fine to do a "quiet" exit. "You simply leave without an announcement," she said. She also said there's no one right way to communicate in a group chat; what reads to one person as efficient might read to another as rude. "I just think you have to be mindful that it's not the perfect way to communicate," she said.

Not everyone has qualms about quitting their group chats, like Joe Cardillo, who has cleaned house lately. They've worked in venture-backed startups for about a decade and have several group chats with former colleagues and professional contacts. In one such chat, messages started to come through on what Cardillo called some pretty "inflammatory" topics. In particular, someone said that Elon Musk and Donald Trump would be "amazing" for tech, which started an argument with hundreds of messages. Cardillo spoke up, saying they didn't want to be in an "unstructured space" where people didn't show basic respect and take accountability. Ultimately they left.

"I just consider it healthy to think about what a good conversation feels like. And if this isn't it, then you're like, I'm out," Cardillo said.

Group-chat dynamics are, in a word, messy — and in many messy situations, walking away is easier said than done. One friend confessed that they'd been in a weeklyish-brunch chat for two years without any intention of ever attending said brunch. Everybody seems nice, but it just isn't their jam, and they're scared to quit. Another admitted that they kind of hated their friend-group chat, and they were pretty sure everyone else had a chat without them, but they had no idea how to broach the subject. One person told me about a friend who had abruptly left a chat after someone else in the group posted an old picture of her in which she was quite drunk. The person surmised that the friend's husband saw the photo and "went nuts."

Sometimes you just have to set a boundary, and that boundary can be deciding to not sit in a room with 12 people chattering away all day without any ability to shut them off. You can say you have to go for a reason, or you can just walk away. Who knows if they'll even miss you? Years ago, everyone quit a group chat I was in except for me and one other person. My friend renamed it "WE'RE THE BEST," and we've been talking in it, by ourselves, since. It's fun, and we're still friends with the other people.

As for Jess, she insists she's open to being friends with the people in her mediocre-musician chat on an individual, less intense level, but I have my doubts. The last time they were all interested in going to the same show, she bought a ticket — but for a different night.

"They're wonderful people," she says. "They're just not my people."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

If it feels like everybody's betting nowadays, it's because a whole lot of people are. 2024 was the year companies from sportsbooks to prediction markets to trading apps asked, "Wanna bet?" And Americans responded with a resounding yes.

The ground has shifted on gambling in the US in recent years as it's become easier than ever to try your luck at, well, a lot of things. In a survey conducted in July and August for the American Gaming Association, 55% of surveyed adults said they had participated in some sort of gambling over the past year, up from 49% in 2023. Americans are expected to wager some $150 billion on sports this year, up from about $120 billion in 2023. People bet tens of millions of dollars on the 2024 election, with companies such as Polymarket and Kalshi raking in big bucks. The trading platform Robinhood got into presidential-election betting, and it says it's looking into sports gambling now, too.

It's not just explicit betting, either. A lot of "investing" looks very much like gambling nowadays. There's an increasing acknowledgment that the point of bitcoin is really "number go up" (and down), that it's a speculative investment without much of a use case. Small-time investors doing options trading on platforms such as Robinhood aren't banking on a stock's underlying value; they're just guessing at where it's headed over the next little while. And the meme coins are just complete casinolike chaos, full of pump and dumps and rug pulls and meteoric rises and falls.

Even if you're not putting money on the line, it's almost impossible to escape the proliferation of gambling. There are unceasing commercials during sports games and a deluge of ads on our phones. Culturally, the broader acceptance of gambling is on the upswing — betting's positioned as cool and exciting and fun. There's not so much focus on the downsides yet. Betting is in its Marlboro Man era, and a lot of people are dealt in.

"There's definitely a younger cohort that is trying to — I don't want to say get rich fast, but they're looking for ways to get around the system," Chad Beynon, an equity analyst at Macquarie, said.

That can take a lot of formats — betting on a football game or piling into a meme coin because some guy on X said it was the next big thing. It sounds more appealing, though not more realistic, than a traditional 9-to-5 job. That's especially pertinent in an economy where people don't feel particularly optimistic about their prospects. Instead of a "vibecession," maybe what's happening is a "vibe-screw-it."

The most novel — and notable — gambling story in the US remains the explosion of sports betting. Since the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal law prohibiting it, 38 states plus Washington, DC, have legalized wagering on games. The past few years have been a land grab of sorts, with companies such as DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars, MGM, and even Disney (via ESPN) trying to get a piece of what they hope will be a very lucrative pie.

"That's the one that opened the floodgates in terms of creating a large addressable market and throwing a spotlight on the scale of the US online-gambling opportunity," Chris Grove, a sports-gambling-industry investor at Acies Investments, said.

The top two operators — DraftKings and FanDuel — have managed to amass a lot of market share and start to venture into other arenas, such as lotteries and iGaming, the industry term for online blackjack, roulette, and slot machines, which is thus far legal in only a handful of states. Adjacent products around daily fantasy sports, such as PrizePicks, have taken hold as well. It "just shows that consumers are clamoring for something," Grove said.

There's still room for growth in sports betting, though it's increasingly limited. There are some big holdout markets, such as Texas and California, and only about one-fifth of the population has bet on a sport in the past year, according to the AGA. But the holdout states are holding out for a reason, and at least some aren't likely to change course. Companies sort of have to look elsewhere to get people to open their wallets.

"For the business model to work, you probably need to cross-sell to other areas," Beynon said.

The takeoff of sports gambling has many businesses looking around and wondering just what else people are willing to bet on — and, in many cases, guessing correctly that the list of possibilities is long. Maybe sports betting isn't for you. That's fine, but what about an online lottery? Or sweepstakes casinos? Or a slot machine on your phone? Or the next Treasury secretary of the United States?

"The minute that you got widespread regulated online gambling in the US, it was inevitable that nontraditional stakeholders were going to look at getting in on the action," Grove said. "Robinhood is one example of that, and prediction markets are one of the most likely vectors for that expansion, but they're far from the only brand or the only vector that we're going to see explore online gambling in years ahead."

Beyond sports betting, 2024 was a monumental year for prediction markets and crypto. People spent millions of dollars betting on the election, despite the legal gray area around political gambling. On Polymarket, players — though not Americans — can bet whether the US will confirm aliens exist or if Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, will plead guilty. In Cryptoland, bitcoin surpassed the $100,000 mark, and despite constant scams, the meme-coin market is as alive as ever. These are not legitimate investments; they're bets people are making that they can get out before everyone else. (Sometimes, in the pump and dump, you think you're the dumper when you're really the dumpee.) Given Donald Trump's election, it doesn't look like tough regulation is coming for the crypto space anytime soon, so hold on to your hats.

Broadly, gambling has been normalized across American culture. Sports leagues used to be anxious about sports betting and worry it would turn off fans. Now they've seen the dollar signs and embraced it. The vibe around elections betting is that it's kind of cool and smart, a wisdom-of-the-crowds way to prove your political chops. With crypto, the hope is everybody's going to get their bag sooner or later, or if not, at least they think they're in on the joke.

"Every consumer has different motivations for why they're doing it," said Steve Ruddock, a gambling-industry analyst and consultant and the author of Straight to the Point, a newsletter about gambling. "Some are doing it purely for entertainment. Some are doing it as a time sink. Some small percentage are doing it because they're addicted."

It's easy — and responsible — to worry about the harms of gambling culture. There's evidence to suggest sports betting in the US is getting people into trouble with debt collectors, leading to missed car payments, and may even cause a spike in bankruptcies. When people are betting on a baseball game, they're not putting money into long-term investments, and households that are already under financial strain are harder hit. And whatever negative impacts occur aren't limited to gamblers themselves.

"The harms radiate out into families, into the economy, into many sectors of social and cultural life," said Rachel Volberg, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who researches gambling. Most research suggests about 1% of adults develop a gambling disorder. But just because you don't meet the clinical criteria for a disorder doesn't mean all is fine and dandy, Volberg said. "To only talk about the tip of the iceberg means you miss 90% of the impacts," she told me.

Gambling companies have mechanisms in place to ensure responsible gambling. (Not to mention that some companies offering crypto and high-flying stock trading say this is not gambling at all.) Reasonable minds can question how effective those are. In the US, there's a lot of impetus placed on individual gamblers to police themselves and set their own limits, and even if you do reach your limit, you can move on to another app.

The sudden boom has pushed public health experts in the US and worldwide to sound the alarm on gambling. A recent report from The Lancet Public Health commission on gambling found that nearly 450 million people around the globe have experienced at least one behavioral symptom or negative consequence from gambling.

"The answer, globally, that the commission puts forth is, 'Come on, guys, wake up,'" said Malcolm Sparrow, a professor of the practice of public management at Harvard and one of the members of the commission. "We are in a very rapid growth period. The assumption is that legalization, which is already running a pace, is going to just continue until it's ubiquitous. And we are not paying enough attention to gambling-related harms."

Here is the thing, though: Gambling is fun. Generally, people do have a right to use their money how they please, and most can gamble responsibly. Exactly how to regulate and where to draw lines is complicated, whether you're talking about an in-game bet or an obscure penny stock or a meme coin that makes zero sense. But public health experts say it's important to figure out where to draw it.

"On many other public health issues, we are, to a degree, paternalistic," Sparrow said. "You must wear a seatbelt. We don't sell alcohol to kids."

Perhaps the weird thing about the current moment is once you start to notice the prevalence of gambling in a few places, you start to see it everywhere — I see it in my own life. I was at a New York Rangers game the other weekend, and not one but two betting apps were advertising on the ice. On a recent trip to New Jersey, I took advantage of an online casino, which is legal in the state. I lost $10 on blackjack in a matter of minutes. Beyond sports, many of my friends and family are at least dabbling in crypto and have taken note of prediction markets. One group I know is talking about organizing a party-bus trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey, just because.

It's hard not to wonder what's going on in culture now that gambling has gone from a no-no to out in the open and even hip. What's getting its claws in us, and why is it working right now in particular?

Natasha Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and the author of "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas," told me she'd identified four shared criteria of products that hook and hold us, from betting apps to dating apps, which are a little bit like gambling. They're antisocial and solitary, so you can get lost in your own flow. They offer continuous, fast feedback, which serves as reinforcement. They're unpredictable, so you can't be exactly sure when a reward will come. And they never come to a close or resolve — you just keep going. The result is that people get pulled into what she describes as a gambling "machine zone," where the world sort of falls away, and people fall into a rhythm of go, then again, then again.

"There certainly is a cultural story to tell here too, where we're living in a context of uncertainty in the world, whether politically or environmental or economic uncertainty," Schüll said. When you gamble, you're diving into uncertainty and chance, but also in an ordered, calm, digital environment that's cordoned off from the outside world. "It might start being about thrill and suspense and imagining a big win or imagining that you're having an encounter with chance," she said. "But once you put yourself in the seat, so to speak, and start having the interaction, the formatting of it and the flow of it gives you this other thing. It gives you this way to modulate your affect and go into a zone that allows you to avoid life."

It could be the case that in 10 years, we'll look back at the current moment and realize this was all fine — it was OK that people were gambling a bunch, that even major athletes were getting caught up in it. Hey, maybe even the meme-coin stuff will work out. The likelier scenario is that we wonder what we were even doing. Or we realize we probably should've done things a little differently.

Volberg, from UMass Amherst, has been studying gambling for 40 years and has seen this story play out before in other countries. Some form of gambling gets the go-ahead, it takes off, and there's a lag in realizing the consequences and getting guardrails in place appropriately.

"It's a pattern I've seen over and over again where it's after the fact," she said. "And if you don't start monitoring impacts before the actual new form of gambling is being used, you really have no idea what the baseline looked like."

The argument many companies will make is that people will gamble anyway — on sports, on elections, on whatever — and that making it legal brings that activity into the light, gets it some oversight, and generates tax revenue for the states. That's true, but also, once the government greenlights it, people who otherwise wouldn't gamble start. It's impossible to argue everyone on FanDuel right now was betting on sports on some offshore account 10 years ago. If it were that easy, sportsbooks wouldn't be investing so much in advertising to draw people in. On the meme coins, I mean, if you got bamboozled by the "Hawk Tuah" girl's crypto shenanigans, that's at least a little bit on you. But also, you probably deserve some protection next time. (But seriously, next time, maybe think that one over a bit more.)

In the meantime, may the odds be ever in your favor, because we're not getting out of gambling-palooza anytime soon.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Robyn gets a kick out of being able to say she's worked at both the "good" and the "bad" Dollar Trees in her West Texas town. The stores may be only a few miles from each other geographically, but qualitywise, there's an enormous gulf between them. Shocked customers who have been to both locations remark on the stark differences "all the time," she said. The good store is clean — the floors are swept, aisles open, merchandise in its place. At the bad one, merchandise is scattered all over the place, and unpacked boxes fill the aisles. There's supposed to be a clear, wide pathway from the break room to an exit in case of an emergency, like a fire or a shooting. Instead, employees at the bad store have to turn sideways and try to shuffle through an 8-inch-wide gap between boxes piled high in the hallways.

The factors that account for the difference sound quite small. The good store has dedicated recovery staff, whose job it is to put stuff where it goes. The bad one doesn't. The good store's manager is better at pushing for more work hours for employees, which means there are more people and time for stocking and tidying up on top of cashiering. The manager at the bad store just kind of lets anything fly. Still, Robyn, which is a pseudonym, says a lot of the blame is on corporate. She was an assistant manager in the past, and she's heard what goes on in the weekly calls. Rather than try to revive struggling stores, she said, they're left out to dry.

"They look at their trend of sales, and if a store is underperforming, then instead of maybe investing a little bit more hours there to try to pick it back up, they're like, 'Oh, well, it's not worth investing in this store' because it is not making us whatever amount of money they think it should be making. It makes the problem worse," she said. Dollar Tree did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Most people have probably had experience shopping in their own version of Robyn's "bad" store. They've walked into a local dollar store or pharmacy or department store and wondered whether there's been an explosion. Aisles are filled with unopened boxes, stacks of bins, and full dollies. Merchandise is strewn about. To get to the item on the shelf you actually want, you have to climb over a pile of crates. (If you have not had this experience, congratulations, and also, here are some TikTok videos to get at what I'm describing.) It's representative of the broader decline of the in-store retail experience. Stores are slashing costs, cutting corners at every turn, and generally ignoring the consequences.

"When you cut costs, there's a very immediate and very visible impact to the bottom line. It's something that retailers do, and they're very happy to do, and investors are very comfortable with them doing it," Neil Saunders, a managing director at the retail consultancy GlobalData, said. Yes, they'll lose customers in the process, sales will fall, and loyalty will dissipate. But that's all subtle and harder to trace. "They happen more slowly and steadily over a period of time, and they build up into a bigger problem," Saunders added.

What that looks like on the ground is stores filled to the brim as boxes pile up. At Robyn's Dollar Tree stores, they can't call the distribution center and ask it to stop shipping, either, as everything continues to accumulate if they don't have time to put it away. "The truck is going to show up whether you have room for it or not," she said.

The boxes-everywhere scenario used to be largely a dollar- or discount-store problem, but now the perilous piles have spread to other types of retailers. In other words, it's not just Dollar General anymore but also Target and Duane Reade. Much of the explanation is staffing, or rather, the lack of it. Many stores simply do not have enough people working to do everything necessary, between helping customers and stocking shelves and cleaning and fulfilling pickup and e-commerce orders. It's often the case that just one or two people are on a shift at a time, and checking customers out at the register takes precedence, meaning everything else falls by the wayside.

Many retail chains had to raise wages to compete for workers over the past several years, thanks to the pandemic-induced labor shortage and as major retailers such as Amazon and Walmart upped their pay. One way some retailers have compensated is by reducing staffing. Maybe they now pay their workers $15 an hour instead of $10, but where three people used to work a certain shift, there are now two.

Adding to the staffing problems is the simple lack of space. To keep their footprints small and their rent, in turn, low, many stores don't have much backroom area for storage. Long gone are the days of loading docks where stuff could sit until it was ready to be put out, said Jason Goldberg, the chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing firm. "Most stores are designed to have the vast majority of merchandise out on the floor," he said.

Essentially, this is an inventory issue and a labor issue. There's no stockroom for keeping products stowed away and nobody to unpack them when they arrive. Skeleton crews are doing their best to keep up, but they're constantly being squeezed. Shipping schedules are unpredictable. Customers are demanding. And the worse the job becomes — because the pay is low, because it's hard to get shifts — the more people quit, extending the cycle of doom.

That's what's happening at the Walgreens where Stephanie has worked in Florida for more than a decade. When she started, there would be two cashiers, someone in photo, someone else in beauty, and two shift leads. They'd close the store with four or five people. Now when she's on, it's usually just her and another person, and they have to frantically try to get bins unloaded and put up sales tags all while working the register. They'll leave rolling carts around the store during the day to get to as they can, which is usually at the end of the shift. Bins can't be left out overnight. It's not a disaster zone — luckily, they do have some decent storage space, and the manager runs a tight ship — but it's not perfect, either.

"They basically cut a lot of positions, and now they work as minimum a staff as they can, and even with that, they're telling us, 'You're over budget, we've got to cut more hours,'" Stephanie, also a pseudonym, said. She does DoorDash and Instacart on the side, so she also gets to experience the customer end of the equation when she runs to the dollar store to pick up orders, which is much worse, boxes-in-aisles-wise, than her Walgreens. "It's not even their fault. They have one worker on all the time, and they expect that worker to put their merchandise away," she said.

When reached for comment about this story, a Walgreens spokesperson said that the company is "always working to improve our patient and customer experience by making it easier for our team members to do their job."

Good managers are able to do some triage, which is why one store might be pretty picked up while others are a mess. But sometimes, constraints make it so it's impossible to keep up.

"There will be some store managers that have very strong operating disciplines, and they will not allow things to get out of control," Saunders said. "And there will be some store managers that are much more lax."

As easy as it is to point the finger at retailers for dropping the ball on inventories and aisles, they're not operating in a vacuum. They're in a landscape where margins are razor thin, e-commerce is cannibalizing their business, and consumers are hypersensitive to prices. One response for big-name retailers, including Walgreens, CVS, and Target, is to shut down unprofitable locations across the country. US retailers have announced 7,185 store closures this year, according to the research and advisory firm Coresight, up by 58 from 2023. (By comparison, they've announced 5,581 store openings.) Among the stores that are staying open, retailers are super focused on maximizing their profitability, Claire Tassin, a retail and e-commerce analyst at Morning Consult, said. Staffing a store to have a pleasant customer experience isn't "necessarily in their budgets," she said. Moreover, the message many retailers are getting from consumers is that the sacrifice on experience is acceptable, as long as they're keeping their prices low, especially for retailers where value is the main proposition.

"Yes, it's annoying when there's boxes in the aisles and it feels bad and cluttered, but if it's in the name of lowering costs, that is what consumers are signaling to these brands that they want," Tassin said. "If the store's sort of primary purpose is value and convenience, that's what is going to matter most."

To be sure, there are limits. You trip over boxes in a store enough or wait endlessly for someone to unlock deodorant for you, and you'll probably give up, go somewhere else, or start looking online. For people with mobility issues, going to an overcrowded store isn't even an option. Retailers know people are shopping online, too, which is why the ones who are behind on e-commerce are trying to catch up — and, in some cases, why the in-store experience is even worse.

That's part of what's happening with Target, retail analysts told me. Despite the retailer's recent struggles, e-commerce has been a bright spot for it, Goldberg said. But part of the model is to use the space in the back of stores for goods that need to be shipped — space that previously would have been used for merchandise headed to the floor. "They need space to stage orders and pack orders and hand orders off," he said.

The setup also loads up associates' duties, Saunders added. "They pick orders for online delivery. They take them out to cars for curbside pickup. They have to man the desks where collections are made and then returns of online products are made," he said. "There's a lot more tasks that now have to be done day-to-day in the store, and it's distracted and taken time away from some of the basics like merchandising."

A Target spokesperson said the company's staffing model accounts for online fulfillment being part of how it operates its stores.

The dynamic is one of a race to the bottom that's turning into a race for survival. Retailers are stretching on pricing and staffing and quality, and eventually, something's got to give. But instead of trying to proactively make the in-store experience better, many continue to bury their heads in the sand.

"Rather than thinking, 'How can we differentiate ourselves to really attract shoppers to come to us?' They started competing head-on against online with price discounts," said Sharmila Chatterjee, a senior lecturer in marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "The less you invest in in-store experience, the more the customers are turned off. So you are sort of pushing them away, to online."

Stuff spilling into aisles used to be a somewhat isolated problem, the sign of a particularly poorly run store. Increasingly, though, it's an everywhere problem. Some stores might be inspired to turn it around — especially after dollar stores have been hit with safety violations over blocked exits, crowded aisles, and clutter — but profit motive could prove a stronger incentive. Anecdotally, many consumers have noticed more piled boxes in more retailers lately, not fewer. And that's not just because it's the holidays.

Crowded walkways are a symptom of a much-bigger affliction hitting retail, which is that the business model isn't really working. Gone are the days when supercheap labor made adequate levels of store staffing easy, though I will note that Robyn makes just over $9 an hour and Stephanie about $15.50. Rents aren't going back to where they were. Consumers still do most of their shopping in person, but e-commerce is becoming more and more appealing, especially when brick and mortar is such a hassle. If it's no longer cheap or convenient to pop by the dollar store or drug store, what's the point? And there's always Walmart, which operationally doesn't seem to have this boxes-everywhere issue.

Cynthia, another pseudonymous Dollar Tree worker, is at a store that opened about a month ago in Virginia. When she started, she thought it was weird that customers kept commenting on how clean and organized the place was. "One of the biggest compliments was that we can walk through the aisles. I was like, what?" she said. It's already starting to turn — there's "no freaking way" she can get everything done in a shift, she said. Stuff's starting to pile up, and her coworkers are quitting because they're frustrated with the heavy workload and the lack of hours.

"Then it's more of that work falls on other people who already are burnt out and aggravated," she said. "It's a nasty little cycle."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Sky-high credit-card interest rates are not popular. The idea of capping them, however, is popular — which is why politicians on both sides of the aisle are talking about limiting just how high credit-card companies can drive their rates. The issue is making for some perhaps unexpected bedfellows, a potential team-up you wouldn't expect. Such a cap would be a very big deal, shaking up the industry and Americans' access to credit. But just because both sides have hopped onto the idea doesn't mean it will actually happen. That will come down to whether everyone's actually serious about it, and there are reasons to have some doubts.

On the campaign trail, now-President-elect Donald Trump floated the idea of putting a temporary cap of 10% on credit-card interest rates to let people "catch up" on their debt, declaring that "we have no choice" but to do it. Now that he's headed to the White House, the message coming from some progressive voices is basically: OK, go ahead. Sen. Bernie Sanders said on X that he looked forward to Trump "fulfilling his promise" for an interest-rate cap, and reiterated the point in a recent interview with Business Insider. "He said, you know what, credit-card interest rates, which in some cases right now are 20, 25%, should not be higher than 10%. Well, you know what? I agree with that," Sanders said. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is singing a similar tune. "Bring it on," she said in an interview with Politico.

The banks and credit-card companies are not happy about the notion of a rate cap — the financial industry has a tendency to set its hair on fire whenever there's a whiff of a threat to a revenue stream. In reaction to Trump's campaign-trail remarks, the American Bankers Association said a rate cap would "result in the loss of credit for the very consumers who need it the most" and push them toward "less-regulated, more risky alternatives including payday lenders and loan sharks."

Matt Schulz, the chief credit analyst at LendingTree and the author of "Ask Questions, Save Money, Make More," said there's "no question" a 10% interest-rate cap would have a significant impact, which could include credit being restricted and rewards being reduced. "But it's always important to remember that the banks have lots of buttons to push, lots of levers to pull to regain revenue," he said.

Perhaps the bigger point here is that in an election year in which people expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, politicians have identified a salient issue that could seemingly help alleviate many Americans' financial burden. And when there's a seemingly popular solution, a lot of politicians want to hop on board. Focusing on credit-card companies and banks is an obvious move to speak to average people's money-related concerns, whatever your political stripes. Actually delivering that relief, however, is another question entirely.

You probably don't know exactly what your credit-card interest rate, or annual percentage rate, is — that's fine; a lot of people don't — but if you take a look at it, you might be surprised to see just how high it is. The average credit-card interest rate for new card offers is 24.43%, according to LendingTree — up about 10 percentage points from a decade ago. Interest payments are also becoming an increasingly important moneymaker for credit-card companies — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates they earned an extra $25 billion in revenue in 2023 by raising their rates. The margins they're making on APRs on revolving credit, meaning debt consumers carry month to month and don't pay off, are now at a record high.

"Obviously, the interest rates have to respond to changing market conditions, and we've definitely seen that happen. But we've seen that at the same time, they're baking in additional margins into those rates that go toward profit," said Julie Margetta Morgan, the associate director of research, monitoring, and regulations at the CFPB. "It's connected to the use of APRs as a center for profitability."

Margetta Morgan pointed to rewards. While credit-card rewards have typically been funded by interchange fees — the small fee a merchant pays every time you swipe your card — issuers are using interest rates paid on debt to fund them, too.

"Increasingly, the interchange may not be covering the cost of the reward programs or generating profits that justify the rewards," she said. "And then you can see rewards go from a program to entice people to spend more to drive interchange revenue to a program to entice people to spend more so that they end up revolving and paying interest."

These higher interest rates are also coming at a time when Americans have a lot of credit-card debt. Credit-card balances in the US rose to a record $1.17 trillion in the third quarter of the year, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. You can see the problem. And as interest rates increase, it's becoming even more expensive to deal with the debt. Given this double whammy, a lot of people see an interest-rate cap as a solution: Schulz said that in LendingTree's surveys, about three-quarters of consumers supported a cap on credit-card interest rates, and of those who do, two-thirds said they'd support it even if it meant lower rewards. Six in 10 said they would support it if it meant less access to credit for people with not-so-great credit scores.

"It's not hard to understand the frustration," Schulz said.

On its face, a 10% interest-rate cap sounds like a good deal to a lot of consumers, especially at a moment when interest rates are so high. (Seriously, for some retail cards, APRs are in the 30s.) It also sounds like a good idea to populist-minded politicians, from Trump to Sanders. As to what it might look like in terms of policy, it's complicated.

Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told me they would "welcome the conversation" about a national interest-rate cap, though she expressed some doubt that Trump was serious about it, given that Elon Musk posted "Delete CFPB" a few weeks ago on X. "I question the sincerity of the Trump team's willingness to protect consumers when one of their key people, Elon Musk, has called for the abolishing of the most important agency protecting consumers' wallets," she said.

Musk aside, Wu said consumer advocates have generally supported rate caps at a national level. High interest rates can make debt impossible to pay off, leading people into a spiral where the amount they owe just keeps growing even as they try to pay it off. This is often true of predatory payday lenders, but it can also apply to credit cards — if you owe $5,000 on a store card and pay just the minimum $25 a month, you're in trouble. While some states have caps, lenders are usually able to get around them by setting up shop somewhere else. Banks charge interest rates in accordance with the states they're based in, not where their customers might live. On the other side, banks and credit-card issuers say that a 10% rate cap would ultimately come back to bite consumers — high interest rates allow these companies to make up for losses incurred from risky borrowers declaring bankruptcy or otherwise failing to pay back debt, and they say if they can't charge the high rates, they can't take on the risk. If that revenue stream shrinks, the issuers argue they would have to cut back on rewards and stop issuing credit cards to people with low credit scores and low incomes. To some extent, of course, banks will say that because they don't want any threat to any revenue stream. At the same time, a cap would make an impact on their balance sheets, though it's not entirely clear how severe it would be.

Natasha Sarin, a law professor at Yale and former counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, has been a quite vocal critic of the proposal for a 10% rate cap. In a Washington Post op-ed, she said it would make credit cards harder to get, especially for riskier borrowers who might then turn to payday lenders that get them into even more trouble. She points to the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which became law in 2009. Among other measures, the law requires issuers to notify customers of interest-rate increases 45 days in advance, limits some fees, and restricts credit-card companies from targeting consumers under 21. Sarin argues that while the CARD Act saved consumers $12 billion a year from the regulations overall, some people were harmed and shut out of the system.

"Certain types of borrowers found that their cost of credit increased and got less access to credit. These were often younger people without credit history," Sarin told me in an interview.

Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and former deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Department of Treasury under President Barack Obama, echoed the argument that a 10% rate cap is "too low" and would be a mistake. He said he would be more comfortable with a 36% cap — the limit for interest rates on consumer loans for active-duty service members under the Military Lending Act. Basically, if that's a good protection for the military, everyone should get access to it. "Thirty-six percent has proven to be a more politically and more sustainable cap for unsecured lending," Klein said.

Of course, there's a lot of space between 10% and 36%. Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill in 2019 proposing a 15% cap, though it didn't get far. Margetta Morgan, from the CFPB, pointed out that credit unions have an 18% rate cap and are able to make it work.

"The data that CFPB has suggests that credit unions have been able to offer credit to a variety of people at or below that cap successfully over the years," she said. "And the big problem that they have is that they actually can't compete with the larger credit-card issuers who have the larger budgets for rewards programs, advertising, and merchant partnerships and pay for that increasingly with high interest rates."

An interest-rate cap would likely cause some disruptions, but banks and credit-card companies are very good at figuring out how to make things work and keep growing their businesses. They've done it before.

After the CARD Act, things were "chaotic" for a while, Schulz said, and one credit-card issuer went as far as to jack up its interest rate to 79.9%. "But then eventually everything settled back down into where we are now and record profits and that sort of thing," he said. "That's probably similar to what we would see if a rate cap hit. There would be a little bit of chaos for a while while banks figured out how to make their money again, and then everything would go forward."

That could include inventing fees — where one door closes in fee-land, another door opens. But it could also include a cutback on rewards, which are a regressive mechanism that tends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Also, there's no rule saying banks are entitled to a certain amount of profits.

As mentioned, as much as one can debate the policy implications of an interest-rate cap, the politics of it are the primary issue. The central question is how serious politicians in Washington are about making it happen. Nearly every person I reached out to for this story opened with the caveat that they think a 10% cap is not a serious proposal from the president-elect. Consumer advocates say that while, sure, they're delighted to talk about it, just like Sanders and Warren, they do not see Trump putting it high on his priorities list.

"Smoking out the false populism of Trump's actual policies, as opposed to his rhetoric, can never be a bad thing," said Carter Dougherty, the communications director at Americans for Financial Reform, a consumer-advocacy group. "That said, color me skeptical that the Trump administration or congressional Republicans will actually try to do something to bring down the high costs of credit cards."

"When Trump said that, that was pandering with zero forethought and zero commitment," Klein said. He added that in 2016, Trump campaigned on implementing an updated version of Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banking and was repealed in 1999. "Once elected, he immediately moved to deregulate the banks," Klein said.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

A rate cap isn't the only solution to America's ballooning credit-card-debt problem and just how expensive it is to carry debt. The credit system is very complex, and reasonable minds might disagree on what's the right fix. Some consumers may be willing to give up rewards if that means a fairer, less expensive setup; others won't. One could also argue that the required minimum payments on credit cards should be higher so that people don't languish in debt for so long, or that it's actually OK for some people to not have access to endless amounts of credit they have no chance of paying back. Even if immediate action might not be on the table, that politicians are paying attention to the issue at all indicates there's a problem.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Kelly is aware that she should have been more careful when she signed up for a weight-loss medication online. She knows she should have looked into the company selling it, but, as she puts it, "desperate times call for desperate measures." She had gastric-bypass surgery in 2011, and that worked for a while, but then she started to gain the weight back after the "food noise" returned. "It's not like alcohol where you can abstain," she says. "You have to eat."

In May, she signed up for a subscription with Zealthy, a telehealth company she found through Google. It seemed simple enough: She was charged a subscription fee and a fee for the medication she ordered, semaglutide, which is basically generic Ozempic. She quickly noticed her food cravings and appetite had decreased. About six weeks later, she noticed she was losing weight. But then the billing got weird. Screenshots of the company's billing portal show that in September she was charged three times for one medication on top of the subscription fee and a separate "manual entry" charge of nearly $400. In October, her medication never arrived; the company blamed shipping delays on hurricanes in Florida. She tried to resolve the problem through the company's chat service and emails, trying to get the medication or a refund, but eventually, she gave up after failing to make progress on either front. She canceled the card she had on the account to prevent further charges. After filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, Kelly, which is a pseudonym, has gotten some of her money back, but she's still out hundreds of dollars. Zealthy didn't respond to a request for comment.

The topic of embarrassment came up throughout our conversation. Kelly has been overweight her whole life, and many people aren't particularly nice about it — they don't understand why she can't manage with just diet and exercise. "My pants don't fit if I so much as look at a cookie," she says. The experience with Zealthy only added to this sense of ostracism. Kelly's ashamed that she gained the weight back, that she let her guard down, and that she was taken for a ride.

But Kelly isn't alone: The explosion of new weight-loss medications has opened the door for all sorts of questionable business practitioners and outright scams. Drugs promising to help people lose weight are everywhere, and the fact that society prizes being thin — and punishes those who aren't — makes vulnerable people susceptible to tricks.

The diabetes and weight-loss drugs semaglutide and tirzepatide — which are generally referred to as GLP-1s and which you probably know by the names Ozempic or Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk, and Mounjaro or Zepbound, made by Eli Lilly — have been game changers in obesity treatment and management. For people struggling with their weight, these drugs can seem like a miracle. But because the brand-name medications are so expensive and difficult to get, many people, like Kelly, are turning to other sources, buying copycats from online telehealth companies and sellers that have very little, if any, oversight.

Compounded versions of the drugs have been effective for many people, even if the Food and Drug Administration doesn't approve them and has warned against taking them. But not everyone has been so lucky. In Kelly's case, she's out a chunk of money. (She's not the only one with issues with Zealthy: The federal government has sued the company, alleging unfair and deceptive conduct including billing customers for things they didn't knowingly agree to and misleading people about their subscriptions.) For others, the consequences are not only financial but medical. Poison-control centers reported an enormous jump in semaglutide-related calls last year. One recent study looking at websites advertising semaglutide without a prescription found that 42% of the sites belonging to online pharmacies were part of illegal operations.

"We're a little bit in the Wild West," said John Hertig, an associate professor at Butler University's College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. "It's just exploded so fast. There's so much money to be made here."

The marketplace is awash in companies trying to ride the Ozempic wave by selling compounded semaglutide, knockoff drugs, and similar-sounding supplements. Last year NBC News found that there were more ads on Instagram and Facebook mentioning semaglutide than there were ads for Viagra on the platforms. Semaglutide content is all over TikTok, much of it dubious. Phishing scams that use the medications as the hook have increased, as have other schemes designed to get people's data or payment information with the promise of access to the drugs. Reddit and the Better Business Bureau's website are filled with complaints about telehealth companies offering GLP-1 products — people describe unwittingly signing up for pricey subscriptions, never receiving medication, or finding it impossible to quit. It can be hard to discern a safe, legitimate offer from a dupe. Complicating things is that the FDA hasn't clearly established what's OK here, leaving consumers to figure things out for themselves. Even big-name telehealth companies are sending medications to patients without a lot of supervision.

"Every medication carries a risk, and they don't affect everyone equally," said Jessica Bartfield, a clinical associate professor at Wake Forest University's Bariatric and Weight Management Center. "So when you see these images and testimonials and stories about people who are on it for maybe inappropriate purposes or who are losing tremendous weight or who aren't being monitored the right way, then it normalizes it, and people think that that's OK."

The body-positive movement has spread the message over the past decade or two that you can and should love your body at any size and that health and beauty are not synonymous with thinness. That movement isn't necessarily a failure, but the rush to get semaglutide shows that American culture's preference toward skinny never went away, said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a history professor at The New School who wrote the book "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession."

"It's very clear that there are still a lot of people who — medical issues aside — really want to be thin," she said.

As much as the FDA and doctors might tell people that off-brand semaglutide and other products are risky, people aren't necessarily deterred from seeking them out. They see others getting results, and they want the same.

"You don't see this with cancer treatment. You don't see this with blood-pressure medications. You don't see this with antibiotics," Bartfield said. "This is a very unique field, and I can appreciate the appeal."

The rush of gray-market semaglutide and scams riffing on the desire for the drugs are a confluence of market need and market want — some people who really do need to lose weight for medical reasons are turning to alternative methods because they can't get or afford the "official" stuff, while others are using the medications more out of vanity. After all, the pursuit of dubious miracle products in the name of being thin and attractive has existed forever.

"I mean, Jane Fonda tells stories of mailing away for tapeworms," Mehlman Petrzela said. "In the '90s — and this is an approved thing — Olestra was a fat substitute, and the warning was anal leakage. And people were like, 'OK, whatever, if it makes you skinny.'"

The promise of being thin is an incredibly effective marketing tactic and one that's hard to resist, especially with this new class of drugs. My Instagram feed is filled with nearly indistinguishable ads for weight-loss medications that show a little vial of some clear substance, list facts and figures about weight loss, and mention how expensive the real stuff is. Sometimes it takes me a second to realize I'm looking at an ad, because it's just a person talking to the camera. Mehlman Petrzela told me she often sees ads for supplements promising to be "nature's Ozempic" on her feed. An acquaintance recently mentioned that after seeing all the ads, she signed up with a telehealth company to see if she qualified to get compounded semaglutide. After a consultation, she was denied. (She's quite thin and pretty clearly didn't need them.) But then, months later, she noticed the company had been quietly withdrawing $30 from her bank account each month. She'd missed it because the purchases were categorized as "groceries."

Eric Feinberg has researched Ozempic scams on TikTok in his role as vice president of content moderation at the Coalition for a Safer Web. He told me the social-media platform's algorithm is good at sending people down a "rabbit hole" of content once it figures out they might be interested in losing weight. "I'm not searching TikTok videos on Ozempic; it's coming right through my feed," he said. "That's the danger."

As part of his research, Feinberg engages with people purporting to be selling Ozempic or some version of it on TikTok. He sent screenshots of one of his recent exchanges with an account called Ozempicweightloos0 where the seller sent over a list of prices ranging from $90 for 0.25 milligrams of Ozempic to $110 for 1 mg. (For comparison, Novo Nordisk's website lists the price of 1 mg of Ozempic as $968.52.) The account stopped responding after he asked where the medication shipped from. It's a type of conversation he's had often — and alerted lawmakers and TikTok to.

Michael Jabbara, a senior vice president and global head of fraud services at Visa, said it saw a huge spike in chatter on the dark web about weight-loss scams in May and June. He posited that it was tied to the World Health Organization's warning around that time about fake semaglutide: The WHO noticed enough nefarious activity to issue an alert, triggering more conversations among bad actors about how well the scams are working. He said they realize that "this is a successful fraud scheme that is yielding a good return on investment for us, so we're going to continue to pursue it."

May and June are also the start of beach season, when people are looking to get their summer bodies — and maybe realizing it's too late unless they take some extreme measures. "Fraudsters are very attuned to cultural moments and what is attractive to consumers," Jabbara said. "They're very keen marketers."

One can't paint all the operators in the compounded-semaglutide and GLP-1 markets with a broad brush, because there's a lot of variation. There's a difference between major telehealth companies like Ro or Hims doling out prescribed medication and illegal pharmacies and scammers on WhatsApp or Telegram sending medications willy-nilly, if at all. But the reality is that everyone is operating in a bit of a gray area.

Except for the really sketchy stuff, compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide are generally coming from compounding pharmacies that make customized medications. Most of the time these pharmacies make medications for people with unique needs: You have an allergy to a certain dye usually used in the name-brand drug, so they make the drug without it for you. But when there's a shortage of the drugs — as there has been for GLP-1 drugs — the rules for compounding get a little looser, and the FDA allows copying.

There are some confusing wrinkles. For one thing, shortages don't last forever, and when they end, the copying is supposed to stop. The FDA took tirzepatide off its shortage list in the fall, which should have meant no more compounding. But after a compounding trade group sued the FDA over the decision, it said it would reevaluate.

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly both have patents on their drugs, and they're not eager to give up their secret sauce — meaning it's not clear how close the compounded concoctions are to the real stuff. And though the FDA has warned people that all the compounded drugs are risky, it's at the same time somewhat greenlighting them, people are being inundated with ads for them, and people are trying them out. The cat's already out of the bag.

"We're in somewhat of a no-man's-land in terms of no clear regulation, reduced government oversight, and a straight lab-to-lap delivery model," said Anthony Mahajan, a founding partner at the Health Law Alliance, a healthcare-focused law firm.

He added that telehealth and direct-to-consumer GLP-1 sales circumvent many of the checkpoints in traditional prescribing. Because these prescriptions aren't covered by insurers and are instead paid for directly by the consumer, there's no inspection by the government or insurers reviewing whether a drug is medically necessary and deciding whether to authorize payment. Compounds are also generally exempt from a federal law meant to stop harmful drugs from getting into the US's supply chain, meaning checkpoints for product sourcing and supply-chain integrity are missing. "Oversight agencies are cut out," he said.

It's tough to blame consumers or the companies distributing compounded semaglutide for getting into this business, given how expensive and difficult it is to get the name-brand drugs. Insurers generally won't cover Ozempic or Mounjaro unless a patient has diabetes, meaning that to get the medications, people who want to use them for weight loss have to cough up thousands of dollars a year. That's assuming their doctors will prescribe them, which, some won't.

"If you don't price it appropriately, if you don't have enough supply, then people are always going to find another way to get it," Hertig said. "And sometimes that other way to get it is safe, but in many examples it's not."

To ward off telehealth companies, Eli Lilly cut the price of Zepbound for certain patients who order directly from the company, though the drug is still pricey.

To some extent, this is a tale as old as time: People want to be thin and will go to great lengths to achieve that, and businesses are happy to oblige. But GLP-1 medications do seem to have put this dynamic into overdrive. These drugs really are everywhere — in commercials, on social media, in the news, in conversations. And everyone's getting into the semaglutide game: diet companies, gyms, even grocery stores.

Maybe this will all turn out fine. The regular versions of the drugs will become more available, and the generic ones will, by and large, work fine. Sure, there will be scams; that's true of everything. But that's not the only possible outcome. Many people may wind up not only losing money but also harming their bodies by injecting medications that aren't safe. And these medications are so new that it's hard not to worry that in five or 10 years we'll wonder why we allowed online companies to send compounded injected drugs around the country to people who were prescribed a medication after completing a five-minute survey.

Hertig said he expects tighter and clearer regulations on GLP-1s in the years ahead, which is good, though it doesn't help people trying to sort things out now. In the meantime, the miracle drug has people looking for miracles everywhere, including in places they shouldn't.

When people fall for traps or scams, they're often hesitant to admit it or advertise it. That's especially true for weight-loss products — the message American culture sends is that you're supposed to be thin and fit but you're not supposed to talk about how you do it. Society often treats being overweight as a moral failure and using a medication to take off pounds as cheating.

Kelly hasn't given up on semaglutide altogether. She's switched providers — she's now getting her medication from Hers — and continues to shed weight. The experience is "night and day." Her mom is nervous about her taking medication and worries about the unknowns, but that hasn't deterred Kelly. She hasn't told many people about the Zealthy experience, and she doesn't advertise that she's taking a weight-loss drug, though she'll be honest if people ask. Her doctor has been reluctant to prescribe her a GLP-1 medication, meaning she's still paying out of pocket. She thinks the reluctance was part of what landed her in a bad spot in the first place.

"That makes patients like myself especially vulnerable for fraud in the telemedicine world. We want and need to lose weight, have tried everything, and this is working for so many people," she said. "So we turn a blind eye to the risks."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

I've been fighting with my health insurance company a lot lately. The mundane billing disputes are exactly the type of situation that, theoretically, AI should make easier. That, however, is not what's going on. The first point of contact is the AI-powered online virtual assistant, which asks what it can help me with but has, thus far, never been able to actually help. After some back and forth, it directs me to an allegedly real person who's supposed to be better equipped to handle the matter. A lot of the time, I get referred to a phone number to call instead. Once I call that number, I'm presented with a new robot — this time, one that talks. It's not any better at understanding my problem than the typing robot, but it's also not so sure I'm ready to get to an agent just yet. Yes, it understands I'd like to speak with a representative, but why don't I explain what about first? As my frustration grows, I can hear my voice rise to a Karen-level pitch I swore I'd never use.

By corporate America's (sometimes dubious) telling, AI is basically the answer to everything, including customer service. Businesses say it's the way to unlock efficiencies and improve customer "journeys" so people can solve their problems and get what they need on their own, and fast. The bigger, though less advertised, focus is how AI can save companies money and cut costs, whether by helping human assistants or, in likelier scenarios, reducing the need for human assistants at all. Corporations have long seen contact centers as cost centers, and ones they're constantly looking for ways to reduce.

"It's a lot of work, and it's expensive to think about customer experience and design your AI in a way that's going to be an enjoyable experience," said Michelle Schroeder, the senior vice president of marketing at PolyAI, which creates AI-based voice assistants. "And most companies that are thinking about cost cutting and the AI revolution are not really thinking about the customer."

Simply put, the AI still doesn't work that well. Many of these chatbots and virtual support agents are not ready for prime time. People don't want to use them, but they have to anyway.

"Companies are operating in the dark, in some sense. They have this idea that this technology is going to provide them with cost savings," said Michelle Kinch, an assistant professor of business administration at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "They don't exactly know how to deploy it."

At the moment, customers are the guinea pigs in companies' experimentation with AI. We're the ones navigating the mishaps, overcoming the hurdles, and serving as case studies for what works and what doesn't. The hope is that all this testing will pan out, and the AI will get better as time goes on. But that's not the only outcome possible. We may just be consumers, standing in front of a chatbot, begging to talk to a real person forever.

Consumers are already suspicious of the whole chatbot thing. A recent Gartner survey found that nearly two-thirds of customers prefer that companies don't use AI for customer service. The main reason for their concern was that it would make it harder for them to reach a person. They also worried it would take jobs and give the wrong answers. A J.D. Power survey found bank customers aren't sold on AI. Some academic research indicates that when consumers hear "AI," it lowers emotional trust, and that consumers evaluate service as worse when it's provided by a bot versus a human, even when the service is identical. People think automation is meant to benefit the company — as in, save money — and not them.

Many of them use AI in their daily lives, to some extent, like using ChatGPT to research a product or ask a question about a warranty, said Keith McIntosh, a researcher at Gartner. They're just wary in a customer-service setting that it won't do the trick. "They know the tools can work, but they're just worried that service organizations will use it to just block access to a person and probably do not trust yet that the technology will actually give them a solution," he said.

Companies need to reassure customers that they're actually using AI to deliver a solution they can use in a self-service way and offer a clear path to an agent when necessary, he said. That sounds nice, but that's often not the reality. It's tough, if not impossible, to get a real person on the phone in a way that can be deeply frustrating and anxiety-inducing.

"When we do have that acute need to talk to a person, the chatbot becomes a hurdle," Kinch said.

Even setting aside the cost savings for companies, there are clear reasons that AI should be a good fit for customer service. When people reach out to a company, it's often with the same basic questions — when is my package arriving, where are my tickets, what is the balance on my checking account? Generative AI chatbots are good at distilling this sort of simple information and packaging it in an easy-to-read, conversational way — assuming they're not making stuff up.

"Most companies have tiered operations where they have tier-one, tier-two, tier-three support in increasing complexity, and that tier-one support is typically the sort of high-volume, low-complexity type questions," said Jason Maynard, the chief technology officer of North America and Asia Pacific Zendesk, a customer-service platform. "We're already seeing some customers that are really successful at automating a lot of what has been typically like their tier-one operations."

He pointed to DraftKings, which has millions of players, many of whom have basic questions about where to find their bonuses or how to work a promotion that would be expensive and inefficient for a human to answer on a case-by-case basis. It would be an "untenable cost" for the size of their brand, he said.

What gets more complicated is when people get up the ladder into tier-two and tier-three issues. When "Where is my package?" becomes, "You say my package is here and keep sending me a picture the FedEx guy snapped of the delivery, which shows ⅓ of my package is clearly missing," the robot's in a pickle. (A former coworker is in such a situation now.)

"Customer experience is so much more complicated than people realize," said Chris Filly, who heads marketing at Callvu, a customer-experience company. "The customer-service team has to deal with an infinite number of potential issues that come up across all these different touchpoints, all these different customer types. It's very, very complicated to make sure that every node in that network has perfect information from everything else."

No system, AI-driven or otherwise, is going to be perfect. But weighing on the corporate decision of what counts as "good enough" is money. Maynard, from Zendesk, spends a lot of time with chief operating officers and chief customer officers in his position, and they're under pressure to cut costs. They "know they're under the microscope," he said — some CFO reads a story about how a company cut 700 jobs using AI support agents, and they shoot over an email asking, "Why aren't we doing that?"

"We're in a macroeconomic environment where there's just much more scrutiny on costs these days for any organization," Maynard said, adding that thanks to increases in interest rates, there's a "real focus on profitability, and that puts pressure on margins."

This creates some misaligned incentives. Companies are inclined to implement AI broadly even if it's not appropriate and will make their customers miserable. They may see the immediate dollar signs they save by moving to an automated system — but they don't see the consumer on the line shouting at the AI agent and pleading to talk to a human.

"They tend to view contact centers as a cost center, not as a profit center, and the only thing you want to do in a cost center is reduce cost," said Jeff Gallino, the CEO of CallMiner, a software company that focuses on conversation intelligence and customer experience. "They're not looking for transformative, they're looking for incremental."

I recently found myself watching a panel at a conference hosted by Fortune magazine that was focused on unlocking the economic potential of AI, featuring executives at companies such as Santander and Siemens. The consensus was that AI was inevitable — bank tellers are out, robots are in, and everyone is just going to have to get used to it, including begrudging consumers who are often on the unfortunate end of it. Rodney Zemmel, a senior partner at McKinsey, said consumer acceptance is coming. "It's amazing how many people in the US were dead against any form of facial recognition until it saves them two minutes in the Delta security line in the airport," he said, or were "massive privacy advocates and for a free pizza online will give away all their personal information." As long as the benefits are there, people will come around to it.

That sounds lovely, except for a lot of consumers, the benefits aren't that evident yet, or at least not enough to outweigh the drawbacks. AI looks like just another measure companies put in place to boost their bottom lines. The bull case is that the AI gets better over time, that five years from now, the virtual agents will be lifelike enough that nobody can tell the difference, and we'll just be chatting away with robots all day to solve our problems. At the moment, companies are building the AI-enabled plane, in a sense, while flying it. Eventually, the plane will be built: The models will be trained, they'll have the right data, and there will be best practices in place for deployment.

Maynard compared the current moment to building a website in 1999 — everyone's guessing at what this is supposed to look like, but eventually, they'll figure it out. "That transition, we're just very, very early in it, and like all technology changes, it's sort of like things that you think are going to happen really fast tend just to proliferate out into the broader economy and have people adopt them and all these things, it just takes longer than anyone expects," he said.

"People are not enjoying that experience right now," Gallino said. "I very strongly believe that they will enjoy the experience probably soon."

Filly, from Callvu, said that a survey his company conducted on attitudes toward AI in customer-service settings shows consumers are coming around on it and are more willing to give it a chance. Still, they prefer to deal with a live agent in most situations.

"The honest truth is that the data is getting better, that there is hope that this will all resolve itself," he said. "We know that there are certain aspects of customer service that AI is doing well. Now, how long before the state-of-the-art AI makes it into that chatbot that's annoying the heck out of you? It might not be there yet."

The bear case is that significantly better doesn't come. There are no guarantees that this will all just work itself out. The conventional wisdom in business is that if customers have a bad experience, they'll vote with their pocketbooks and go elsewhere. But many industries are uncompetitive, and you can't easily pick up and walk away from your health insurer or your cable company. What's more, if every company has a mediocre AI experience, the bar might just be lowered across the board.

Many companies don't prioritize customer service and contact centers. They're a necessity, but the goal is to make them as cheap as possible.

"Everybody says, 'Oh, this is just going to get better naturally, and then thus conversational AI will get better naturally.' There's two huge flaws with that," Schroeder, from PolyAI, said. For one thing, Google Home and Alexa have been around for years, and they're not wizards. "Even that is, still years later, not getting the difference between 15 and 50," she said. That's a "dealbreaker" for a good conversation. "The second thing is that most of these companies are thinking about conversational AI purely as an efficiency play and as a cost savings and human replacement," she said. If the point of the AI isn't to do a good job, then why would it?

Companies' new favorite way to make — or, rather, save — money, is making consumers slightly more miserable. Hopefully, that will change, eventually. We've just got to wait and see.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

In the days after the election, I caught myself doing some strange Googling. Mostly it was low-grade curiosity about the economic implications of Donald Trump's win — specifically, whether there was anything I could do to prepare for him to slap stiff tariffs on goods imported into the United States. I briefly weighed whether I should buy a car. Not because I actually want a car while living in New York City. But what if this is my last chance before prices go up? A news story about a potential hike in iPhone prices made me realize I had no idea when I last replaced mine. And even though I'm not much of a shopper, I wondered whether to buy a new pair of shoes.

I'm not alone in this light bout of tariff terror. Over the past month, "things to buy before tariffs" has become a breakout Google search, and there's plenty of chatter about it on Reddit, too. Anecdotally, I've found that "what to do ahead of tariffs" keeps coming up in conversation — friends fretted about tariff-triggered inflation at an early-November Friendsgiving celebration, and my mom mentioned that her decision to finally buy a new car was triggered in part by worries that inflation will return under Trump. Companies are already talking about raising prices in anticipation of the new administration. The other day I got a marketing email from Jolie, which makes filtered showerheads, with an "important message" about tariffs. "If you're considering buying a Jolie," the email said, "now is a great time to lock in our current prices." The implication was clear: Buy now, before any tariffs take effect. I did not expect a TikTok-popular showerhead company to raise my blood pressure over prices, but here we are.

It's unclear whether Trump will make good on his campaign promises to slap a 60% tariff on goods from China and tariffs of 10% to 20% on imports from everywhere else. And even if he does, it's not clear whether they'll fuel inflation, as many economists have warned. (The Yale Budget Lab estimates that Trump's tariffs, as proposed, would drive up prices by as much as 5.1%, costing households an extra $7,600 a year.)

"We don't know the nature, the magnitude, or the timing of these tariffs," says Greg Daco, the chief economist at EY-Parthenon. "So we don't necessarily know the impact of the potential shocks on the economy."

But what is clear is that American consumers and businesses are already freaking out over tariffs. "Everybody's just in kind of a state of anxiety and scratching their heads," says Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, an economic think tank. "Everybody's trying to protect themselves. They're trying to figure out what to do. And frankly, no one knows."

Let's start with how businesses are planning for tariffs. For companies that import products or components from abroad, tariffs would be "the least surprising train wreck ever," says Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab, who previously worked for the Biden administration. "For companies that can divert their supply chains in a way to minimize tariffs, they are certainly already thinking about that." The fashion brand Steve Madden, for example, said in its latest earnings call that it would reduce sourcing from China — a scenario it's been anticipating for quite some time.

Paul Brashier, a vice president of global supply chain for ITS Logistics, has been working with clients on tariff-related contingency plans since the start of the year. Thanks to muscle memory from the tariffs Trump imposed in 2018, he says, many businesses are speeding up their shipping schedules — racing to get as many goods as possible into the country before any new tariffs are implemented.

"Shippers realized that tariffs were coming into place, and they all started shipping heavy to get ahead of those tariffs," Brashier tells me. That rush, in turn, pushes up rates for shipping containers, causes congestion at ports, and increases the cost of inland transportation and storage. In other words, the fear of tariffs could drive up prices before a single tariff is actually in place. Freight costs, Brashier says, "will be your first canary in the coal mine.".

But there's only so much preparing companies can do. If you're thinking about moving production from China, say, it's hard to know where to go. Vietnam might look good, but what if Vietnam gets hit with tariffs, too? "It's one thing to say we're trying to get you to move out of China," says Stephen Lamar, the CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, a trade association. "But then what is trade policy saying about where you should move to?"

Small businesses have few options. Mike Brey, the owner of Hobby Works, saw tote bags he sources from China get hit with tariffs during Trump's first term. But while small businesses have a reputation for being nimble, that's not true on the import side. "We can't easily pack up and move to Mexico," Brey says. "It's harder for a small company to move their manufacturing someplace else, especially when they're fighting against larger companies for that same manufacturing time." Because of the hurdles, they didn't move production out of China, instead swallowing the increased cost before passing it on to customers.

Whether or not tariffs drive up costs, experts say companies are likely to use them as an excuse to raise prices. "It's something we saw in this inflationary period," says Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank. "It does contribute to this kind of vicious circle in terms of prices for Americans and a virtuous circle in terms of profits for companies." In 2018, when Trump imposed tariffs on washing machines, they got more expensive. So did dryers, even though they weren't subject to tariffs — companies figured customers would assume that two related products were subject to the same inflationary forces.

If the cost of imports goes up, even companies whose products are American-made are likely to get in on the price hiking. "It's like a Christmas gift," Tedeschi says. "They have this windfall given to them in their lap. They're like: 'Wait, you're telling me that my competitors are now forced to raise their prices 20%? Well, I'm going to raise my prices 19% and I've still got the competitive edge. But now I have 19% of pure profit I can just add on top.' I think that's where it's really going to sting for consumers."

So how can consumers prepare for tariffs? The economists I spoke with didn't have a lot of solid answers. They did, however, have some suggestions about what consumers can keep an eye on. Many items, including apparel, electronics, furniture, and cars, are expected to get pricier when Trump's proposed tariffs go into effect. And we're likely to get a heads-up, because tariffs often require a comment period, so consumers keeping track of the news will have an opportunity to get ahead of major price increases.

"If they can accelerate big purchases they know they're going to make, they should do that," says Lovely, the senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. "So if you know you're going to need to buy a new laptop or if you're going to need to buy a new Apple Watch, those are things that haven't been taxed at all yet."

Tedeschi says consumers can do the research now on the sources of any big purchases they're planning. But he emphasizes that just because something is made in the USA, that doesn't mean all the parts are. "Even your Ford F-150 has a lot of imported parts," he says. "So you're not going to totally avoid tariffs by buying a domestic car."

Some consumers are already getting a jump on big purchases. On Reddit, one person said they were planning to buy some new tires sooner rather than later, and perhaps get an extra phone. Others mentioned getting new laptops and computers, predicted that Temu and Shein products would get more expensive, and even mulled starting a garden in case food prices rise.

So if Trump winds up imposing tariffs, when can consumers expect to see price hikes? Brey, the Hobby Works owner, says it won't take long. "Increased tariffs get passed on to the consumer really, really quickly — like one manufacturing cycle away," he says. "That's it — three to six months tops."

Daco, the chief economist at EY-Parthenon, predicts that higher prices won't kick in until late 2025 or early 2026. But he warns against trying to do much anticipatory buying. "You should consider the possibility that the price of these goods may increase," he says. "But you can't time policy — it's impossible."

The truth is we're headed into a period of unpredictability and upheaval. Savvy consumers can be on the lookout for tariff announcements, increases in freight prices, and companies' comments on earnings calls about their pricing and sourcing plans. But if Trump makes good on his promise to implement across-the-board tariffs, there may be nowhere to hide.

"What do consumers and small businesses hate more than anything? That is uncertainty," Brey says. "And in this case, it's just wave after wave of uncertainty."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.