France campaigns against Black Friday
The French government has asked its citizens to say "non" to Black Friday deals in a new advertising campaign from the country's environment ministry, Agence de la Transition Écologique, and its minister Christophe Béchu, the minister of ecological transition.
Like fast food and Hollywood blockbusters, rampant consumerism has gone from being primarily American to a global phenomenon. Black Friday is now the biggest sales day in many European countries.
According to the BBC, the ad shows a man asking for advice in a store, only to be urged by a clerk not to buy anything for the sake of his finances and the planet.
The ad was attacked by other government departments, with finance minister Bruno Le Maire calling it "ill-conceived" and fretting that it would harm "honest businesses." And the Commerce Alliance, the Union of Textile Industries and the French Union of Fashion and Clothing Industries, issued a joint statement asking for the campaign's immediate withdrawal, "failing which we will consider legal action for commercial denigration."
While Béchu did concede that the ad should have targeted online sales businesses rather than brick-and-mortar stores, there are no plans to pull the campaign.
ByteDance abandoning video game strategy
In a rare misstep for TikTok parent ByteDance, the company's foray into video games has ended faster than a first play of the notoriously difficult "Flappy Bird."
Gaming was one of six ByteDance business units announced under a 2021 restructuring, but Reuters reported today that after two years of "patchy" performance, the company has scaled back its Nuverse division and started laying off some of its 3,000 staff.
“We regularly review our businesses and make adjustments to centre on long-term strategic growth areas. Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business,” a ByteDance spokesperson told Reuters.
ByteDance invested heavily in the unit, including a $4 billion purchase of a Shanghai studio called Moontown that it is now looking to divest. Reuters reported earlier this month that the company is currently in discussions with a Saudi Arabia-based firm about a possible sale.
"Authentic" is Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2023
In a year that saw the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, and terms like "deepfake" become part of the mainstream, Merriam-Webster has selected "authentic" as its word of the year for 2023.
In announcing the word on Monday, Merriam-Webster said that while authentic was already a "high-volume lookup," it saw a substantial increase this year—driven by lots of stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.
It also cited the broader cultural impact, that included people like Taylor Swift and Prince Harry chasing authenticity in their words and deeds; X owner Elon Musk urging users on the platform to "speak authentically" by running their own accounts; and apps and platforms like BeReal making “authentic” experiences their main purpose.
Another word that stood out in the dictionary's data for the year was "rizz," an internet slang term added in September, that the dictionary says takes its lexical inspiration from the word "charisma." As a noun, rizz means “romantic appeal or charm," and as a verb represents “to charm or seduce.”
More employees is a theft deterrent, says Best Buy
Best Buy says that increasing its number of in-store associates, as well as adding full-service cashier lanes and security staff at exits, has successfully mitigated losses from theft. Its efforts come amid a sharp rise in shoplifting across the entire retail sector that CNN says has reached "crisis-level proportions."
The French government has asked its citizens to say "non" to Black Friday deals in a new advertising campaign from the country's environment ministry, Agence de la Transition Écologique, and its minister Christophe Béchu, the minister of ecological transition.
Like fast food and Hollywood blockbusters, rampant consumerism has gone from being primarily American to a global phenomenon. Black Friday is now the biggest sales day in many European countries.
According to the BBC, the ad shows a man asking for advice in a store, only to be urged by a clerk not to buy anything for the sake of his finances and the planet.
The ad was attacked by other government departments, with finance minister Bruno Le Maire calling it "ill-conceived" and fretting that it would harm "honest businesses." And the Commerce Alliance, the Union of Textile Industries and the French Union of Fashion and Clothing Industries, issued a joint statement asking for the campaign's immediate withdrawal, "failing which we will consider legal action for commercial denigration."
While Béchu did concede that the ad should have targeted online sales businesses rather than brick-and-mortar stores, there are no plans to pull the campaign.
ByteDance abandoning video game strategy
In a rare misstep for TikTok parent ByteDance, the company's foray into video games has ended faster than a first play of the notoriously difficult "Flappy Bird."
Gaming was one of six ByteDance business units announced under a 2021 restructuring, but Reuters reported today that after two years of "patchy" performance, the company has scaled back its Nuverse division and started laying off some of its 3,000 staff.
“We regularly review our businesses and make adjustments to centre on long-term strategic growth areas. Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business,” a ByteDance spokesperson told Reuters.
ByteDance invested heavily in the unit, including a $4 billion purchase of a Shanghai studio called Moontown that it is now looking to divest. Reuters reported earlier this month that the company is currently in discussions with a Saudi Arabia-based firm about a possible sale.
"Authentic" is Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2023
In a year that saw the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, and terms like "deepfake" become part of the mainstream, Merriam-Webster has selected "authentic" as its word of the year for 2023.
In announcing the word on Monday, Merriam-Webster said that while authentic was already a "high-volume lookup," it saw a substantial increase this year—driven by lots of stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.
It also cited the broader cultural impact, that included people like Taylor Swift and Prince Harry chasing authenticity in their words and deeds; X owner Elon Musk urging users on the platform to "speak authentically" by running their own accounts; and apps and platforms like BeReal making “authentic” experiences their main purpose.
Another word that stood out in the dictionary's data for the year was "rizz," an internet slang term added in September, that the dictionary says takes its lexical inspiration from the word "charisma." As a noun, rizz means “romantic appeal or charm," and as a verb represents “to charm or seduce.”
More employees is a theft deterrent, says Best Buy
Best Buy says that increasing its number of in-store associates, as well as adding full-service cashier lanes and security staff at exits, has successfully mitigated losses from theft. Its efforts come amid a sharp rise in shoplifting across the entire retail sector that CNN says has reached "crisis-level proportions."
Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said last week that additional staff and very few self-checkout lanes has had a pronounced impact for the electronics retailer, which operates nearly 1,000 stores across the U.S.
“In certain parts of the country in particular, there is a real issue around theft and organized crime," said Barry. "With that being said… we have not called out material impacts to our business as a result of shrink for at least the last two years."
Shoplifting has become a major issue for the retail sector as a whole, however, with a recent report from the National Retail Federation finding that shrink increased 19% to US$112 billion last year, and has nearly doubled from pre-pandemic levels.
While a host of factors are used to calculate shrink, including employee theft, damaged products, administrative errors, and online fraud, shoplifting is a major contributor.
Meta allegedly allowed underage users on Instagram
Despite receiving more than 1.1 million reports of Instagram accounts belonging to children under 13, Meta deleted only a "fraction" of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the tech giant brought by the attorneys general of 33 U.S. states.
Meta could potentially face hundreds of millions of dollars in civil penalties if the states can prove the allegations, said The New York Times.
Citing the unsealed complaint, the Times said that Meta “routinely continued to collect” children’s personal information, including their location and email addresses, without parental permission, a violation of a federal children’s privacy law.
“Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public," said the Times in quoting the document.
The complaint said that Meta "continually failed" to prioritize effective age-checking systems, and instead "used approaches that enabled users under 13 to lie about their age to set up Instagram accounts."
In a statement, Meta contended that it spent a decade ensuring that its online environments were safe and age-appropriate for teenagers, and contended that the complaint "mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents."
