The title, “You Sold Me A Dream” could be applied to a variety of scenarios, but in this instance it’s talking about colonization. This song’s cadence is basically a furor, with a driving Congolese drum beat and jittery rhythm guitar underscoring the vocalists’ aplomb re: the practice of selling entire continents. Feels like a reasonable sentiment on the week of Indigenous People’s Day, yeah? Listen here.
It’s old news that online returns don’t go where you think they go, and that’s because reselling returned stuff is less efficient for a store than just getting rid of it. But Amanda Mull is spreading the gospel, and I pulled out the parts that are new to me:
1. Business schools are very good at teaching people how to sell things, but they evidently do not teach “reverse logistics,” or “how to do returns.”
2. Given that the way we shop now is to order things in six sizes and send five of them back, retailers are actually v stressed about the losses posed by returns. Lots of online stores are actually using software to identify the top returners and ban them from sending things back.
3. There’s really no solution on the horizon. So just remember to feel extra bad next time you buy something, cool?
I got an email from the Brooklyn Public Library last week saying the whole New York library system is doing away with late fees! Why? The library gods know a few things: First, late fees deter people from coming back to the library. And in Brooklyn, the branches with the most late-fee-blocked cards are in neighborhoods where more than 20% of households are below the poverty line. 65% of those blocked cards belong to kids. Keeping kids out of public, free learning space is the opposite of what we’re trying to do, right? Wham-bam-fundraise-to-offset-the-fine-costs-and-kiss-fees-goodbye.
I recently got a package from a reader named Dan, who has been working on a Covid-time business of importing really nice olive oil from Italy. Quick backstory: Dan and his business partner Bob and their Italian friend Kajo all had their work shut down during Covid (Dan & Bob had an event app business; Kajo is an Olympic swimming coach). Kajo is friends with the president of a small olive-growing co-op along the border of Tuscany, where the groves have been around since the Etruscan era (900bc – 27bc). The harvest normally goes to locals at high-end Italian restaurants and grocers, but during the pandemic, those places have been closed, leaving a small surplus of the good stuff. So the guys secured the rights to import it to the USA for the first time.
D.O.P Canino is intensely green with a nice balance between bitter and spicy— it’s supposed to be the best you can get when it comes to olive oil. Only a few hundred bottles were imported from this year’s harvest, But EVEN SO, Dan & co are throwing you a discount. So go here and use the (one-time) code LOREM for 15% off. Thinking this would be a good present for literally anyone.