The CQ: A $9.8B Black Friday and Millennials' $525,000/year Threshold for Happiness
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By Forerunner
What We’re Talking About on Slack:
Americans set a new online spending record for Black Friday of $9.8 billion, a 7.5% increase from last year, Axios reports. Thanksgiving Day also saw a boost of 5.5%. According to Reuters, U.S. shoppers shelled out $38 billion online over the entire holiday weekend. Another record breaker was BNPL, with $940 million worth of purchases made through the service on Cyber Monday, up 42.5% from last year. The nuance: this banner year for spending could very likely point to increasingly price sensitive shoppers showing up for deals vs. upticks in consumer spending overall.
Related: American spending has kept the economy going since the pandemic, it may finally be slowing. Says one economist: “Headwinds are going to eventually force the consumer to buckle, and I think that we’re going to see consumers have to pull back on spending for a quarter or two.” CNN charts out the economic impact of these headwinds from the mounting housing costs and dwindling Covid-era nest eggs to the non-mortgage loan debt that has more than doubled in the last 20 years — with more than $500 billion of that debt accumulated in the past two years.
The Economist says, Welcome to the golden age of workers. During the mid-2010s, wage growth was weak and income inequality was rising. Today, things look vastly different — 38% of the wage inequality has been undone, most countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have maintained or increased minimum wages in the face of inflation, and 77% of companies say they’re having difficulty filling roles, twice as many as in 2015. “Labor is becoming scarcer and better rewarded, especially manual activity that is hard to replace with technology. Governments are spending big and running economies hot, supporting demands for higher wages, and are likely to continue to do so. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is giving workers a productivity boost, which could lead to higher wages, too.”
So why is everyone so unhappy at work right now? The Wall Street Journal reports that job satisfaction has dipped to its lowest point since early 2020 — with a 10% drop this year — revealed data from more than 57,000 workers. Another survey found that 34% of employees dread starting their workday, which is 11 percentage points higher than 2020. Several cited reasons: inflation, which is eating up significant pay gains, and a cooling job market, particularly for white-collar roles — causing many to avoid changing jobs despite and stay put despite wanting something else. Then there’s the polarizing nature of WFH — some workers resent being pushed back into the office, while others find remote and hybrid work isolating.
Just how bad is the U.S. cost-of-living squeeze? Bloomberg did the math: Since January 2020, electricity and groceries have increased 25%, used-car prices are up 35%, auto insurance 33%, rents about 20%—even a takeout hamburger jumped 23%. In that span of three years, prices have risen about as much as they had in the 10 years before the pandemic. “The reality is setting in for consumers that prices rarely go down, especially not in the aggregate. And so really the best they can hope for is prices leveling off and—at the very least—growing at a slower rate.”
In 2023, every company is a
tech AIadvertising company. The tides have turned from the heyday of ad blockers and ad-free streaming. Today most streamers from Netflix to Disney+ have introduced an ad-supported tier, and many other companies, like United Airlines and Uber, are embracing the advertising business to generate revenue, attract new price-conscious customers or to leverage their consumers’ data to create targeted ads. Case and point: Instacart’s IPO, which revealed $760M in ads revenue in 2022, accounting for 30% of total revenue that year. Other examples: Best Buy and Walmart allow brands to buy ads that will appear on the TV screens in their stores, while Marriott lets advertisers send its loyalty members email ads. “This ‘retail media’ category is projected to yield $46.4 billion in U.S. ad revenue this year, almost a 50% increase from two years ago.”It’s too easy to buy stuff you don’t want. The Atlantic makes the argument that buying something online these days is so effortless, fast, and frictionless that it often leads to bad shopping decisions. “E-commerce’s greatest trick has been convincing us that risk can be escaped, but of course it can’t. Even with the smoothest shopping, there’s still the risk of waste, of disappointment, future inconvenience, and money lost in the fine print.”
Millennials say they need to earn $525,000 a year to be happy. For context, Gen Z, Gen X, and baby boomers say they only need $124,000 to $130,000. (In reality, the median household in the U.S. earns $74,580.) According to the survey of 2,000 Americans, the reason for the huge difference may be due to all the setbacks millennials have experienced since they have entered adulthood including the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic, as well as the current high peaks of inflation, mortgage rates, and student loan debt. Respondents generally defined happiness as “being able to pay bills on time, being debt free, and having the ability to enjoy small luxuries, like a cup of coffee, without worry. Many pegged happiness as having a plan and being independent, and around 60% of Americans believe that money can indeed buy them that peace of mind.”
The obesity pay gap is worse than we previously thought. What might be surprising is that it affects well-educated workers most, more than any type of demographic. According to new research published in The Economist, obese men with a bachelor’s degree earn 5% less than thinner colleagues; if they have a graduate degree, they earn 14% less. Meanwhile for obese women, the numbers are 12% and 19%, respectively. Disparities were also apparent in highly skilled jobs: Obese workers in health care make 11% less than their slimmer colleagues, and those in management roles make 9% less, on average.
It’s TikTok Shop’s first Christmas, and shoppers are torn between hot deals and ethics — and torn on whether they love or hate the feature overall.
Portfolio Highlights:
Faire CEO/Co-Founder Max Rhodes and CFO Lauren Cooks-Levitan write an op-ed for Fast Company about how retailers can woo Gen Z shoppers, including Forerunner research.
Stan cofounders John Hu and Vitalii Dodonov make Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in social media, while Topline Pro cofounders Nick Ornitz and Shannon Kay make the enterprise technology list.
AmplifyMD’s Virtual Care program and Tally Health make Fast Company’s list of the Next Big Things in Tech 2023.
Glossier CMO Cleo Mack is one of Ad Age’s Breakout Brand Leaders 2023.
Jump is one of Business Insider’s 25 most promising sports startups to watch.
Fast Company profiles Cleo CEO Madhavi Vemireddy about how Cleo is handling the issue of caregiver burnout.
The Washington Post reports on a new study, in which participants wore Oura rings, discovered that women’s body temperatures are no more variable than men’s, undercutting some of the basis for excluding women from medical research.
Yahoo!Finance reports that Arrived is launching a new fund to acquire more single-family homes.
AdWeek announces that Chime brings its Dollars & Sense board game to Walgreens.
Work at a Portfolio Company:
Product Manager - Experts & B2B | Curated: Curated is on a mission to help people find exactly what they’re looking for within high-stakes purchases by connecting customers with Real Experts. This role will work on improving core workflows and delivering brand new ideas to help lead every phase of the Experts & B2B product lifecycle: defining success, research and analysis, product design & development, testing, go-to-market, evaluation and iteration.
Advisor Success & Strategy, Senior Manager | Fora: Fora is reimagining the travel advisor industry by building a travel agency that is modern,, tech-enabled, and based on empowering 100,000 entrepreneurs to transform their passion for travel into revenue. This role will be responsible for ensuring an excellent experience every time an advisor reaches out to a member of the Fora HQ team and will play a strategic role across the organization to solve the root causes for outreach.
Director, Health Plan Sales | Cleo: Cleo is a family benefits platform that picks up where the healthcare system leaves off, combining the expertise of guides and specialists with a powerful technology platform that helps every working caregiver succeed. This role will be responsible for driving partnership and revenue growth focusing on typically managed care organizations, such as HMOs, PPOs, Third Party Administrators, insurance companies, and Integrated Delivery Systems.
There are ~568 other openings on our jobs site. Check ‘em out.