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.

TGI Fridays has gone through a lot of iterations. It started in the 1960s as a hot singles bar. By the '80s and '90s, it had transformed into a nice-enough family-friendly spot for a cheapish night out. Nowadays, the chain has become a place that nobody really wants to go to — at least not enough to keep the casual dining chain out of bankruptcy.

The writing has been on the wall at TGI Fridays for a while. The restaurant has been struggling to pay its bills and foot traffic is down. Its CEO of five years, Ray Blanchette, stepped down in May 2023, and the next guy in the CEO role, Brandon Coleman III, only lasted for two months before exiting for "personal reasons." Coleman was replaced by Weldon Spangler, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, left the role in August.

Fridays closed 36 underperforming corporate-owned restaurants at the start of the year, citing efforts to "optimize and streamline" its operations — business speak for "things aren't going so hot, and we need to cut costs." On November 2, it filed for bankruptcy, citing the COVID-19 pandemic and its capital structure, meaning the setup of its debt and equity, as the primary drivers. The company says it plans to maintain operations across the 39 remaining corporate-owned US locations when it emerges from bankruptcy. The hundreds of TGI Fridays franchises across 41 countries are independently owned entities and, therefore, not part of the bankruptcy process.

If you're a TGI Fridays lover, that means you can still go to the one nearby if you want. But given the restaurant's troubles, I'll take a guess that applies to very few of you. Even if you can't remember the last time you went but happen to have a Fridays gift card, you may want to hurry up and use it. Apparently there are $50 million in unused credits floating around that the company says it will still honor, but you never know how long that will last.

It's been a tough year for many restaurant chains, including Red Lobster and Buca di Beppo. As The Wall Street Journal notes, other than that pandemic-triggered wipeout of 2020, chains appear to be on track to declare more bankruptcies than they have for decades. Like companies in a similar situation, the story of TGI Fridays is one of slow decline before an accelerated crash. The chain was cool and hip until it wasn't, and no one's been able to right the ship — including its private-equity owners. While those firms aren't the sole reason for the chain's death knell, they haven't helped by putting debt on the books they can't pay off.

"You just really have a lot of different challenges. And then eventually private equity looks at businesses like this, and they're like, 'Let's load it up with debt, and that's how we're going to make our money,'" Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of Restaurant Business Magazine, said. "That's really kind of what happened here."

Your memories of TGI Fridays likely depend on your age. If you're a baby boomer, you may remember the original singles bar that started on New York City's Upper East Side. (If you want to get a sense of the vibe, check out the 1988 Tom Cruise movie "Cocktail," because that's where some of it was filmed.) If you're Gen X or a millennial, you might recall it as more of a family-friendly sports bar. On the fancy scale, it fell closer to Olive Garden than McDonald's but also developed a reputation as a little hokey. (For a sense of this, see the 1999 film "Office Space.") Over time, TGI Fridays became indistinguishable from other bar and grill chains like Applebee's, Chili's, and Ruby Tuesday. So maybe it's no surprise that those restaurants — with the exception of Chili's — have floundered.

"You've got these bar and grill concepts that, on balance, there's just not as many people who want to visit these on a regular basis any longer, for one reason or another," Maze said.

This is partly a story of changing tastes: If diners want a good burger, they'll go to Shake Shack or Five Guys, where the quality is comparable but the price tag is lower. A night on the town might be somewhere nicer, perhaps not a chain restaurant at all. And if they're in the mood for a chain sports bar with more of a focus on the actual sports, they'll hit up, say, Buffalo Wild Wings.

"Buffalo Wild Wings started with, originally, the sports aficionado who'd get bombed on a pitcher of beer and watch NFL games all Sunday afternoon and night," Burt Flickering, the owner of the retail consulting firm Strategic Resource Group, said. "It's been moving to more family-oriented and team-oriented."

It's not that TGI Fridays hasn't tried some different things — getting into events, adding different menu items, trying out different cocktails — but none of it has really worked. Adding to the chain's woes was the pandemic, which crushed dining establishments everywhere. There's been a "delayed effect" of the pandemic on certain restaurants, said John Bringardner, the head of Debtwire, a trade publication that covers dealmaking and debt. Many restaurants were able to scrape by, banking on customers returning post-lockdowns, but that hope has faded.

"The ones that managed to stay through, now they just can't hang on any longer," Bringardner told me. "Business didn't bounce back in the same way that they were hoping."

In addition to grappling with changing tastes, TGI Fridays has also been subject to another trend in the restaurant business: private equity financial maneuvering. The restaurant chain was sold to a pair of PE firms — TriArtisan Capital Advisors and Sentinel Capital Partners — in 2014, though Sentinel eventually exited in 2019. In 2017, Fridays' PE owners decided to undertake a financial deal called whole business securitization, where a company issues debt that's secured by assets that generate cash, like royalties paid by franchisees. They sold debt that was contingent on money that was expected to be made in the future on franchise agreements, IP, licensing agreements, etc. It's not an uncommon practice — Five Guys and Planet Fitness have done it, too. Bringardner explained that at a basic level, it's similar to a bond, but instead of the debt being backed by the entire operations of the company, the assets and liabilities associated with the WBS are carved out from a company's balance sheet and put into a separate entity called a special purpose vehicle, which can usually borrow money at a lower interest rate.

"The interest rate is lower because investors are given very detailed data on the underlying royalty and franchise payments being made to ultimately repay this debt, and investors are first in line for payment, ahead of the company's other costs," he said. The setup has not gone well. As part of the WBS, Fridays was supposed to make regular updates on the associated finances — stuff like the amount of incoming franchisee royalties. But Citibank, the manager overseeing Fridays' financing, terminated its role in September after the company failed to make certain financial reports on time. (Think of it like a publicly traded company being late in filing its annual report with the SEC.) That's the first time a company's been dropped by its financing manager since the 2008 financial crisis. There's now a backup manager, FTI Consulting, in place.

"That was a clear sign of trouble. I mean, a healthy company does not get kicked out of managing it," Bringardner said.

Ragini Bhalla, the head of brand and a spokesperson for Creditsafe, which tracks businesses' financial stability and credit, said the company's track record of paying its bills on time has been "erratic and volatile" over the past 12 months. "You could see they're struggling," she said.

Alicia Kelso at Nation's Restaurant News outlined the "dizzying number of changes" at TGI Fridays over the past few years as the private-equity-led owners tried to see what might stick. One of those attempts included a partnership between TGI Fridays and the virtual kitchen company C3 to add items such as poke bowls and sushi to its menus, which are not Fridays' normal fare. As Kelso notes, TriArtisan invested $10 million in C3 in 2021, so there may have been some mixed incentives there. (I'll note here that TriArtisan is also an owner of Hooters, which, when is the last time anyone was in one of those?)

Strategic Resource Group's Flickering also argued that TGI's owners have been less nimble in reacting to the current environment. The Wall Street owners have been happy to take what profit they've made to pad their bottom line, he told me, rather than reinvesting that money back into the chain to help it improve operations and adapt to changing tastes.

"The private-equity people were so obtuse and not operators, they didn't look at their food-service competitors and channels," Flickering said.

Earlier this year, it looked like Hostmore, which operates TGI Fridays' UK locations, might take over the entire company, but that deal fell through. In September, Hostmore fell into administration, which is basically British for bankruptcy.

TriArtisan and TGI Fridays did not respond to requests for comment.

TGI Fridays isn't necessarily a case where absolutely everything went wrong. It's a situation where enough things just didn't go right. Consumer trends and tastes changed. The pandemic hit. It failed to reinvent itself or pivot. Private equity, as is often the case, wasn't really a boost. The goal of those firms is ultimately to make a profit on their investment, which can happen even absent a true business turnaround.

I went on my very first date, in high school, to a TGI Fridays, though if I'm being honest, it might have been a Chili's or Applebees. I can't tell the difference. That's part of Fridays' problem. The other part of the problem is that I probably wouldn't go there in this day and age unless there really weren't any other options. And apparently, I'm not alone. Given the chain's struggles, a lot of people feel that way. It can always be Friday anywhere, not just TGI Fridays, and maybe at a better price point or nicer experience.

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