⛪️ drive-by mass.
on the agenda this week: supply & demand, saying goodbye to amazon, virtual food brands & a drive-by mass.
📖 reading time: 6m 23s.
fig. 1. 3 months ago in an airbnb on a rainy night. bondi beach - australia.
🤠 hey, hi, & happy monday.
i hope the past week has been kind to you.
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on the agenda this week:
supply & demand, saying goodbye to amazon, virtual food brands & a drive-by mass.
⚡️ tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain!
as always, feel free to skip any section that doesn’t interest you or reply directly to this email to provide me with feedback.
📝 a note on: supply & demand.
i subscribe to a business called glimpse which aggregates information from our online activity to discover underlying trends about products, companies, and industries.
glimpse’s key metric is what they term ‘consumer interest levels’, which is based on the company’s analysis of “hundreds of millions of consumer behaviour signals from across the web.”
a business stood out to me last week — hobbii — that sells yarn. knitting is being seen as an ideal hobby during this quarantine era, with a cost that’s low in monetary terms and high in time-commitment.
by offering both sides of the business: the content (knitting patterns) and the physical product (yarn), hobbii can shape demand and even manage inventory—if they have too much of a particular kind of yarn, they can boost rankings for patterns that use it. the product has a built-in viral loop: customers get patterns, buy yarn, knit—and share their creations online, driving traffic back to hobbii.
most interestingly, hobbii’s customer retention benefits from the mismatch between how much yarn someone buys and how much they end up using: since the yarn is generally sold in equal amounts for each color, but different patterns use different quantities, customers can get into a loop: using up one color and buying more, finding a pattern that will use up a different color they have too much of, and running out of something else. like a food company that sells 8-packs of hot dogs and 10-packs of buns, hobbii ensures that customers are always running out of something, but never fully depleting their inventory.
hobbii offers free and paid patterns, but the overwhelming majority of the knitting patterns they show are free; since it’s trivial to share a pattern, hobbii benefits more from making it easy than from charging. the site’s traffic doubled from jan to april, ending at just over 700k visits.
📚 word of the week:
“derring-do”.
meaning quite literally ‘daring-to-do’. the saying originated in the 1300s where it was erroneously taken as noun phrase.
a story of entrepreneurial derring-do and excruciating work habits.
- the economist, 2020
🤪 mildly humorous:
outtakes from the twitter-sphere.
🧠 brain candy:
👋
bye, amazon
.
tim bray quit his job as vp at aws in dismay at amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of covid-19.
bray was also the only vp-level amazon employee to sign a letter to amazon shareholders in 2019 calling for a stop to amazon web services' support for oil extraction.
it’s inspiring to read a blog like this from someone who stands their moral ground.
fast-forward to the covid-19 era. stories surfaced of unrest in amazon warehouses, workers raising alarms about being uninformed, unprotected, and frightened. official statements claimed every possible safety precaution was being taken. then a worker organizing for better safety conditions was fired, and brutally insensitive remarks appeared in leaked executive meeting notes where the focus was on defending amazon “talking points”.
warehouse workers reached out to aecj for support. they responded by internally promoting a petition and organizing a video call for thursday april 16 featuring warehouse workers from around the world, with guest activist naomi klein. an announcement sent to internal mailing lists on friday april 10th was apparently the flashpoint. emily cunningham and maren costa, two visible aecj leaders, were fired on the spot that day. the justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.
👉 read more via tim bray.
🧀
virtual food brands
.
a reddit user was surprised to discover that the pizza she ordered last month on grubhub (similar to deliveroo or ubereats) from what she thought was a local pizzeria called pasqually's pizza actually came from chuck e. cheese, the ubiquitous fast food chain.
you might think — that’s an odd story to highlight — but i thought it was an interesting insight into the future of food delivery. brands are free to create ‘virtual brands’ that experiment with new food items or menus. uber eats even offer a helpful article for doing just that: “this program allows you to create new brands and deliver new cuisines to customers, without the risk and expense of opening another physical location.”
when kendall neff tasted the pizza she ordered from a local shop in her town of phoenixville, pennsylvania, she thought it tasted very familiar.
she had never heard of pasqually's pizza & wings when it appeared as an option on grubhub, but she figured she'd give it a shot.
"i was just searching for something that wasn't a chain," neff told cnn, noting that she wanted to support local businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.
but after a bit of investigating, her suspicions were confirmed. the pizza wasn't from a mom-and-pop restaurant, but from chuck e. cheese. yes, that chuck e. cheese, the one filled with arcade games, sweaty children and unexpectedly fresh-made pizza. a quick glance at the address confirmed it. the delivery guy did, too; he said pasqually's even had its own sign in the window.
👉 read more via cnn.
⛪️
drive-by mass
.
fears of viral infection have created a new role in society for the car, where birthdays, weddings and other events are now being celebrated. here, a new phenomenon — the drive-by mass — is described:
large gatherings are not permitted under stay-at-home orders in many states and countries, but some churches have been able to conduct services that cater to worshipers in their cars. the genoa baptist church in westerville, ohio, calls it “come as you are, but stay in your car.” the church offers at least two avenues for worshipers — they can stream the service online or drive up and park.
“is anyone here today for the very first time, will you toot your horn?” the pastor, frank carl, said during a may 17 sermon. he was speaking from a scissor-lift platform customarily used by construction workers to tower over the parking lot.
a few car horns sounded.
“now genoa, let’s make them feel welcome!” he said, and the rest of the faithful pressed their car horns in unison. in an interview, pastor carl said he started delivering parking lot sermons on march 15, and was considering adding a fourth sunday sermon because they have become so popular. the parking lot holds 600 cars, he said, and sometimes there are more spilling over onto the street.
“sometimes there are cars parked around the building where they can’t even see me but they can hear it,” he said. “people come together, but separate, in cars. there is an emotional and social element that is being filled this way.”
👉 read more via the new york times.
👂 earworm: aminé.
“i fuck up in every way
i fuck up like when i pull up on sunday at chick-fil-a
my dark twisted fantasy, beautiful insanity
when the rain pours, i'm the one you call your canopy”
stream now:
from a distance, aminé (born adam amine daniel) exudes glee and mischief. on the
back of his laptop is a supreme sticker cut up and reshuffled to read “penis.” on the
cover of his album, he is seated on a blue toilet, naked from the calves up. a few weeks ago, he was selected as part of xxl magazine’s annual freshmen list; on the magazine’s cover, he wore a t-shirt with several mispronunciations of his name- the new york times.
listen to aminé on spotify or on apple music.
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