+ Taco Bell Adds Chicken Nuggets to Menu (Restaurant Dive): “LTOs like Taco Bell’s new nuggets or Cheez-It tostada are a key part of Taco Bell’s menu strategy. They preserve novelty for consumers, generate social media buzz and allow the brand to have a roster of promotional items it can roll out to give itself traffic boosts during slow calendar periods … The nuggets are marinated in jalapeño buttermilk flavor and breaded with bread crumbs and tortilla chips … Taco Bell partnered with Hidden Valley Ranch to design a dipping sauce for the nuggets, the Hidden Valley Fire Ranch Sauce, which combines the QSR chain’s spicy sauces with ranch. Taco Bell also added two other sauces, jalapeño honey mustard and Bell sauce.”
+ Obscene Prices, Declining Quality: Luxury Is in a Death Spiral (The New York Times): “… luxury good are winding up on the shelves of discount outlet stores … according to Bain, at the end of 2023, that’s exactly where about 13% of all luxury goods were purchased, compared with 5 percent a decade earlier.”
+ Why Chanel Chose Matthieu Blazy (The Business of Fashion): “With nearly $20 billion in annual revenue, fashion’s second-biggest brand doesn’t need a ‘revolution’ … but Chanel is nonetheless positioning the hire as a historic, transformative move for the company … Blazy is set to join Chanel by April 2025, ahead of a debut collection slated for next September.”
+ Why Can’t You Pack a Bag? (The New Yorker): “A packer faces three obstacles. There’s contingency: a variety of possible futures must somehow be tamed. There’s consumerism: the junk you own needs to be winnowed into a useful curation. And there’s comfort: we want to be cushioned against transit’s sharp points … Many basically ordinary activities conceal, or can conceal, vast amounts of effort. Packing … requires a surprising amount of consistent work over time. The effort isn’t just practical but intellectual … making choices takes energy … decision fatigue is cumulative … Overpacking has the effect of deferring decisions, shifting them from your house to your hotel room. When you understand this, you become more motivated in your packing: it’s senseless to add not just to your physical load but to your mental one.”
+ The Airline Rewards Game Is Getting Tougher to Win (Bloomberg): “Some three-quarters of airline points issued by major US carriers now come from credit-card spending … airlines moved to a ‘dynamic’ pricing model that varies the value of points flight-to-flight and even day-to-day, based on real-time demand and availability … United said it makes a 50% profit margin on points sold to its credit-card partners compared to about 20% for points awarded to flyers.”
+ What Going Private Means to Nordstrom Inc. (WWD): “The $4 billion has been approved by its board of directors and the transaction is expected to close sometime in the first half of 2025. The Nordstrom family along with Mexican retailer El Puerto de Liverpool will buy up all of the shares they do not own, with the family emerging with 50.1 percent of the business and Liverpool owning 49.9 percent. Currently, the Nordstrom family owns 33 percent and Liverpool owns 10 percent … Nordstrom said the transaction will be financed through a combination of rollover equity by the Nordstrom family and Liverpool, cash commitments by Liverpool, up to $450 million in borrowing under a new $1.2 billion asset-back loan, and company cash on hand. Nordstrom has $2.7 billion in debt. At the $24.25 per share price in the deal, the equity value amounts to $4.1 billion and the enterprise value, including debt, comes to $6.3 billion … the deal represents a premium of about 42 percent to the company’s unaffected closing stock price on March 18.“
+ America’s Obsession with California Failing (SFGATE): “… the state never lost more than 1% of its population — in fact, it’s never lost more than 1% of its population, ever — even in the past three years that resident numbers have declined, according to the Department of Finance. U.S. census data estimates a slightly bigger outflow, but the losses are still relatively meager.”
+ Bad influence (The Verge): “Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced … But she has an uphill battle in proving there is something in her work that she has legal ownership over in the first place. Sometimes, you can be so basic that copyright law doesn’t even protect you.”
+ ‘Filler Fatigue’ Is Setting In (The Business of Fashion): “Consumers are clearly ready to spend more on aesthetic treatments, and are willing to adapt to longer timelines in order to see results, but they also want to be reassured that the product they’re getting is of an even higher quality, and with less obvious signs … biostimulators are for the patient patient. Many …. take as many as three sessions to show a visible difference on the skin and don’t immediately volumise … treatments that have an element of naturality–either in their formulation or their perception—give off an air of elevation, prestige and status.”
+ How I Ended My Voyeuristic Relationship With Mormon Momfluencer Culture (Vogue): “When you’re feeling adrift in your own life, as I did for most of my early 20s, it’s tempting to lose yourself entirely in someone else’s … In a world where some people don’t believe that queer and trans couples like me and my partner should have the privilege of becoming parents, I’ve determined that I actually…don’t want the repressive, regressive ideology at the core of so much momfluencer content anywhere near me, even if it talks softly and carries a big Starbucks cup. Sure, I’ll probably just spend the time that I once devoted to their content watching lesbians redecorate their houses on TikTok instead, but at least that feels a little less ideologically fraught.”
+ In Jordan Harper’s 2023 novel, Everybody Knows: A Novel, Los Angeles is more than just the setting, it is the star. This city, in which “everything is an echo of something else,” produces characters with a sort of duality like the city itself: glamourous and seedy; ethical and mercenary; hopeful and despairing. Everybody Knows is told from two perspectives in alternating chapters by Mae Pruett, a crisis manager who carries around blank NDAs and who is as drawn to scandals as she is repulsed by them; and her former lover Chris Tamburro, a disgraced former cop turned hired muscle.
Over the course of Everybody Knows, the two protagonists find themselves in new roles: they go from being enforcers of LA’s seedy underbelly to inadvertent protectors of “justice,” though in a distinctly LA way. I would recommend Everybody Knows to fans of the neo-noir genre, as the novel is written like a film script waiting to be adapted for the screen, and relies on scene-setting and character-building through interior dialogue, rather than presenting a particularly twisty or innovative mystery. The MeToo theme also feels awkward for a 2023 novel–especially after the results of the 2024 US elections.
+ The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone (The New York Times): “In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women … women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales … What will become of literature–and indeed of society–if men are no longer involved in reading and writing?”
+ What’s Behind the Rise of the Farm-to-Fashion Aesthetic? (Elle): “Sometimes you have to step into a role or wear clothes that may not necessarily pertain to what you do every day. Lots of people in New York, I don’t know if they’ve ever even been in a barn, let alone worked in a barn, but they’re going to have the barn coat. It’s the creation of a persona. When people put this on, they are sending you a very clear message.”
+ The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books (The Atlantic): “… middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests … the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But ‘in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general’ … if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it … it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts … attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books … they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past.”
+ J.Crew: How to Build an ‘Ageless’ Brand (The Business of Fashion): “In 2024, J.Crew Group, which also owns Madewell, is projected to hit sales of $3 billion, a record high … core customers … are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, and they’ve likely grown up with J.Crew … they’re … multi-generational customers and they’re bringing their kids to the brand, too.”
+ How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking? (The New Yorker): “Languages … influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English–its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture–can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality … What if language is less like a yoke than like a wind, nudging us in various directions? … More than communication tools, languages help concretize the abstract, providing frameworks for making sense of concepts as fundamental as time.”
+ Recently ordered: Tory Burch Cap Toe Ballet Flat (on sale and restocked in the “Shell Pink/Perfect Black” colorway), Beauty of Joseon Radiance Cleansing Balm, LOFT Henley Hoodie Sweater, Lioness Trencherous Mini Coat, Lululemon Crossbody Bag with Nano Pouch 2L, Yoku Moku Holiday Petit Cinq Delices Cookies (40% off), SIMKHAI Andi Cardigan Andi Cardigan, and Reformation Poppy Sleeveless Cotton Rib Minidress.
Have a good week, everyone!
