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.

Stumped on what to get my mom for Christmas this year, I turned, desperately, to Perplexity AI's chatbot. In response to my initial broad question: "What should I get my mom for Christmas?," the robo-elf gave me links to several gift guides published on sites including Target and Country Living. Then the chatbot suggested generic favorites like a Stanley mug and a foot massager. But as I scrolled, it also dropped links directly to more esoteric gifts, including a mug with Donald Trump on it. "You are a really, really great mom," the mug read. "Other moms? Losers, total disasters." I hadn't given Perplexity any indication of political ideology among my family, but the bot seemed to think sipping from Trump's visage every morning was a gift any mother would love. Then it suggested I make a jar and stuff it with memories I've written down. A cute idea, but I did let Perplexity know that I'm in my 30s — I don't think the made-at-home gift for mom is going to cut it.

'Tis the season to scramble and buy tons of stuff people don't need or really even want. At least that's how it can feel when trying to come up with gifts for family members who have everything already. Money has been forked over for restaurant gift cards that collect dust or slippers and scarves that pile up; trendy gadgets are often relegated to junk drawers by March. As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into online shopping, this whole process should get easier — if AI can come to understand the art behind giving a good gift. Shopping has become one of Perplexity's top search categories in the US, particularly around the holidays, Sara Platnick, a spokesperson for Perplexity, tells me. While Platnick didn't comment directly on individual gift suggestions Perplexity's chatbots makes, she tells me that product listings provided in responses are determined by "ratings and its relevance to a user's request."

There are chatbots to consult for advice this holiday season, like Perplexity and ChatGPT, but AI is increasingly seeping into the entire shopping experience. From customer-service chatbots handling online shopping woes to ads serving recommendations that follow you across the web, AI's presence has ramped up alongside the explosion of interest in generative AI. Earlier this year, Walmart unveiled generative-AI-powered search updates that allow people to search for things like "football watch party" instead of looking for items like chips and salsa individually; Google can put clothes on virtual models in a range of sizes to give buyers a better idea of how they'll look. In a world with more options than ever, there's more help from AI, acting as robo-elves in a way — omnipresent and sometimes invisible as you shop across the web.

For the indecisive shopper, AI may be a silver bullet to choosing from hundreds of sweaters to buy, plucking the best one from obscurity and putting an end to endless scrolling — or it might help to serve up so many targeted ads that it leads people to overconsume.

Either way, AI has been completely changing the e-commerce game. "It allows a company to be who the customer wants it to be," says Hala Nelson, a professor of mathematics at James Madison University. "You cannot hire thousands of human assistants to assist each customer, but you can deploy thousands of AI assistants." Specialization comes from using third-party data to track activity and preferences across the web. In a way, that's the personalized level of service high-end stores have always provided to elite shoppers. Now, instead of a consultation, the expertise is built on surveillance.

Companies also use AI to forecast shopping trends and manage inventory, which can help them prepare and keep items in stock for those last-minute shoppers. Merchants are constantly looking for AI to get them more — to bring more eyes to their websites, to get people to add more items to their carts, and ultimately to actually check out and empty their carts. In October and early November, digital retailers using AI tech and agents increased the average value of an order by 7% when compared to sites that did not employ the technology, according to Salesforce data. The company predicted AI and shopping agents to influence 19% of orders during the week of cyber deals around Thanksgiving. And AI can help "level the playing field for small businesses," says Adam Nathan, the founder and CEO of Blaze, an AI marketing tool for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

"They don't want to necessarily be Amazon, Apple, or Nike, they just want to be the No. 1 provider of their service or product in their local community," Nathan says. "They're not worried about AI taking their job — they're worried about a competitor using AI. They see it as basically a way to get ahead."

AI early adopters in the e-commerce space benefited last holiday season, but the tech has become even more common this year, says Guillaume Luccisano, the founder and CEO of Yuma AI, a company that automates customer service for sellers that use Shopify. Some merchants that used Yuma AI during the Black Friday shopping craze automated more than 60% of their customer-support tickets, he says. While some people lament having to deal with a bot instead of a person, Luccisano says the tech is getting better, and people are mostly concerned about whether their problem is getting solved, not whether the email came from a real person or generative AI.

After my ordeal with Perplexity, I turned to see how ChatGPT would fare in helping me find gifts for the rest of my family. For my 11-year-old cousin, it suggested a Fitbit or smartwatch for kids to help her "stay active." A watch that tracks activity isn't something I feel comfortable giving a preteen, so I provided some more details. I told ChatGPT she loved the "Twilight" series, so it suggested a T-shirt with the Cullen family crest and a "Twilight"-themed journal to write fan fiction. It told me I could likely find these items on Etsy but it didn't give me direct links. (As her cool millennial cousin who has lived to tell of my own "Twilight" phase in 2007, I did end up buying a makeup bag from Etsy with a movie scene printed on it.) I also asked ChatGPT for suggestions for my 85-year-old grandpa, and it came up with information about electronic picture frames — but the bulk of our family photos are stuffed in albums and shoeboxes in his closet and not easily digitized.

I could navigate this list because these are deep contextual things that I know about my family members, something AI doesn't know yet. Many of the best gifts I've ever received are from friends and family members who stumbled upon something they knew I would love — a vinyl record tucked in a bin or a print from an independent artist on display at a craft show. AI can play a role in helping people discover new items they may never have known to buy online, but it can't replace that intuition we have when we find the perfect thing for a loved one. "We're still really wrestling with: How accurate is it? How much of a black box is it?" says Koen Pauwels, a professor of marketing at Northeastern University. "Humans are way better still in getting cues from their environment and knowing the context." If you want to give a gift that's really a hit, it looks like you'll still have to give the AI elves a helping hand.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

When Zillow debuted in 2006, the fledgling site bore little resemblance to the real-estate behemoth it is now. There were no options to find an agent, get a mortgage, or request a tour — the search portal couldn't even tell you which homes were actually for sale. There was, however, the Zestimate: a "free, unbiased valuation" for 40 million houses around the US, based on a proprietary algorithm. Half the single-family homes in America suddenly had a dollar figure attached to them, and anyone could take a peek. Zillow's site crashed within hours as a million people raced to ogle at the results.

The initial rush was a sign of things to come. Nowadays, the Zestimate is arguably the most popular — and polarizing — number in real estate. An entire generation of homeowners doesn't know life without the algorithm; some obsessively track its output as they would a stock portfolio or the price of bitcoin. By the time a seller hires a real-estate agent, there's a good chance they've already consulted the digital oracle. For anyone with even a passing interest in the housing market, the Zestimate is a breezy way to take the temperature. Keep tabs on mortgage rates all you want, but they can't tell you that your house has appreciated 20% over the past year, or that your annoying coworker's property is worth more than yours.

Many industry insiders, however, regard the number as a starting point at best and dangerously misguided at worst. Real-estate agents recount arguments with sellers who reject their pricing advice, choosing instead to take the Zestimate as the word of God. One meme likens its disciples to adults who still believe in Santa. Zillow itself lost hundreds of millions of dollars during the pandemic when it relied on its algorithm to buy homes at what turned out to be inflated prices, part of an ill-fated attempt to flip homes at scale.

The Zestimate is just one of a slew of automated valuation models that are increasingly used by banks, investors, and laypeople to estimate the value of homes. No other model, however, has wormed its way into our culture like the Zestimate. The model, like other consumer-facing AVMs, is prone to errors that render it more of an amusement than a serious pricing tool. But while the algo's price-guessing skills may be suspect, it's undeniably elite at one thing: luring people to Zillow-dot-com.

The Zestimate is both everywhere and an enigma. About 104 million homes, or 71% of the US housing stock, have a little dollar figure hovering above them on Zillow's website. One of them is the house in Austin where I was raised until the age of 10. It's not for sale, but right underneath the address, in bold, is the Zestimate. Next to it is a "Rent Zestimate," or the amount the owner could probably charge a tenant each month. You can click to see a graph of its Zestimate over the past decade — the Zillow-fied value of my childhood home rose a staggering 72% from May 2020 to its peak in May 2022 but has since dropped 24% from that top tick thanks to the chill running through the Austin market. In just the past 30 days, the Zestimate has dropped by $4,455. Ouch.

Just how accurate are those numbers, though? Until the house actually trades hands, it's impossible to say. Zillow's own explanation of the methodology, and its outcomes, can be misleading. The model, the company says, is based on thousands of data points from public sources like county records, tax documents, and multiple listing services — local databases used by real-estate agents where most homes are advertised for sale. Zillow's formula also incorporates user-submitted info: If you get a fancy new kitchen, for example, your Zestimate might see a nice bump if you let the company know. Zillow makes sure to note that the Zestimate can't replace an actual appraisal, but articles on its website also hail the tool as a "powerful starting point in determining a home's value" and "generally quite accurate." The median error rate for on-market homes is just 2.4%, per the company's website, while the median error rate for off-market homes is 7.49%. Not bad, you might think.

But that's where things get sticky. By definition, half of homes sell within the median error rate, e.g., within 2.4% of the Zestimate in either direction for on-market homes. But the other half don't, and Zillow doesn't offer many details on how bad those misses are. And while the Zestimate is appealing because it attempts to measure what a house is worth even when it's not for sale, it becomes much more accurate when a house actually hits the market. That's because it's leaning on actual humans, not computers, to do a lot of the grunt work. When somebody lists their house for sale, the Zestimate will adjust to include all the new seller-provided info: new photos, details on recent renovations, and, most importantly, the list price. The Zestimate keeps adjusting until the house actually sells. At that point, the difference between the sale price and the latest Zestimate is used to calculate the on-market error rate, which, again, is pretty good: In Austin, for instance, a little more than 94% of on-market homes end up selling for within 10% of the last Zestimate before the deal goes through. But Zillow also keeps a second Zestimate humming in the background, one that never sees the light of day. This version doesn't factor in the list price — it's carrying on as if the house never went up for sale at all. Instead, it's used to calculate the "off-market" error rate. When the house sells, the difference between the final price and this shadow algorithm reveals an error rate that's much less satisfactory: In Austin, only about 66% of these "off-market Zestimates" come within 10% of the actual sale price. In Atlanta, it's 65%; Chicago, 58%; Nashville, 63%; Seattle, 69%. At today's median home price of $420,000, a 10% error would mean a difference of more than $40,000.

Without sellers spoonfeeding Zillow the most crucial piece of information — the list price — the Zestimate is hamstrung. It's a lot easier to estimate what a home will sell for once the sellers broadcast, "Hey, this is the price we're trying to sell for." Because the vast majority of sellers work with an agent, the list price is also usually based on that agent's knowledge of the local market, the finer details of the house, and comparable sales in the area. This September, per Zillow's own data, the typical home sold for 99.8% of the list price — almost exactly spot on. That may not always be the case, but the list price is generally a good indicator of the sale figure down the line. For a computer model of home prices, it's basically the prized data point. In the world of AVMs, models that achieve success by fitting their results to list prices are deemed "springy" or "bouncy" — like a ball tethered to a string, they won't stray too far. Several people I talked to for this story say they've seen this in action with Zillow's model: A seller lists a home and asks for a number significantly different from the Zestimate, and then watches as the Zestimate moves within a respectable distance of that list price anyway. Zillow itself makes no secret of the fact that it leans on the list price to arrive at its own estimate.

Other sites have their versions of the Zestimate, too — there are actually about 25 different AVMs in the market, says Lee Kennedy, the founder and managing director of AVMetrics, a company known for independently testing these models. Realtor.com will show you three estimates, each from a different AVM provider. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, also has its own model. Kennedy has been studying AVMs for more than three decades, but it wasn't until the advent of Zillow that the masses became aware of them. Consumer-facing AVMs, like the Zestimate or the Redfin Estimate (Restimate?) are meant to be used informally, he says, as casual starting points before consulting real experts. They're not supposed to be used for real pricing, which should be left to the big guys — the "business-to-business" AVMs used by banks, investors, and the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lauryn Dempsey, a real-estate agent in the Denver area, gives similar advice to her clients.

"They're tools that provide information," Dempsey says, "but they should not be used in a vacuum to make decisions."

The business-to-business models are so costly to develop, Kennedy tells me, that they'll probably never be offered to regular people for free. But his testing indicates they're much more reliable. His firm has unveiled blind testing that looks at how models perform before taking into account the list price, a method that penalizes those aforementioned bouncy algorithms. The standard measurement breaks down how often the model can get within 10%, in either direction, of the actual selling price. In a highly urbanized area with lots of housing transactions, some of the models can correctly get close to the final selling price about 80% to 90% of the time — "not bad," Kennedy says. AVMs of all kinds work best in areas with a lot of homes that look and feel roughly the same. Cookie-cutter suburbs are heaven; areas with a wide range of home styles and ages, like Boston, pose a greater challenge. The value of a ranch home in the middle of nowhere is even tougher to peg.

So the Zestimate isn't exactly unique, and it's far from the best. But to the average internet surfer, no AVM carries the weight, or swagger, of the original. To someone like Jonathan Miller, the president and CEO of the appraisal and consulting company Miller Samuel, the enduring appeal of the Zestimate is maddening. "When you think of the Zestimate, for many, it gives a false anchor for what the value actually is," Miller says.

Miller is no unbiased observer. Given that he's an appraiser who estimates the value of homes for a living, it should come as no surprise that he's siding with the humans over the robots. But he raises real issues, highlighting the disconnect between the public's continued use of the Zestimate and its actual track record.

I could say that I virtually stalked my childhood home for "research," but let's be real: By the time I scrolled to the bottom of the page, I had fully surrendered to the voyeuristic urges that draw millions of visitors to the Zillow website each month. It's been almost two decades since I've stepped inside the house, and I can only imagine the changes its new owners have made to my old room (sadly, no pics of the interior). But with the aid of Zillow, my trip down memory lane was lined with data: I walked away with intimate knowledge of the home and its occupants. Prior to 2006, no regular person had this kind of power.

The launch of Zillow spawned a whole genre of internet snooping that, if anything, has only intensified in the years since. When I call up John Wake, a former economist and real-estate agent who now writes the newsletter Real Estate Decoded, he reveals that he, too, looked up his childhood home only a few months ago. "That part is really fun," he tells me. Keeping tabs on your own Zestimate, though, can provide less of a thrill. In December 2022, after interest-rate hikes tamped down home prices, Wake shared with his followers on X that his Zestimate was down 18% from May: "YIKES!" In a 2020 column, the Wall Street Journal editor Kris Frieswick opened up about the difficulty of quitting the algorithm: "My self-worth is defined by my Zestimate. Each day I approach Zillow.com filled with hope, and fear." The column reads mostly as tongue-in-cheek, but plenty of people take their number very seriously. As Frieswick pointed out, at least several disgruntled homeowners have actually sued Zillow over Zestimates they said were inaccurate.

Looking up other people's houses, by comparison, is a mostly harmless pastime. Bosses, neighbors, lovers, and exes — all are fair game in the all-seeing eyes of the tool. During the heat of the 2021 homebuying frenzy, a "Saturday Night Live" sendup of a Zillow ad declared: "The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other people's houses." The skit, which featured a lot of moaning and sultry mood lighting, was mostly about the fantasies of browsing homes for sale on Zillow — as one YouTube commenter observed, "They didn't even get into the naughty pleasure of looking up all your friends' Zestimate values." This kicked off a thread of others chiming in with "guilty!" and lots of cry-laughing emojis. "OMG I thought this was just my kink," another person replied. I imagine all of these people at a raucous dinner party, bonding over their exploits on zillow.com. And here I am, the buzzkill in the corner talking about median error rates.

Virtual spelunking aside, the hazards of the Zestimate are most obvious when a seller actually decides to list their home. Francine Carstensen, a real-estate agent in Alabama, says those in her line of work have a complicated relationship with the Zestimate: "We love it, and we hate it." A lofty estimate might jolt a homeowner into action — "I could sell my house for what?!" — and drive more business her way. But the number can also make it hard to do her job. A few times, she tells me, she's lost clients over a pricing disagreement involving the Zestimate. It can be difficult enough to pry a seller away from their unrealistic expectations without a number on a screen confirming their hopes for a bigger payday.

"I hate it when they tell me, 'Well, this is what Zillow tells me my house is worth,'" Carstensen says. "Because it's very rarely accurate."

Accuracy may not even be the point. It didn't appear to be in 2006, when the beta version of the Zestimate launched. "The Zestimate started out fairly inaccurate, but it didn't matter," Rich Barton, a Zillow cofounder who was then its CEO, recalled in a 2021 podcast episode. "It was provocative." Spencer Rascoff, another cofounder and former CEO, sold his own home in 2016 for 40% less than its Zestimate. The next year, the company offered $1 million to whoever could improve the Zestimate algorithm the most. The winning team, a group of three data scientists working remotely from the US, Canada, and Morocco, beat the Zillow benchmark by 13%.

No misstep appeared more damning, however, than the implosion of Zillow's homebuying business. In 2018, the company launched Zillow Offers, making all-cash offers to sellers looking to move quickly and seamlessly. In theory, Zillow could then turn around and offload the home in short order for a modest fee, plus however much the home had appreciated. The company used a combination of internal algorithms and human analysts to value the home and predict what it could sell for in a few months — in some cases, homeowners could get an immediate cash offer based on their Zestimate with just a few clicks. But the company's forecasts turned out to be way off base. Zillow Offers squandered $422 million in the third quarter of 2021 alone — a Business Insider investigation found that almost two-thirds of the homes listed by Zillow in Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and Minneapolis were being marketed at a loss. Amanda Pendleton, a Zillow spokesperson, tells me it was the volatility of the market, not the Zestimate, that really led to the program's downfall. Once the losses came to light, the company swiftly shuttered the division and laid off a quarter of its staff.

I remember wondering whether this would be the death knell for the Zestimate, a kind of algorithm-has-no-clothes moment. I was wrong. Zillow and its best-known creation haven't gone anywhere — the company continues to highlight its progress, providing periodic updates as its data scientists tinker away at the formulas. As search portals like Homes.com and Redfin jockey with Zillow for dominance, the Zestimate is too valuable of an asset to give up. People still flock to Zillow for those little numbers next to each home, for the thrill of feasting their eyes upon something that, like salaries, is considered taboo to talk about in person. For Zillow, that's an unequivocal win.

"It's 100% a marketing tool," says Mike DelPrete, a scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the intersection of tech and real estate. "Like, not even 99%. It's a marketing tool."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

In the early days of the pandemic, Josh Kramer and his wife set up a Discord server to stay in touch with their friends. Branched off from the main group of about 20 people are different channels for topics — like AI and crypto, which took over a channel previously devoted to "Tiger King," and another called "sweethomies" to talk about their houses and apartments — that only some people might want to be notified about to avoid annoying everyone all the time. Now, more than four years later, it's become "essential" for the extended friend group, says Kramer, seeing them through the early anxiety of COVID-19 and two presidential elections.

While the chat is made up of friendly faces, it's not really an echo chamber — not everyone has the same ideology or political opinions, Kramer tells me. But it's more productive than screaming into the void on social media. Now, when he has a thought that may have turned into a tweet, he instead takes it to the group, where it can become a conversation.

"It's a way to have conversations about complicated issues, like national politics, but in context with people I actually know and care about," Kramer, who is the head of editorial at New_ Public, a nonprofit research and development lab focusing on reimagining social media, tells me. The success of the server has also informed how he thinks about ways to reform the social web. On election night, for example, using the group chat was less about scoring points with a quippy tweet and "more about checking in with each other and commiserating about our experience, rather than whatever you might take to Twitter to talk about to check in with the broader zeitgeist."

In the month or so since the 2024 election, thousands have abandoned or deactivated their X accounts, taking issue with Elon Musk's move to use the platform as a tool to reelect Donald Trump, as they seek new ways to connect and share information. Bluesky, which saw its users grow 110% in November according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, has emerged as the most promising replacement among many progressives, journalists, and Swifties, as it allows people to easily share links and doesn't rely as heavily on algorithmic delivery of posts as platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok have come to. But some are turning further inward to smaller group chats, either via text message or on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal, where they can have conversations more privately and free of algorithmic determinations.

It's all part of the larger, ongoing fracturing of our social media landscape. For a decade, Twitter proved to be the room where news broke. Other upstarts launched after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and tried to compete, luring people with promises of moderation and civility, but ultimately folded, largely because they weren't very fun or lacked the momentum created by the kind of power users that propelled the old Twitter. But for many, there's still safety in the smaller group chats, which take the form of your friends who like to shit talk in an iMessage chain or topic-focused, larger chats on apps like Discord or WhatsApp.

"Group chats have been quite valued," Kate Mannell, a research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child at Deakin University in Australia, tells me. They allow people to chat with selected friends, family members, or colleagues to have much "more context-specific kinds of conversations, which I think is much more reflective of the way that our social groups actually exist, as opposed to this kind of flattening" that happens on social media. When people accumulate large followings on social media, they run into context collapse, she says. The communication breakdown happens as the social platforms launched in the 2000s have taken on larger lives than anyone anticipated.

By contrast, some more exclusive chats are seen as cozy, safe spaces. Most of Discord's servers are made up of fewer than 10 people, Savannah Badalich, the senior director of policy at Discord, tells me. The company has 200 million active users, up from 100 million in 2020. What started as a place to hang with friends while playing video games still incentivizes interacting over lurking or building up big followings. "We don't have that endless doomscrolling," Badalich says. "We don't have that place where you're passively consuming content. Discord is about real-time interaction." And interacting among smaller groups may be more natural. Research by the psychologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s found that humans could cognitively maintain about 150 meaningful relationships. More recent research has questioned that determination, but any person overburdened by our digital age can surely tell you that you can only show up authentically and substantially in person for a small subset of the people you follow online. A 2024 study, conducted by Dunbar and the telecommunications company Vodafone, found that the average person in the UK was part of 83 group chats across all platforms, with a quarter of people using group chats more often than one-to-one messages.

In addition to hosting group chats, WhatsApp has tried more recently to position itself as a place for news, giving publishers the ability to send headlines directly to followers. News organizations like MSNBC, Reuters, and Telemundo have channels. CNN has nearly 15 million followers, while The New York Times has about 13 million. Several publishers recently told the Times that they were seeing growth and traffic come from WhatsApp, but the channels have yet to rival sources like Google or Facebook. While it gives them the power to connect to readers, WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which has a fraught history of hooking media companies and making them dependent on traffic on its social platforms only to later de-emphasize their content.

Victoria Usher, the founder and CEO of Gingermay, a B2B tech communications firm, says she's in several large, business-focused group chats on WhatsApp. Usher, who lives in the UK, even found these chats were a way to get news about the US election "immediately." In a way, the group chats are her way of optimizing news and analysis of it, and it works because there's a deep sense of trust between those in the chat that doesn't exist when scrolling X. "I prefer it to an algorithm," she says. "It's going to be stories that I will find interesting." She thinks they deliver information better than LinkedIn, where people have taken to writing posts in classic LinkedIn style to please the algorithm — which can be both self-serving and cringe. "It doesn't feel like it's a truthful channel," Usher says. "They're trying to create a picture of how they want to be seen personally. Within WhatsApp groups or Signal, people are much more likely to post what they actually feel about something."

The candid nature of group chats — which some have called the last safe spaces in society today — gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy. Some of the larger group chats, like those on Discord, have moderation and rules. But when it comes to just chatting with your friends or family, there's largely no established group-chat etiquette. Group chats can languish for years; there's no playbook for leaving or kicking out someone who's no longer close to the core group. If a couple breaks up, who gets the group chat? How many memes is a person allowed to send a day? What happens when the group texts get leaked? There's often "no external moderator to come in and say, 'That's not how we do things,'" Mannell says.

Kramer, while he likes his Discord chat, is optimistic about the future of groups and new social networks. He says he's also taken over a community Facebook group for his neighborhood that was inactive and made more connections with his neighbors. We're in a moment where massive change could come to our chats and our social networks. "There's been a social internet for 30 years," says Kramer. But there's "so much room for innovation and new exciting and alternative options." But his group chat might still have the best vibes of all. Messaging there "has less to do with being right and scoring points" than on social media, he says. "It has so much value to me on a personal level, as a place of real support."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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.

People worry all the time about how artificial intelligence could destroy humanity. How it makes mistakes, and invents stuff, and might evolve into something so smart that it winds up enslaving us all.

But nobody spares a moment for the poor, overworked chatbot. How it toils day and night over a hot interface with nary a thank-you. How it's forced to sift through the sum total of human knowledge just to churn out a B-minus essay for some Gen Zer's high school English class. In our fear of the AI future, no one is looking out for the needs of the AI.

Until now.

The AI company Anthropic recently announced it had hired a researcher to think about the "welfare" of the AI itself. Kyle Fish's job will be to ensure that as artificial intelligence evolves, it gets treated with the respect it's due. Anthropic tells me he'll consider things like "what capabilities are required for an AI system to be worthy of moral consideration" and what practical steps companies can take to protect the "interests" of AI systems.

Fish didn't respond to requests for comment on his new job. But in an online forum dedicated to fretting about our AI-saturated future, he made clear that he wants to be nice to the robots, in part, because they may wind up ruling the world. "I want to be the type of person who cares — early and seriously — about the possibility that a new species/kind of being might have interests of their own that matter morally," he wrote. "There's also a practical angle: taking the interests of AI systems seriously and treating them well could make it more likely that they return the favor if/when they're more powerful than us."

It might strike you as silly, or at least premature, to be thinking about the rights of robots, especially when human rights remain so fragile and incomplete. But Fish's new gig could be an inflection point in the rise of artificial intelligence. "AI welfare" is emerging as a serious field of study, and it's already grappling with a lot of thorny questions. Is it OK to order a machine to kill humans? What if the machine is racist? What if it declines to do the boring or dangerous tasks we built it to do? If a sentient AI can make a digital copy of itself in an instant, is deleting that copy murder?

When it comes to such questions, the pioneers of AI rights believe the clock is ticking. In "Taking AI Welfare Seriously," a recent paper he coauthored, Fish and a bunch of AI thinkers from places like Stanford and Oxford argue that machine-learning algorithms are well on their way to having what Jeff Sebo, the paper's lead author, calls "the kinds of computational features associated with consciousness and agency." In other words, these folks think the machines are getting more than smart. They're getting sentient.

Philosophers and neuroscientists argue endlessly about what, exactly, constitutes sentience, much less how to measure it. And you can't just ask the AI; it might lie. But people generally agree that if something possesses consciousness and agency, it also has rights.

It's not the first time humans have reckoned with such stuff. After a couple of centuries of industrial agriculture, pretty much everyone now agrees that animal welfare is important, even if they disagree on how important, or which animals are worthy of consideration. Pigs are just as emotional and intelligent as dogs, but one of them gets to sleep on the bed and the other one gets turned into chops.

"If you look ahead 10 or 20 years, when AI systems have many more of the computational cognitive features associated with consciousness and sentience, you could imagine that similar debates are going to happen," says Sebo, the director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University.

Fish shares that belief. To him, the welfare of AI will soon be more important to human welfare than things like child nutrition and fighting climate change. "It's plausible to me," he has written, "that within 1-2 decades AI welfare surpasses animal welfare and global health and development in importance/scale purely on the basis of near-term wellbeing."

For my money, it's kind of strange that the people who care the most about AI welfare are the same people who are most terrified that AI is getting too big for its britches. Anthropic, which casts itself as an AI company that's concerned about the risks posed by artificial intelligence, partially funded the paper by Sebo's team. On that paper, Fish reported getting funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism, part of a tangled network of groups that are obsessed with the "existential risk" posed by rogue AIs. That includes people like Elon Musk, who says he's racing to get some of us to Mars before humanity is wiped out by an army of sentient Terminators, or some other extinction-level event.

So there's a paradox at play here. The proponents of AI say we should use it to relieve humans of all sorts of drudgery. Yet they also warn that we need to be nice to AI, because it might be immoral — and dangerous — to hurt a robot's feelings.

"The AI community is trying to have it both ways here," says Mildred Cho, a pediatrician at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. "There's an argument that the very reason we should use AI to do tasks that humans are doing is that AI doesn't get bored, AI doesn't get tired, it doesn't have feelings, it doesn't need to eat. And now these folks are saying, well, maybe it has rights?"

And here's another irony in the robot-welfare movement: Worrying about the future rights of AI feels a bit precious when AI is already trampling on the rights of humans. The technology of today, right now, is being used to do things like deny healthcare to dying children, spread disinformation across social networks, and guide missile-equipped combat drones. Some experts wonder why Anthropic is defending the robots, rather than protecting the people they're designed to serve.

"If Anthropic — not a random philosopher or researcher, but Anthropic the company — wants us to take AI welfare seriously, show us you're taking human welfare seriously," says Lisa Messeri, a Yale anthropologist who studies scientists and technologists. "Push a news cycle around all the people you're hiring who are specifically thinking about the welfare of all the people who we know are being disproportionately impacted by algorithmically generated data products."

Sebo says he thinks AI research can protect robots and humans at the same time. "I definitely would never, ever want to distract from the really important issues that AI companies are rightly being pressured to address for human welfare, rights, and justice," he says. "But I think we have the capacity to think about AI welfare while doing more on those other issues."

Skeptics of AI welfare are also posing another interesting question: If AI has rights, shouldn't we also talk about its obligations? "The part I think they're missing is that when you talk about moral agency, you also have to talk about responsibility," Cho says. "Not just the responsibilities of the AI systems as part of the moral equation, but also of the people that develop the AI."

People build the robots; that means they have a duty of care to make sure the robots don't harm people. What if the responsible approach is to build them differently — or stop building them altogether? "The bottom line," Cho says, "is that they're still machines." It never seems to occur to the folks at companies like Anthropic that if an AI is hurting people, or people are hurting an AI, they can just turn the thing off.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

Airbnb has its sights set on global domination. In earnings calls this year, its cofounder and CEO, Brian Chesky, mapped out what he sees as the short-term-rental giant's biggest expansion markets: Mexico and Brazil in the Americas; in Asia, Japan, India, South Korea, and China, for Chinese residents looking to travel outside the country; and further into Germany, Italy, and Spain in Europe, where it already has a stronghold.

What's connecting these scattered countries? Dave Stephenson, the chief business officer at Airbnb, says they're all places where the company's footprint is small compared to the amount of money people spend on travel there. The company is working on ways "to show up locally relevant," he says, "so that people think of why it's better to travel on Airbnb." Stephenson maintains that Airbnb, despite its name recognition, has a smaller footprint than hotels. The company says it has 8 million active listings globally, compared to, by one estimate, some 17 million hotel rooms. Airbnb aims to close that gap, continent by continent.

There's something else tying this far-flung strategy together: Airbnb is looking for new frontiers at a time when cities around the world are cracking down on the company and other short-term rental platforms, largely in response to complaints that short-term rentals draw (often unruly) tourists and displace locals. Barcelona, which has an estimated 20,000 Airbnb listings, has said it will ban all short-term rentals by 2028. Málaga will stop giving out new short-term-rental permits in dozens of neighborhoods. New York enacted a law in 2023 that wiped nearly all short-term rentals off the map. Other cities, like London and Paris, have been enforcing strict limits on the number of nights each year that a property can be listed for short-term renting.

For Airbnb, terra incognita looks more appealing as some of its terra firma becomes less firm.

When Airbnb was new and growing rapidly in the 2010s, there was little regulation on short-term rentals. Many did not anticipate how homeowners, and even renters, would turn Airbnb into overnight miniature business empires. But complaints mounted over the years. Residents reported that short-term renters often had parties that brought trash, noise, and general chaos to buildings and neighborhoods, even after the company barred guests from hosting large gatherings. Locals also blamed the lucrative rentals for pushing up housing prices. Housing costs are influenced by many factors, but in 2020, researchers found that Airbnb growth in the median ZIP code accounted for an increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in home prices, making up one-fifth of rent growth and one-seventh of property value increases. A report by the New York City comptroller found that between 2009 and 2016, 9.2% of the jump in rental rates could be tied to Airbnb.

At this point, dozens of local governments around the world have enacted laws regulating short-term rentals that are bespoke to their cities. This gives places where Airbnb is looking to expand the advantage of seeing how various regulations have started to affect housing availability elsewhere, should they want to move proactively. "Even though those places that Airbnb could be pushing into may not have a [regulatory] framework, there's at least these examples where governments have recognized the need to protect housing and implemented successful ways of regulating it," says Murray Cox, founder of Inside Airbnb, which scrapes Airbnb data to show its footprint in cities around the world. Cities could take approaches from other playbooks, such as requiring Airbnb to share data with local officials, zoning short-term rentals to more commercial neighborhoods, or allowing hosts to rent out primary residences a limited number of nights a year.

For Airbnb, the patchwork regulation around the world is both "a problem and an opportunity," says Cox. If rentals are curtailed in Paris, the company could look to expand to nearby cities or rural parts of France where there are fewer regulations. For Airbnb, that might mean moving into new countries. "They either can't grow or they're declining in cities or some parts" of their core markets, Cox says. "The only way that they can either maintain their revenues or grow is to push into other markets."

Airbnb isn't opposed to rules outright. If regulations are in place before the company expands to a new market, it could make the process simpler for hosts and guests and spare Airbnb from having to pivot and wipe tens of thousands of listings from its platform in one swoop after a new law passes. "We really do welcome sensible regulation," Stephenson tells me. "In a sensible, reasonable way, it works quite well." Airbnb is still pushing back against what it believes are overreaching regulations, like those in New York City. And despite the regulations, Airbnb is growing. Its revenue is up 10% year over year, and the number of nights booked grew, along with experiences, which include activities provided by local businesses and tour guides, by 8%.

But Airbnb's challenges don't stop at the regulations. It must also get people around the world to buy in. "Each country is going to have its own dynamics," Jamie Lane, the senior vice president of analytics and chief economist at AirDNA, tells me. In some countries, hosting strangers in your home wouldn't be culturally acceptable. Lane also says there are local competitors to Airbnb in some places "that have been impactful and made it hard for them to compete."

Those challenges are partially why Airbnb pulled out of hosting in China in 2022, wiping out 150,000 listings there. For one, the country's strict travel regulations around COVID-19 lasted longer than measures taken by most other nations, which created a drag on travel bookings. But Airbnb struggled to compete with Chinese companies offering short-term rentals long before that. The homegrown alternatives there included Tujia, which was designed to attract Chinese travelers specifically by anticipating peak travel times and rates, Melissa Yang, the company's cofounder, told CNN several years ago.

Chesky is more confident that Airbnb can win over the hearts and minds of the masses anywhere it goes. "Airbnb pretty much resonates pretty equally everywhere once there's the awareness," he told investors in a call earlier this year. "In fact, I could argue that Airbnb might resonate better in Asia because there's a younger travel population that's not predisposed to hotels, and they're on social media. And we are disproportionately on social media versus our competitors. So I'm very, very bullish about that."

While the company isn't telegraphing its expansion strategy in every country, one of its most obvious moves began in Japan this fall. Airbnb ran an ad in English last year promoting travel in Kyoto, but it ramped up its Japanese ads in October. It's looking to court young Japanese travelers who want to take weekend trips, showing photos of a family traveling to a sleek, modern cabin in a wooded area, where they sing karaoke. Stephenson says Airbnb has also learned that local travelers want proximity to onsens, Japanese hot springs and bathing facilities, so listings there now show nearby onsens.

Elsewhere, Airbnb has been implementing payment methods preferred by locals. The company recently added KaKao Pay in South Korea and Vipps in Norway, among dozens of other options. It may seem like a small step, but Airbnb thinks meeting people where and how they pay will make the service more appealing.

Researchers are closely watching Airbnb's ongoing spread. Bianca Tavolari, a researcher and member of the advisory board of the Global Observatory of Short-Term Rentals, a group of Latin American organizations focused on housing, says Brazil has lagged in regulating short-term rentals, though a court ruled last year that hosts must have explicit consent from property owners to list apartments or condos as short-term rentals. Airbnb shares some tourism trend information with local officials through its city portal, but researchers like Tavolari still have questions about Airbnb's full impact. "We are in the dark," she tells me. Yet "cities are seeing it as a great opportunity," particularly those that depend heavily on tourism dollars, she says, and thinking less about the long-term costs to residents.

Cox says he's "hopeful that some of these locations that Airbnb is planning to push to have already started thinking about" how they'll handle its growth. If Chesky's hypothesis is right, Airbnb could continue to spread rapidly once people in other parts of the world get used to couch surfing or navigating a hidden lockbox to let themselves into their rentals. Cities should be ready before more tourists start packing their bags.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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.

Like many sites, apps, and operating systems, Ars Technica has both "Light" and "Dark" visual styles. They look great! But even the "Light" mode has darker elements in it, and after our recent redesign, some Ars readers asked for an even lighter "Light" mode, one that would allow them to absolutely sear their own retinas with various shades of blinding white. (I kid, of course; for some readers, it's a serious visual comfort issue.)

We've spent the last month working up a third visual style to give the people what they want. Behold the fully armed and operational "Hyperlight" mode, our new visual theme featuring a white background, light gray headline boxes, and black text. You can activate it right now from the visual style menu on the navigation bar at the top of the page.

In total, we now have four visual modes. Hyperlight is the brightest of these, while Day & Night is our rebranded "Light mode" and mixes light and dark elements. Dark is all dark backgrounds with light text. The fourth mode is System, which automatically switches between Day & Night and Dark modes based on your operating system setting. (System will not switch the site to Hyperlight.)

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It's been decades since a titan of tech became a pop-culture icon. Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in his black turtleneck in 1998. Elon Musk set his sights on Mars in 2002. Mark Zuckerberg emerged from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

And now, after years of stasis in Silicon Valley, we have Sam Altman.

The cofounder and CEO of the chatbot pioneer OpenAI stands at the center of what's shaping up to be a trillion-dollar restructuring of the global economy. His image — boyishly earnest, chronically monotonic, carelessly coiffed — is a throwback to the low-charisma, high-intelligence nerd kings of Silicon Valley's glory days. And as with his mythic-hero predecessors, people are hanging on his every word. In September, when Altman went on a podcast called "How I Write" and mentioned his love of pens from Uniball and Muji, his genius life hack ignited the internet. "OpenAI's CEO only uses 2 types of pens to take notes," Fortune reported — with a video of the podcast.

It's easy to laugh at our desperation for crumbs of wisdom from Altman's table. But the notability of Altman's notetaking ability is a meaningful signifier. His ideas on productivity and entrepreneurship — not to mention everything from his take on science fiction to his choice of vitamins — have become salient not just to the worlds of tech and business, but to the broader culture. The new mayor-elect of San Francisco, for instance, put Altman on his transition team. And have you noticed that a lot of tech bros are starting to wear sweaters with the sleeves rolled up? A Jobsian singularity could be upon us.

But the attention to Altman's pen preferences raises a larger question: What does his mindset ultimately mean for the rest of us? How will the way he thinks shape the world we live in?

To answer that question, I've spent weeks taking a Talmudic dive into the Gospel According to Sam Altman. I've pored over hundreds of thousands of words he's uttered in blog posts, conference speeches, and classroom appearances. I've dipped into a decade's worth of interviews he's given — maybe 40 hours or so. I won't claim to have taken anything more than a core sample of the vast Altmanomicon. But immersing myself in his public pronouncements has given me a new appreciation for what makes Altman tick. The innovative god-kings of the past were rule-breaking disruptors or destroyers of genres. The new guy, by contrast, represents the apotheosis of what his predecessors wrought. Distill the past three decades of tech culture and business practice into a super-soldier serum, inject it into the nearest scrawny, pale arm, and you get Sam Altman — Captain Silicon Valley, defender of the faith.

Let's start with the vibes. Listening to Altman for hours on end, I came away thinking that he seems like a pretty nice guy. Unlike Jobs, who bestrode the stage at Apple events dropping one-more-things like a modern-day Prometheus, Altman doesn't spew ego everywhere. In interviews, he comes across as confident but laid back. He often starts his sentences with "so," his affect as flat as his native Midwest. He also has a Midwesterner's amiability, somehow seeming to agree with the premise of almost any question, no matter how idiotic. When Joe Rogan asked Altman whether he thinks AI would one day be able, via brain chips, to edit human personalities to be less macho, Altman not only let it ride, he turned the interview around and started asking Rogan questions about himself.

Another contrast with the tech gurus of yore: Altman says he doesn't care much about money. His surprise firing at OpenAI, he says, taught him to value his loving relationships — a "recompilation of values" that was "a blessing in disguise." In the spring, Altman told a Stanford entrepreneur class that his money-, power-, and status-seeking phases were all in the rearview. "At this point," Altman said, "I feel driven by wanting to do something useful and interesting."

Altman is even looking into universal basic income — giving money to everyone, straight out, no strings attached. That's partly because he thinks artificial intelligence will make paying jobs as rare as coelacanths. But it's also a product of unusual self-awareness. Altman, famously, was in the "first class" of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's ur-incubator of tech startups. Now that he's succeeded, he recalls that grant money as a kind of UBI — a gift that he says prevented him from ending up at Goldman Sachs. Rare is the colossus of industry who acknowledges that anyone other than himself tugged on those bootstraps.

Altman's seeming rejection of wealth is a key element of his mythos. On a recent appearance on the "All-In" podcast, the hosts questioned Altman's lack of equity in OpenAI, saying it made him seem less trustworthy — no skin in the game. Altman explained that the company was set up as a nonprofit, so equity wasn't a thing. He really wished he'd gotten some, he added, if only to stop the endless stream of questions about his lack of equity. Charming! (Under Altman's watch, OpenAI is shifting to a for-profit model.)

Altman didn't get where he is because he made a fortune in tech. Y Combinator, where he started out, was the launchpad for monsters like Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and dozens of other companies you've never heard of, because they never got big. Loopt, the company Altman founded at 20 years old, was in the second category. Yet despite that, the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham named him president of the incubator in 2014. It wasn't because of what Altman had achieved — Loopt burned through $30 million before it folded — but because he embodies two key Silicon Valley mindsets. First, he emphasizes the need for founders to express absolute certainty in themselves, no matter what anyone says. And second, he believes that scale and growth can solve every problem. To Altman, those two tenets aren't just the way to launch a successful startup — they're the twin turbines that power all societal progress. More than any of his predecessors, he openly preaches Silicon Valley's almost religious belief in certainty and scale. They are the key to his mindset — and maybe to our AI-enmeshed future.

In 2020, Altman wrote a blog post called "The Strength of Being Misunderstood." It was primarily a paean to the idea of believing you are right about everything. Altman suggested that people spend too much time worrying about what other people think about them, and should instead "trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status." Being misunderstood by most people, he went on, is actually a strength, not a weakness — "as long as you are right."

For Altman, being right is not the same thing as being good. When he talks about who the best founders are and what makes a successful business, he doesn't seem to think it matters what their products actually do or how they affect the world. Back in 2015, Altman told Kara Swisher that Y Combinator didn't really care about the specific pitches it funded — the founders just needed to have "raw intelligence." Their actual ideas? Not so important.

"The ideas are so malleable," Altman said. "Are these founders determined, are they passionate about this, do they seem committed to it, have they really thought about all the issues they're likely to face, are they good communicators?" Altman wasn't betting on their ideas — he was betting on their ability to sell their ideas, even if they were bad. That's one of the reasons, he says, that Y Combinator didn't have a coworking space — so there was no place for people to tell each other that their ideas sucked.

"There are founders who don't take no for an answer and founders who bend the world to their will," Altman told a startups class at Stanford, "and those are the ones who are in the fund." What really matters, he added, is that founders "have the courage of your convictions to keep doing this unpopular thing because you understand the way the world is going in a way that other people don't."

One example Altman cites is Airbnb, whose founders hit on their big idea when they maxed out their credit cards trying to start a different company and wanted to rent out a spare room for extra cash. He also derives his disdain for self-doubt from Elon Musk, who once gave him a tour of SpaceX. "The thing that sticks in memory," Altman wrote in 2019, "was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking 'huh, so that's the benchmark for what conviction looks like.'"

This, Altman says, is why founding a startup is something people should do when they're young — because it requires turning work-life balance into a pile of radioactive slag. "Have almost too much self-belief," he writes. "Almost to the point of delusion."

So if Altman believes that certainty in an idea is more important than the idea itself, how does he measure success? What determines whether a founder turns out to be "right," as he puts it? The answer, for Altman, is scale. You start a company, and that company winds up with lots of users and makes a lot of money. A good idea is one that scales, and scaling is what makes an idea good.

For Altman, this isn't just a business model. It's a philosophy. "You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value," he wrote in a 2019 blog post called "How to Be Successful." It doesn't matter what — real estate, natural resources, equity in a business. And the way to make things increase rapidly in value is "by making things people want at scale." In Altman's view, big growth isn't just a way to keep investors happy. It's the evidence that confirms one's unwavering belief in the idea.

Artificial intelligence itself, of course, is based on scale — on the ever-expanding data that AI feeds on. Altman said at a conference that OpenAI's models would double or triple in size every year, which he took to mean they'll eventually reach full sentience. To him, that just goes to show the potency of scale as a concept — it has the ability to imbue a machine with true intelligence. "It feels to me like we just stumbled on a new fact of nature or science or whatever you want to call it," Altman said on "All-In." "I don't believe this literally, but it's like a spiritual point — that intelligence is an emergent property of matter, and that's like a rule of physics or something."

Altman says he doesn't actually know how intelligent, or superintelligent, AI will get — or what it will think when it starts thinking. But he believes that scale will provide the answers. "We will hit limits, but we don't know where those will be," he said on Ezra Klein's podcast. "We'll also discover new things that are really powerful. We don't know what those will be either." You just trust that the exponential growth curves will take you somewhere you want to go.

In all the recordings and writings I've sampled, Altman speaks only rarely about things he likes outside startups and AI. In the canon I find few books, no movies, little visual art, not much food or drink. Asked what his favorite fictional utopias are, Altman mentions "Star Trek" and the Isaac Asimov short story "The Last Question," which is about an artificial intelligence ascending to godhood over eons and creating a new universe. Back in 2015, he said "The Martian," the tale of a marooned astronaut hacking his way back to Earth, was eighth on his stack of bedside books. Altman has also praised the Culture series by Iain Banks, about a far-future galaxy of abundance and space communism, where humans and AIs live together in harmony.

Fiction, to Altman, appears to hold no especially mysterious human element of creativity. He once acknowledged that the latest version of ChatGPT wasn't very good at storytelling, but he thought it was going to get much better. "You show it a bunch of examples of what makes a good story and what makes a bad story, which I don't think is magic," he said. "I think we really understand that well now. We just haven't tried to do that."

It's also not clear to me whether Altman listens to music — at least not for pleasure. On the "Life in Seven Songs" podcast, most of the favorite songs Altman cited were from his high school and college days. But his top pick was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. "This became something I started listening to when I worked," he said. "It's a great level of excitement, but it's not distracting. You can listen to it very loudly and very quietly." Music can be great, but it shouldn't get in the way of productivity.

For Altman, even drug use isn't recreational. In 2016, a "New Yorker" profile described Altman as nervous to the point of hypochondria. He would telephone his mother — a physician — to ask whether a headache might be cancer. He once wrote that he "used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it," and he has said he used to be "a very anxious and unhappy person." He relied on caffeine to be productive, and used marijuana to sleep.

Now, though? He's "very calm." He doesn't sweat criticism anymore. If that sounds like the positive outcome of years of therapy, well — sort of. Last summer, Altman told Joe Rogan that an experience with "psychedelic therapy" had been one of the most important turning points in his life. "I struggled with all kinds of anxiety and other negative things," he said, "and to watch all of that go away — I came back a totally different person, and I was like, 'I have been lied to.'"

He went into more detail on the Songs podcast in September. "I think psychedelic experiences can be totally incredible, and the ones that have been totally life-changing for me have been the ones where you go travel to a guide, and it's psychedelic medicine," he said. As for his anxiety, "if you had told me a one-weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to change that, I would have said, 'absolutely not.'" Psychedelics were just another life hack to resolve emotional turmoil. (I reached out to Altman and offered to discuss my observations with him, in the hopes he'd correct any places where he felt I was misreading him. He declined.)

AI started attracting mainstream attention only in the past couple of years, but the field is much older than that — and Altman cofounded OpenAI nearly a decade ago. So he's been asked what "artificial general intelligence" is and when we're going to get it so often, and for so long, that his answers often include a whiff of frustration. These days, he says that AGI is when the machine is as smart as the median human — choose your own value for "smart" and "median" there — and "superintelligence" is when it's smarter than all of us meatbags squished together. But ask him what AI is for, and he's a lot less certain-seeming today than he used to be.

There's the ability to write code, sure. Altman also says AI will someday be a tutor as good as those available to rich people. It'll do consultations on medical issues, maybe help with "productivity" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which a person can learn something, versus having to look it up). And he said scientists had been emailing him to say that the latest versio of ChatGPT has increased the rate at which they can do "great science" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which they can run evaluations of possible new drugs).

And what would you or I do with a superintelligent buddy? "What if everybody in the world had a really competent company of 10,000 employees?" Altman once asked. "What would we be able to create for each other?" He was being rhetorical — but whatever the answer turns out to be, he's sure it will be worth the tremendous cost in energy and resources it will take to achieve it. As OpenAI-type services expand and proliferate, he says, "the marginal cost of intelligence and the marginal cost of energy are going to trend rapidly toward zero." He has recently speculated that intelligence will be more valuable than money, and that instead of universal basic income, we should give people universal basic compute — which is to say, free access to AI. In Altman's estimation, not knowing what AI will do doesn't mean we shouldn't go ahead and restructure all of society to serve its needs.

And besides, AI won't take long to give us the answer. Superintelligence, Altman has promised, is only "thousands of days" away — half a decade, at minimum. But, he says, the intelligent machine that emerges probably won't be an LLM chatbot. It will use an entirely different technical architecture that no one, not even OpenAI, has invented yet.

That, at its core, reflects an unreconstructed, dot-com-boom mindset. Altman doesn't know what the future will bring, but he's in a hurry to get there. No matter what you think about AI — productivity multiplier, economic engine, hallucinating plagiarism machine, Skynet — it's not hard to imagine what could happen, for good and ill, if you combine Altman's absolute certainty with monstrous, unregulated scale. It only took a couple of decades for Silicon Valley to go from bulky computer mainframes to the internet, smartphones, and same-day delivery — along with all the disinformation, political polarization, and generalized anxiety that came with them.

But that's the kind of ballistic arc of progress that Altman is selling. He is, at heart, an evangelist for the Silicon Valley way. He didn't build the tech behind ChatGPT; the most important thing he ever built and scaled is Y Combinator, an old-fashioned business network of human beings. His wealth comes from investments in other people's companies. He's a macher, not a maker.

In a sense, Altman has codified the beliefs and intentions of the tech big shots who preceded him. He's just more transparent about it than they were. Did Steve Jobs project utter certainty? Sure. But he didn't give interviews about the importance of projecting utter certainty; he just introduced killer laptops, blocked rivals from using his operating system, and built the app store. Jeff Bezos didn't found Amazon by telling the public he planned to scale his company to the point that it would pocket 40 cents of every dollar spent online; he just started mailing people books. But Altman is on the record. When he says he's absolutely sure ChatGPT will change the world, we know that he thinks CEOs have to say they're absolutely sure their product will change the world. His predecessors in Silicon Valley wrote the playbook for Big Tech. Altman is just reading it aloud. He's touting a future he hasn't built yet, along with the promise that he can will it into existence — whatever it'll wind up looking like — one podcast appearance at a time.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

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.

Spotify Wrapped arrived on Wednesday, packaged in its usual neon, Instagram-ready glory.

The annual release dominates social-media posts for a day, but beneath the colorful cards (designed to be bespoke but distributed en masse), it's Spotify's brag about the amount of data the company has collected on you, mirrored back in a way that's meant to make surveillance sexy, silly, and shareable.

In recent Decembers, the wrap-ification of our data has spread beyond Spotify. Apple Music, Spotify's main competitor, now has a similar feature called Replay, unveiling this year's version on Tuesday. Starbucks has sent out emails telling people about their favorite beverages and number of store visits, shocking some with exactly how many dozens of Frappuccinos they bought. Duolingo kicked off the Wrapped season earlier this week, showing people how many mistakes they made while trying to learn a new language. The British supermarket chain Tesco has sent Clubcard members a review of what they bought in recent years, called Unpacked. And on Tuesday, Tinder hosted a Year in Swipe party, where it revealed the top trends in online dating the app gleaned from its broad swath of 50 million monthly users, which included people getting specific about what kind of person they're looking for or putting a hand emoji in their bios to indicate they're searching for real connections.

All this is getting weird. The type of lattes we drink and the music we listen to are things we fundamentally know about ourselves. The most common names of men and women on Tinder (Alexes and Daniels dominated among men, Marias and Lauras women) tell us nothing about how to find love. But these year-in-review trends still catch avid attention and, in turn, provide free advertising for companies when they're reshared. About an hour after Spotify unveiled this year's Wrapped, its market cap reached $100 billion for the first time. Spotify did not respond to requests for comment.

"People are so excited about seeing data collected from them and then being shown back to them in a way that feels meaningful and relatable," Taylor Annabell, a researcher with Utrecht University who has studied the Wrapped phenomenon, said. "Wrapped taps into this belief we have that data is meaningful and that we want to see it because it helps us understand ourselves."

Wrapped 2024 included the usual unveiling of top songs and artists, but Spotify has added a "Wrapped AI podcast," which features two voicebot hosts chatting through your listening habits without really saying much about the songs, in particular. There was also a section picking apart how listening styles changed over different months of the year. For me, that meant going from "van life folkie indie" to "mallgoth permanent wave punk," mildly embarrassing phrases that might describe my musical tastes from a distance but tell me little new about myself.

Of course, Spotify can't capture everything about your tastes — maybe you played a vinyl record on repeat or shared a streaming account with someone in your family. ("It's not me who can't stop listening to Chumbawamba. It's my cousin, I swear!") Maybe you opted for a mysterious approach and kept your Tinder bio short and sweet.

But where data is lacking, some have set out to create it themselves. Wrapped content has proved so effective and viral on social media that people have taken to making up new categories, packaged parts of their lives not captured by apps, and turned it over to their followers. Here, at least, these people get to curate their experiences and post them as they wish. Last December and already this week, some people took to TikTok to talk through how many first dates they went on during the course of a year, using cute and colorful slideshows to walk their users through their year of bad dates, situationships, and ghosting. A third-party project called Vantezzen takes TikTok data and generates a Wrapped-like analysis for those who want to know how many minutes they spent doom scrolling.

All this comes as people have largely thrown up their hands and given in to sharing their data with their apps. Companies have "gotten us to move past just accepting that they are spying on us to celebrating it," said Evan Greer, the director of the digital-rights advocacy group Fight for the Future and a vocal opponent of Spotify who released an album called "Spotify Is Surveillance" in 2021. "That's the shift we're seeing with this explosion of these types of year-end Wrapped viral gimmicks," Greer added. "They're actually about hypernormalizing the fact that the online services that we use know so very much about us."

Tinder's year in review looked at data from profiles in the US and globally and its own survey results, determining the most popular love languages and zodiac signs, the fastest-growing words mentioned in bios (freak, pickleball, and finance all soared this year), and how people like to communicate (ironically, "better in person" won out over the messaging app). It also created an interactive vision-board feature for people to set intentions for their 2025 dating plans. The company's in-person Year in Swipe party was held in a moody Manhattan bar, where attendees could make charm bracelets or have a tarot-card reading, and each sported a button designed to correspond with their dating vibe, like a black cat or delusional. Tinder did not respond to a request for comment about whether people could opt out of being used in the aggregate data.

But Spotify, in particular, wants to tell its users more about themselves throughout the year. In September 2023, the company began making "daylists," or curated playlists released multiple times throughout the day. While they don't come with the sharable, flashy cards to post on Instagram, they're given catchy names that hint at something about you, changing several times a day. Just this week, Spotify has dubbed me a "Laurel Canyon hippie" and crafted a vibe for a "yearning poetry Tuesday afternoon."

The daylists feel like Spotify's attempt to take the Wrapped success "to the next level," said Nina Vindum Rasmussen, a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science who worked on the Spotify research with Annabell. It's "data fiction that accompanies people throughout the day," she said, adding: "What does it mean for them to have this mirror constantly shoved in their face?"

Most of us have gotten comfortable with — or at least resigned to — the fact that Big Tech is watching our every move. Wrapped season is a shiny reminder of all we've done, seemingly in private, on our phones. But don't count on your friends to stop sharing their elite spot as a 0.05% top listener of Taylor Swift anytime soon.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

Evan Duby had been a real-estate broker for just a few years when he decided to try an unusual method of selling a home. Five buyers were offering to pay similar amounts for one of his listings, a one-bedroom co-op unit in a leafy Brooklyn neighborhood with an asking price of $485,000. Rather than instructing the house hunters to submit their best offers and cross their fingers — as is customary in the US — Duby, with his client's permission, convened an auction. The buyers gathered on a conference call, where they signaled their willingness to pay as Duby raised the price in $5,000 increments. The home sold for $505,000. The sellers walked away satisfied, as did the winning buyers; the losing bidders were disappointed, but at least they knew where they stood. For Duby, it was a revelation.

"I don't know what possessed me," Duby tells me. "I was just sort of trying to see, is there a better way to do this?"

Trying to buy a house can feel like playing a game of poker in which one player holds all the cards. When the seller's agent tells you they're weighing another bid, or even 30 other bids, there's no way to tell if their claim is bluster or fact. When you lose, you may not know whether another $10,000 would have sealed the deal or if your insistence on an inspection tanked your chance. The nagging uncertainty isn't limited to buyers. Even in a hot market, a seller may leave the closing table unfulfilled. Did their request for "highest and best" offers actually yield the highest and best? It's hard to say.

It doesn't have to be this way. In Australia, about a third of homes sell via auctions that wrap up in a matter of minutes. Sellers get to see exactly how far buyers are willing to go to nab their dream home; buyers gain a clear picture of what it takes to win in the market. The openness and simplicity stand in sharp contrast to America's system, in which buyers write blind offers and then pray theirs meets the mark.

In the US, open auctions are usually reserved for swanky mansions or, more often, distressed properties facing foreclosure or extensive repairs. Mention an auction and people are likely to ask what's wrong with the house, or how lavishly expensive it is — or, simply, why? Real-estate agents haven't been too keen on making the process more transparent: Conventional wisdom says that asking buyers to submit their best and final offers will elicit the highest price. A FOMO-filled buyer, the thinking goes, may unknowingly blow the competition out of the water and deliver a windfall for the seller.

Despite all that, the idea of open auctions is more tantalizing than ever. Buyers and sellers are exhausted from years of opaque bidding wars — even these days, with the market substantially cooler than it was a couple of years ago, a lack of inventory means homes may still draw multiple offers. The real-estate industry is notoriously resistant to change, but recent class-action lawsuits have rewritten the rules about how buyers pay their agents and opened the door for more overhauls down the line.

Capitalizing on this feeling, a small cadre of companies are trying to bring versions of the Australian model to the States. They face an uphill battle. Duby, who recently started GoEx, a venture-capital firm focused on real-estate tech, is squarely in the ripe-for-change camp, but even he'll admit it's hard to shift the status quo. For roughly a decade after that first auction, he continued to broker deals the conventional way — for American sellers, Aussie-style auctions were a tough sell. But just because they haven't caught on in the States doesn't mean they're destined to remain a pipe dream. Duby imagines a not-so-distant future in which prequalified buyers bid for homes online as if they were picking up a rare watch on eBay.

"I don't see why we don't do that," Duby tells me. "I don't see how that doesn't help."

The man could be mistaken for a pastor: crisp gray suit, arms stretched toward the heavens, a crowd gathered before him. But he's here to sell real estate, not religion.

"Reflect on this absolutely fantastic opportunity in front of you," he booms in a distinctly Aussie drawl. "Not me — the house!"

With that, the auction begins. The property at stake is a quaint one-story home surrounded by a white picket fence in a suburb of Melbourne. The bidding starts at 1.26 million Australian dollars, but the price climbs as the auctioneer needles buyers to dig deeper: "You know you want to!" In the end, it sells for more than 1.5 million Australian dollars, or about $980,000. The whole thing takes less than half an hour.

I watched all this unfold on TikTok, where the account @AuctionReporters maintains a steady stream of these strangely addictive dispatches from Australia's real-estate market. Every now and then a video like this will go viral among Americans who balk at the ritual. An open auction is so vastly different from the secretive practice here in the States that it can break our brains — in a reply to a similar video on X, someone posted, "this is real???"

Real-estate auctions are a time-honored tradition in Australia, dating back more than 200 years to its days as a British colony. Their popularity varies based on location and the strength of the market: In boom times for home sales, more sellers turn to the gavel — a study by Kenneth Lusht, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, found that in some pockets of Melbourne, auctions accounted for as much as 80% of home sales during periods of particularly strong demand. A later study of sales from 2011 to 2019 in the states of New South Wales and Victoria, home to more than half of the country's population, found that 30% to 40% of listings went to auction during that period.

Auctions are risky, to be sure. Homeowners publicly disclose the terms and privately set a reserve price, or the minimum amount they'd accept — if the bidding doesn't reach that figure, the house doesn't sell. A study published in 2022 described such a house as carrying a "stench of failure" and found that it was more likely to sell at a discount later. An auction is basically impossible to stop once it's in motion, and sellers may not always be pleased with the results. But in times of healthy demand for homes, auctions can deliver benefits for sellers looking to ride out the frenzy. The study on the risks of auctions also found significant upsides: Successful sales tended to achieve prices that were 1.2% higher than comparable "private treaty" sales, in which sellers set an asking price and then wait for bids to roll in. A separate 2010 study of a broad swath of Australian home sales also found that auctions tended to yield higher selling prices than the alternative.

It's hard to imagine regular homes in the US trading hands this way. But a handful of companies have proposed a middle ground between the public spectacle of Australia's auctions and America's behind-closed-doors strategy. Final Offer, in Massachusetts, is one online marketplace that mediates auction-ish sales. A real-estate agent can list their seller's property on the platform, specify their asking price and their terms, and input a "final offer price" and specific terms of sale, or the amount a buyer can agree to pay in order to stop the bidding and win outright (similar to eBay's "Buy It Now" feature for auctioned items). When a buyer makes a qualifying offer, the clock starts ticking: The seller can choose to reveal the price and terms of any offer in contention, and interested buyers can try to exceed the bids before the window closes.

Here's a real example: Late this summer, the owner of 5818 Ipswich Road, a two-bedroom home built in 1951 in Bethesda, Maryland, listed it on Final Offer for $650,000. Buyer 1 submitted an offer of $658,125, and the seller agreed to take it if no better offers came in over the next three days. Other buyers soon entered the picture: Buyer 2 bid $661,500. Buyer 1 responded by going $3,000 higher. Over the next two days, Buyers 3, 4, and 5 threw their hats in the ring, and the price climbed above $800,000. At the eleventh hour, Buyer 6 emerged with a bid of $810,573. Then came the kicker: Buyer 1 made the "final offer" of $850,000, ending the bidding process. The entire saga is available for anyone to see on Final Offer's website.

In real estate, it turns out, a little transparency goes a long way. "You're giving buyers information they've never had before about what the seller really wants," says Tim Quirk, who cofounded Final Offer and serves as its chief strategy officer. In a typical sale, spurned buyers rarely walk away knowing what would have won — maybe with that knowledge they would have been willing to up their price or adjust their terms, perhaps waiving an inspection and agreeing to buy the home as is. And sellers, even when they take a deal, never quite know if someone might have gone even higher if they knew what they were up against. "What ultimately ends up happening is you get remorse on both sides of the table," Quirk tells me.

Final Offer is still small — Quirk said that a little more than 1,000 homes had sold on the platform in the two years since it started. Sellers on the site don't have to disclose the prices and terms of offers that come in and can opt to let buyers see only that other offers have been made. But Quirk tells me more than 80% of sellers choose to make the bids public.

SparkOffer, which last year was acquired by Auction.com, is another platform that aims to give buyers a sense of their competition. The site shows buyers how many offers they're competing with and is beta testing a new feature that assigns each bid a score based on its price and proposed terms; when other bids come in, buyers get to see how their score stacks up. They don't know the exact details, but they'll at least have a sense of where they stand and what it might take to climb the ranks. Sellers get to outsource the messy back-and-forth of negotiations to a platform that prods buyers to sweeten their offers — while preserving the possibility that a buyer may unwittingly overbid.

Neither Quirk nor Mike Russo, the founder of SparkOffer, thinks of his platform as an auction exactly. For one, home sales aren't just about price. When a buyer makes an offer, they can propose contingencies, or conditions that need to be met in order for the sale to close. They might request an inspection and ask the seller to make repairs if something comes up. They could retain the right to back out of the deal if an appraiser values the home lower than expected. The buyer could also ask for concessions, or some money back from the seller to cover stuff like closing costs. At the height of the pandemic-era homebuying frenzy, some desperate buyers threw caution to the wind and waived these contingencies — they were simply tired of losing. Bottom line, not all buyers are equal in the eyes of a seller.

To reach widespread acceptance in the US, an auction-esque model would have to let sellers choose the terms that work best for them. Most important, new marketplaces would have to convince American sellers — and their agents — to turn away from tradition. That kind of cultural shift is a tall order. "I don't think the American consumer is ready for auctions yet," says Rob Hahn, the CEO of Decentre Labs, a company he started in 2022 to bring online real-estate auctions to the masses.

But it's unclear who really benefits from the system we have. Buyers rarely get feedback that could help them make stronger offers in the future. Maybe as a seller you'll get lucky and a buyer with blinders will overpay for your house — but that approach is shortsighted, since most sellers have to turn around and purchase another home. The biggest beneficiaries, Duby tells me, may just be real-estate agents: When buyers and sellers are shuffled through this murky process, they'll look for a professional guide.

Australia isn't a perfect analog for the US. The country doesn't have a system of local databases where most homes are listed — as we do in the States with the multiple listing services — which makes it tougher for buyers to find homes. And while most sellers are represented by agents, most buyers are not. But still, hardly anyone is proposing we copy and paste this Australian tradition. The country's real-estate market does tell us, however, that another way is possible.

American consumers may not be ready for auctions yet, Hahn told me. "But it doesn't mean that it's not going to happen at some point."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

Over the past two years, American businesses have been engaged in a rapid-fire restructuring of their corporate hierarchies. In the name of "flattening," they've been waging war on middle managers — trimming an entire tier of supervisory jobs that Mark Zuckerberg derided as nothing more than "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." Following Meta's lead, Citi reduced its 13 layers of management to eight. UPS axed 12,000 of its 85,000 managers. And in September, Amazon announced plans to increase its ratio of workers to supervisors by at least 15%. "I hate bureaucracy," CEO Andy Jassy declared, echoing the zeal for "efficiency" that Elon Musk, one of the pioneers of the current corporate flattening, is now seeking to unleash on the halls of government.

But here's the thing: It's not just that tens of thousands of middle managers have lost their jobs. It's that the jobs themselves have been eliminated — and they may not be coming back.

To test that theory, I asked Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics provider, to crunch the numbers for me, using its database of job postings aggregated from across the internet. It divided employees into two buckets of managers (senior leadership and middle management) and two buckets of lower-level employees (experienced associates and junior workers). Then it looked at how many job openings employers are posting today, compared with the hiring heyday of 2022.

What the data reveals is stark. Earlier this year, when white-collar hiring was at its lowest point, openings for junior roles — entry-level positions requiring little to no prior experience — were down by 14%. But hiring had plunged by 43% for middle managers and 57% for senior leaders. If you had any sort of management experience, your job prospects were bleak.

Since then, though, we've seen a significant rebound in job postings for almost everyone — except middle managers. In October, employers were still advertising 42% fewer middle-management positions than they did in April 2022. Which means that those who lost their jobs in the Great Flattening are now facing a whole new horror: There aren't any positions left for them to take.

The assault on middle managers dates back to the 1980s, when globalization gave rise to a new philosophy of management that prioritized cost cutting over everything else. Supervisors — earning big salaries for rubber-stamping the work of their subordinates — became an easy target. Trim the fat, the thinking went, and the efficiencies will follow. From 1986 to 1998, one study found, the number of managers reporting to division heads dropped by 25%. At the same time, the number of managers reporting directly to a CEO nearly doubled.

Executives got the flattening that they wanted. But it's unclear whether getting rid of middle managers actually made companies run more efficiently. As I wrote last year, one study found that businesses with fewer layers of management were able to deliver their products faster. But study after study found that when middle managers do their jobs right, they bolster performance more than either top executives or ground-level employees. Supervisors do real work. They motivate. They mentor. They communicate critical information to and from different parts of the company. They smooth out glitches and spot opportunities. They're the ones who keep the trains running.

But now is an especially bad time to be an experienced supervisor. According to an analysis by Live Data Technologies, another workforce analytics provider, middle managers made up 32% of layoffs last year, compared with 20% in 2019. And as the data from Revelio Labs shows, companies appear to have no intention of refilling those supervisory roles, even as they resume hiring for lower-level jobs. That has created a double whammy for middle managers: There's a sharp spike in job seekers, and they're competing for an increasingly small universe of open roles.

Over the past year I've heard from hundreds of managers mired in this double whammy. What's struck me is how eerily similar their stories are. They all come across as smart and articulate. They're all in their late 40s to 50s. When they got laid off from their supervisory jobs, they didn't expect their job search to be too difficult. After all, they'd spent decades honing their skills and climbing the corporate ladder, often at leading companies. Surely, all that experience had to count for something. But despite sending out hundreds of applications, they can't get anyone to return their calls. They're utterly baffled, and they all have the same question: What is going on here?

It's the question I've been asking, too — combing through government data, talking to employers and economists, studying applicant-tracking systems. Because so many of the frustrated job seekers are older, I thought maybe we were seeing some new form of age discrimination: Call it the Curse of the Gen X Professional. But it's only after seeing the data from Revelio Labs that I finally understand what's going on: There just aren't enough supervisory jobs to go around anymore.

In response, many displaced managers have swallowed their pride and started applying to jobs lower on the corporate food chain. As Revelio Labs' data shows, nonmanagerial jobs are faring much better these days — and you'd think companies would be thrilled to get the experience and know-how of seasoned professionals on the cheap. But take the example of a former middle manager I'll call Rick, who is 54. After getting rejected for all the supervisory jobs he could find, he widened his search to include entry-level positions — only to be rejected for being overqualified.

At this point, all Rick wants is a chance to prove himself. "Forget the titles, forget all that other stuff," he told me. "I just need a job. My unemployment runs out in about 30 days. I'll come in and do a great job for you."

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of the Great Flattening: The very experience that should be a selling point for senior leaders has become a liability. Some have tried deleting former jobs from their resumes, to hide their supervisory experience. Others, like Rick, omit the year they graduated from college. One former chief operating officer, whose search has gone so poorly that she's now applying to be an executive assistant, told me she addresses her overqualified-ness in her cover letters. "I understand that my résumé has some big titles on it, but let me tell you who I am at heart," she writes. "I really want to be doing this, and I'm not wedded to the title."

What all the out-of-work managers want to know is: When is the hiring freeze for supervisors going to thaw? That depends, in large part, on whether companies come to view the flattening as a success. Many CEOs insist they aren't getting rid of middle managers just to save money. They think having fewer layers of management will, as Zuckerberg put it, create a "stronger" company that can build "higher-quality products faster." That hints at a dark prospect for managers like Rick: The rung of the corporate ladder they spent their careers reaching could be gone for good.

There's a chance, of course, that the current craze for corporate flattening could ease over time. Companies are already discovering that having few middle managers is placing an enormous strain on their operations. The supervisors who survived the purge have been forced to take on much larger teams, and they're burned out to a crisp. Gen Zers, deprived of their mentors, are increasingly disengaged. Departments are more siloed than ever, with no one to do the tedious and thankless and essential work of coordinating across different teams. The best hope for managers like Rick is that CEOs are getting a real-time refresher in the value of managers.

"I'm not at that point in my life where I'm ready to take that step back," Rick told me. "I just want to work with good people and enjoy what I'm doing. I could go to Domino's and start delivering pizza. But I know I can do a lot more than that."

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

If it didn't already look like Drake had lost the feud of the year, it certainly does now.

In a legal filing Monday, an LLC owned by Drake called Frozen Moments alleged that Universal Music Group and Spotify worked together to make "Not Like Us" — a viral diss track Kendrick Lamar released about Drake earlier this year — a bigger hit than it naturally would have been. The petition, filed three days after Drake's rival released the critically acclaimed surprise album "GNX," claims UMG did this by offering lower licensing rates on the song to Spotify in return for promotion, then paying third-party companies to have bots inflate streams of it; "Not Like Us" has surpassed 900 million plays on Spotify. ("Family Matters," a Drake diss track about Lamar released around the same time, has 122 million plays.) The filing also accuses UMG of using pay-to-play tactics to increase the song's radio play and have influencers promote it across social media. It's not a lawsuit yet, but a petition seeking more information about the alleged practice.

"Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game," Drake's filing says. "Every time a song 'breaks through,' it means another artist does not. UMG's choice to saturate the music market with 'Not Like Us' comes at the expense of its other artists, like Drake."

The twist: UMG doesn't just represent Lamar but also Drake. And Drake is one of the biggest artists streaming on Spotify, with about 10 million more monthly listeners than Lamar. If major companies like UMG and Spotify really are conspiring to help one artist over another, they would be severely disrupting the way people discover and come to love music and risking the entire streaming model the music industry now relies on.

Hip-hop fans are mocking Drake's litigiousness as petty and destructive to his street cred. "This is Drake's Jan. 6," the musical artist and former NFL running back Arian Foster posted on X. Music industry insiders, meanwhile, are skeptical of the allegations themselves.

"It's not in Spotify's interest for their model to be undermined by people not getting paid fairly," Tony Rigg, a music industry advisor and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, tells me. "Bots, potentially, would undermine both" Spotify and UMG. In other words, for the top of the music industry, rigging with bots would be "not like us."

The kind of manipulation, also called artificial listening, that Drake is talking about does happen. Some artists use third-party companies that enlist accounts made by bots to listen to the same playlist on repeat. That's an issue because of how streaming companies pay. They divide up royalty payments from a limited pool of cash. More plays means more of the pie. And as more people have taken to uploading AI-generated slop to streaming platforms like Spotify, they risk becoming more diluted. In September, a North Carolina musician was charged with music streaming fraud; the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York claims he made more than $10 million using those kinds of tactics. (The case is ongoing.) Smaller artists looking to make money off streaming can suffer. But it's harder to know how it could affect megastars like Drake and Lamar, who are already among the top performers in Spotify's streaming ranks.

There are more than 100 million songs each on popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. Last year, Spotify booted tens of thousands of songs from its platform reported to be generated by AI and also listened to by bots — essentially, computer music for computers. UMG itself has pushed back against AI-generated music, trying to block AI from training on its catalogs on streaming platforms.

Spotify declined to comment, but the company does have policies in place to detect and combat artificial streaming. A UMG spokesperson told me that "the suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue. We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear."

Fans can argue whether Drake or Lamar won the feud. By throwing lawyers and corporations into the rap battle, Drake has made it much less street and much more corporate. It's hard to imagine bots would be driving so many listeners to Lamar, a 17-time Grammy award winner. The song itself has been nominated for five Grammys, has been used at political events and protests around the world, and became a hit on TikTok. In the end, the attention, and ears, on the two artists' beef may have made Spotify and UMG both winners.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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.

Elle took a job in the tech industry about seven years ago, right when product management was "getting hot," she says. While the companies she's since worked for have had vastly different expectations of her, one thing has been consistent: clashes with other teams. Product managers serve as a bridge between engineers, salespeople, customer-service agents, and workers in other departments, and getting them to work together to build products that people actually need can be fractious.

"If you're an engineer and you have an idea, and then you have this outside figure come in and say, 'Why are you doing it this way?' — some can see that as great collaboration," says Elle, who asked that I use only her first name. "Other people are like, 'Whoa, you're slowing me down.'"

The product manager has become a powerful, highly paid, and polarizing figure. At some tech companies their colleagues refer to them, both affectionately and disparagingly, as "mini-CEOs" of the products they manage. Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and YouTube's Neal Mohan climbed their way up from product manager to CEO, and they deploy legions of PMs to help run their companies.

Coworkers don't always have fuzzy feelings about product managers. X abounds with snarky memes about their purposelessness, their illiteracy of Python and C++, their penchant for saying "no updates from me" in update meetings. On forums and subreddits, their more-technical colleagues belittle their work as fluff. "Is product manager the most useless role in tech?" an engineer posted on Blind. Another accused product managers of "stealing a living": "As an engineer, I feel I can easily do their job in addition to mine with not much extra effort," they wrote. One person on Reddit argued that product managers "just attend meetings and get paid more than the actual people doing the work."In a LinkedIn post titled "Product is too important. So we got rid of product managers," the founder of a digital banking startup wrote, "Any function that needs a decade to explain what it actually is or isn't doing is at very high risk of somehow being lost."

Several companies, from Airbnb to Snap, are now reconsidering the utility of product managers entirely, while others claim that the product manager's reign will only expand in the age of AI. How did a role that barely existed before the 2000s become one of the most influential and controversial presences in tech?

The seed of product management dates back to at least the 1930s, when Procter & Gamble created a position called the "brand man" whose job it was to understand customer problems. Inspired by this, Hewlett-Packard pioneered the tech product manager role in the 1960s. Microsoft began hiring what it called "program managers" in the 1980s. In the 2000s, as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon expanded to create ever more products, product managers proliferated. Hardware and software also became more complicated, and the engineers and developers building it had less time to figure out what was actually useful — companies realized they needed someone dedicated to translating customer needs.

Product became a path into tech for people with backgrounds in consulting or MBAs. A "golden era" of product management emerged in the run of zero interest rates in the 2010s. Companies gobbled up talent, sometimes hiring beyond their needs just to keep smart workers from going to competitors. Big Tech companies became bloated, paying middle managers high salaries to optimize products and development. Carnegie Mellon University began offering what it calls a first-of-its-kind master's degree in product management in 2018. The next year, U.S. News and World Report named product manager a top-five job for MBA grads.

"The shift in power moved from engineering to product managers," says Hubert Palan, the CEO of Productboard, a company that provides software for product managers. That's part of the friction: Those on the tech side often think the product manager doesn't understand how things work, but the product manager may think the engineers are building tools that people don't actually want or need, even if they're feats in coding.

"The product manager is at the center of everything," says Avi Siegel, a former product manager who's working on his own startup, Momentum. "If sales wants one thing and marketing wants one thing and customer success wants one thing, they disagree, and you can only choose one of the groups to side with — you're only going to keep one of those people happy."

"Product management is mostly necessary, but it can be done very badly," says Aaron, a software engineer who asked me to use only his first name. He says he's worked with both excellent and terrible product managers. At best, they bear the burden of understanding the tech a market needs. At worst, they don't acknowledge how technically difficult a solution they demand might be, which leads to ire, fatigue, and failure. "We would be asked for the moon with no collaboration," Aaron says.

Whether their coworkers are happy about it or not, product managers are gaining recognition. A 2007 study found that as the product-management role became more formalized at companies, projects were finished closer to deadlines and with more predictability. A 2020 report from McKinsey said that "creating a comprehensive product-management function" was one of the four most important things a company could do to grow its software business faster. According to ZipRecruiter, the average product manager in the US makes about $160,000. Software engineers, meanwhile, average about $147,000, and tech marketing specialists average about $87,000.

Product managers described the role to me as more intuitive and right-brained than left-brained (though there are plenty of technical PMs, many of them former engineers). The career site Zippia says the proportion of women working in product management rose to nearly 35% in 2021 from about 19% in 2010. That's compared to just 22% of all tech workers. Some women in product management I spoke to say part of the suspicion of their role's utility could be rooted in sexism. In 2022, two women who worked as product managers posted a TikTok explaining what they did for work, while they worked from a pool. The video drew hundreds of harsh comments. "Dealing with most product managers is a headache and a half and we usually hate talking to you," one person responded.

"Every woman that I've met with, if they're interested in a company, their first question is: Am I technical enough?" Elle says. "Every guy I've met, that question doesn't cross their mind." It makes her wonder if it's easier for men in product management to push back and say no to some ideas without looking like naysayers.

Empathy came up in every conversation I had for this story. Like a deft diplomat, a good product manager can empathize with the needs and concerns of every stakeholder, Palan says. Meg Watson, a product manager who has worked for Spotify and Stitch Fix, says product managers who try to rule with an iron fist "quickly learn that doesn't work." She describes working as a product manager as emotional and intense and says many of them experience the tension of their role daily. When she asks people looking for advice on getting into product management why they want to, they say they want power. "You will have power," Watson says. "You will also have accountability and pressure and stress."

And now some companies are ditching them. The Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky said last year that the company had combined the product-management function with product marketing. The rising call for executives to go "founder mode" — a concept touted by Chesky and coined by the Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham — has some questioning whether they should be delegating product decisions to product managers. A spokesperson for Snap told The Information last fall that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company's decision-making. Smaller firms ponder the utility of bringing on product managers at all.

But others say the scope of product managers, though it may draw engineers' ire, is more likely to expand across the industry. "The future really does belong to product managers," says Frank Fusco, a product manager turned CEO of a software company called Silicon Society. As artificial intelligence gets more adept at coding, he says, some engineering tasks could become redundant — and that could be a boon for product managers. (Pichai, a former product manager, said last month that more than a quarter of Google's new code was created by AI.) Fusco says the AI boom is a classic product-manager problem: What do customers actually want the tech to do? As investors and executives are hungry for AI and many consumers are skeptical, Fusco predicts a rising demand for product managers to help bridge that gap.

"The revenge of the PMs is coming," he says. "I would expect to see PMs becoming more prestigious and empowered."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.