Fritinancy

New writing

If you’ve landed here via search engine, welcome! For the last six months most of my writing has been published on Substack. That’s where you’ll find:

All about Veblen goods (and Thorstein Veblen, for whom they’re named)

Discovering Asian brands at San Francisco’s liveliest shopping center

Critiques of three brand names: Nuvet, TRYP, and Navier

And lots more! Subscribe—it’s free!

I also continue to publish on Medium. Recent stories include:

The triumph of the swears: Why naughty words dominated the Word of the Year vote

It’s been 40 years since Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” ad, and I still haven’t bought a single Apple product

And because squaw is back in the news because Fresno County (California) leaders are refusing to remove the word from a local place name, here’s a gift link to my 2021 story about the valley of the S-word.

You can read all of my Medium stories with an annual membership—just $50—that also gives you access to everything else published on Medium.

Word of the week: Doom loop

During the last month or so I’ve tracked more than a dozen stories about San Francisco’s retail “doom loop,” and spotted many others stories about other doom loops—in climate, banking, politics, procrastination—elsewhere in the US and the rest of the world.

Top four “doom loop” stories in Google News, May 13, 2023

 

The word often paired with “doom loop” is “spiral.”  Sometimes the term is “death spiral”—and the editors are not referring to figure skating.

New writing on Medium: REMO rides again

Way back in 2006, in the early months of this blog, I wrote a sort of fan letter to a little Australian retail business called REMO that sold quirky, beautifully designed products I loved. Back then, I was celebrating what looked like REMO’s reinvention after a business collapse. What I couldn’t have foreseen was that REMO would sink again—and rise again. That’s unusual enough in any industry, but especially in retail. I thought it deserved a second look.

The REMO logo

 

You can read the story here. Don’t forget to clap if you like it (up to 50 times if you really like it).

 

From the archives: Name in the news: Shein

While I’m traveling I’m re-upping a few posts from the archives. This one, about the Chinese retailer Shein, was originally published on October 6, 2021. Shein is still in the news!

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Here’s a statistic that surprised even me, a follower of fashion and retail trends: The most downloaded shopping app in the U.S. in May 2021 was not Amazon. It was Shein, an online-only retailer of cheap fast fashion for women and men (plus beauty products, plus home products) founded in 2008 in Nanjing, China, by Chris Xu, a search-engine-optimization specialist with no previous experience in fashion or retail.

Today, Shein (often styled as SHEIN) is a “quindecacorn”*—its gross merchandise volume is worth US$15 billion—and it’s forecast to surpass $20 billion in volume by the end of 2021. The word “juggernaut” comes up frequently in coverage of the company, which has achieved its numbers by targeting the mostly female tween, teen, and early-20s members of Generation Z who can’t resist buying tops and dresses for as little as $5 (and posting about their “hauls” on social media) and who eagerly anticipate Shein’s monthly roster of designer collaborations.

A still from a Shein “haul video” posted in December 2020 by Instagrammer Fabienne Pelaud, who struggles with the pronunciation of “Shein.”

 

A couple more stats from “Taking Stock With Teens,” a recent survey by the investment company Piper Sandler:

• “52% of teens cite Amazon as their No. 1 favorite e-com site (down 200 bps Y/Y [basis points year over year] ; SHEIN took No. 2 spot (9% share, +400bps Y/Y”
• “Crocs, PacSun, Hey Dude, Zara, SHEIN, Gymshark are all fashion brands gaining share”

But I am not here to discuss Shein’s business model, which conflates shopping with social media to produce something called “social commerce.”** Nor will I get into the questionable ethics and environmental impact of fast fashion in general.

No, I’m here to talk about the Shein name.

Word of the week: Roevember

After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, ending federal protections for abortion, American women showed their disapproval in many ways: by publicly protesting, by publishing opinion pieces, and by registering to vote in often unprecedented numbers. The collective impact of these actions may result in what is optimistically being called Roevember: a rejection in the November 8 state and federal election of elected officials who opposed women’s right to privacy and autonomy.

I haven’t been able to pinpoint the precise origin of “Roevember,” a portmanteau of Roe and November. The earliest usages I’ve found are from early August 2022 (let me know if you’ve found earlier examples!).

On August 1, Insider New Jersey reported on sightings of “See You in ROEvember” T-shirts at a Democratic gathering in Morris County.

“See You in Roevember” throw pillow, $29.99 at Fed Up Frannie’s

June linkfest

“Place names and the stories behind them define how we perceive and connect to landscape. But we live in a world populated by places named for colonizers: Libraries, streets and counties across the country bear names like Washington, Jefferson and Jackson, while ‘San’s and ‘Santa’s dot the Southwest, shadowing California’s coast in missionaries’ cloaks. Can we even see the land underneath those names, in all its complexities? And what is the impact on the mind — especially the Indigenous mind — of a lifetime spent repeating colonizers’ names, invoking their stories?” (Brian Oaster for High Country News)

Trilingual sign in southern Colorado. Photo by Orin Hargraves. See my October 2021 Visual Thesaurus column (no paywall!) for more discussion of place names.

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April linkfest

This month I’ve been reading Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage, by Susan Faludi. Actually, I’ve been re-reading it; the book was originally published in 1999 with the subtitle The Betrayal of the American Man and was reissued in 2019 with a new author’s foreword that adds a Trump-era, #MeToo perspective. Faludi is a superb researcher, interviewer, and writer (and believe me, that’s a tough trifecta), and Stiffed—what a perfect title—holds up shockingly well. Faludi’s mid-1990s reporting took her to Vietnam veterans, diehard Cleveland Browns fans, an Alternatives to Violence group, laid-off defense workers, and meetings of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s association. She investigates the post-World War II redefinition of masculinity as “something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources” and to be “displayed, not demonstrated.” I couldn’t help reflecting on Stiffed when I read a recent New York Times roundtable discussion with eight men who described themselves as politically conservative and who repeatedly expressed a wistful longing for days gone by—the same days, some 25 years ago, that Faludi wrote about: a time of layoffs and gang violence and painful domestic rifts. Moral: Beware the nostalgia trap and the Golden Age fallacy; there never were any good old days, except for the ones that seemed good because you were a little kid and didn’t know any better. (You may also be interested in the letters to the editor about that roundtable discussion. I’ve unlocked both links so that nonsubscribers can access them.)

 

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Why A-list names often aren’t A+ clients. (Nora Trice for A Hundred Monkeys)

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Attention, all you skinflints frugal people! Here are some of my Visual Thesaurus columns that are now unlocked and available to non-subscribers: All about the -core suffix; my picks for brand names of the year for 2021; the lingo of film noir. Don’t you wish you’d read them earlier? You can—a subscription is just $19.95 a year! Give a gift to yourself, or to Mom for Mother’s Day!

In the news: Metamates and Amazonification

How are the 1,500-pound gorillas of commerce doing these days? Let’s rattle some Facebook and Amazon cages and find out!

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Are Americans ready for knickers?

When I, an American, think of “knickers” I generally think of something like this (and I suspect I am not an outlier):

“Men’s Knickers – Khaki Twill,” via Historical Emporium, San Jose, California (“Authentic products and old-fashioned service” since 2003).

 

Across the pond, and Down Under, they think of something more like this:

“Know your knickers!” via Kayser Lingerie, Australia. Not for men.

 

But I’ve recently learned of two women’s-underwear brands doing business in the US that are trading on the British/Aussie sense of knickers. Which leads me to wonder whether we USians are about to adopt this sense of knickers into our retail vocabularies. (Or re-adopt, as I’ll explain in a bit.)

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! When you’ve completed the traditional Feats of Strength you may feel like you deserve a celebratory quaff. There are several Festivus beers and ales; here’s one from Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland. They registered the trademark in October 2015.

There’s also a Festivus Maximus sparkling wine, but it’s only tangentially about the made-up December 23 holiday and “Seinfeld.” It’s actually a Baltimore Ravens story: “Festivus Maximus” was coach Brian Billick’s substitute phrase for “playoffs,” a word he superstitiously wouldn’t allow players to utter in the runup to the 2000 Super Bowl (which Baltimore would go on to win).

And now—drumroll, please—it’s time for the traditional Airing of Grievances. In order from serious to frivolous:

Grievance #1: U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, “Democrat” of West Virginia.
Grievance #2: Punitive abortion laws.
Grievance #3: Expensive, hard-to-find Covid test kits.
Grievance #4: People who still haven’t gotten Covid vaccinations.
Grievance #5: TFG. Enough already.
Grievance #6: Movies that run more than two hours. Looking at you, Nightmare Alley.
Grievance #7: Remakes. See #6.
Grievance #8: Sequels.
Grievance #9: Prequels.
Grievance #10: Holiday promotions that include the phrase “’Tis the Season.”

Read my previous Festivus posts.