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Why the US nursing crisis is getting worse

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Covid-19 may no longer be surging widely across the United States, but America’s hospitals are still experiencing <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/3/26/21192191/coronavirus-us-new-york-hospitals-doctors-nurses">a staffing crisis</a> that is putting critical care for patients in jeopardy.
Hospitals all over the country are struggling, especially those in lower-population areas. A new survey of rural hospitals from the Chartis Group, provided to Vox in advance of publication, reveals how deep the problem runs. Nearly 99 percent of rural hospitals surveyed said they were experiencing a staffing shortage; 96 percent of them said they were having the most difficulty finding nurses.
Almost half of the hospitals in the survey said staffing problems had prevented them from accepting new patients in the past 60 days. One in four hospitals said that a lack of nurses had forced them to suspend certain services, including, according to Michael Topchik, national leader of the Chartis Center for Rural Health: newborn delivery, chemotherapy, and colonoscopies. Another one in five said they were considering it.
“The pandemic has maxed out these hospitals,” Topchik told me, “which means they are unable to provide services vital to the community.”
Hospitals have gotten a lot better at handling Covid-19 surges. They have more weapons at their disposal — antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies — and better understand which techniques are effective at preventing the disease from getting worse. Roberta Schwartz, chief innovation officer at Houston Methodist Hospital, told me while her hospital started shutting down services immediately during the first pandemic wave, they were able to absorb more than 700 Covid-19 patients during the most recent summer wave without compromising their other operations.
But as flu season looms and cold weather threatens <a href="https://www.vox.com/22712737/covid-19-cases-deaths-2021-winter-wave">another Covid-19 surge</a>, two trends that would fill up hospital beds again, the staffing crisis isn’t easing.
According to <a href="https://www.aha.org/system/files/media/file/2021/09/AHA-KH-Ebook-Financial-Effects-of-COVID-Outlook-9-21-21.pdf">a September study</a> commissioned by the American Hospital Association, the average cost of labor expenses for each discharged patient has grown by 14 percent in 2021 — even as the number of full-time employees has dropped by 4 percent.
Hospitals, both rural and urban, are feeling the squeeze. Their workforces are burned out. Some staff members are still reluctant to take the Covid-19 vaccine, even as some facilities start to impose mandates. And they are facing competition from traveling nursing companies that are offering better and better benefits to lure nurses away from permanent full-time jobs.
With some services being shut down, patients in underserved areas may have to travel hours to larger facilities — hospitals that are experiencing their own staffing challenges and often run at near 100 percent capacity already.
“There are nursing shortages nationwide, which means many hospitals can’t staff all their beds,” Karen Joynt Maddox, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. “The big referral centers ... chronically operate at or above capacity, so any bumps in volume put additional strain on the system.”
Burnout among the health care workforce remains acute 20 months into the pandemic. About half of medical workers <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/half-health-workers-report-burnout-amid-covid-19">reported</a> feeling burnout during 2020, according to a study from the American Medical Association. Almost half of ICU nurses <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/31/covid-is-driving-an-exodus-among-health-care-workers.html">said</a> in another survey earlier this year that they were considering leaving the profession.
Nine in 10 rural hospital leaders said their concerns about staff burnout had increased over the course of 2021. In other words, the staffing crisis is getting worse, not better.
“The workforce is burnt out. The workforce is leaving,” said Beth Feldpush, senior vice president at America’s Essential Hospitals. “The human capacity is more of an issue than physical capacity.”
The average age of a nurse in the United States <a href="https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-information/fact-sheets/nursing-shortage">is 50</a>; some of those workers decided to retire early rather than push on through the most difficult working conditions of their career.
”This is mental anguish,” Schwartz said. “We have an aging workforce. Some of them might have worked another year or two, but with a pandemic, nope.”
Vaccine hesitancy could end up making this difficult situation worse. Only about 25 percent of the rural hospitals surveyed by Chartis are instituting a vaccine mandate (some of which have not yet taken effect), but, among those, about one in four expect a significant percentage of their staff — 5 percent or more — not to comply with the mandate.
For some of them, that would mean an automatic termination and another job opening that the hospital needs to fill.
But that’s when the third problem squeezing hospitals complicates things: It’s getting harder to hire and retain nurses because many of them can earn a higher salary working as a traveling nurse, hired for a temporary period by a hospital facing a staffing crunch — and willing to pay the rising prices commanded by those workers.
As NBC News <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/rural-hospitals-losing-hundreds-staff-high-paid-traveling-nurse-jobs-n1279199">reported</a> last month, permanent nurses at rural hospitals make on average about $1,200 per week. These days, some travel nursing firms are offering their workers more than $5,000 per week.
“This has been a huge shift for many folks,” Mary Beth Kingston, chief nursing officer at a health system serving Illinois and Wisconsin, said in a panel discussion on the staffing crisis hosted by the AHA. “People are leaving their place of employment because this is a chance to increase their salary in a major way.”
Traveling nurses have played an important role in the pandemic. Hospital leaders say that, in essence, they needed to increase their workforce by 20 percent to handle Covid-19 surges, and the travel firms helped to supply that excess staffing. In the Chartis survey, more than half of the hospitals said their use of travel nurses had increased “significantly” during the pandemic, even though most of them used those workers only “rarely” prior to the current crisis.
But that increase in demand has allowed travel nursing firms to offer those higher salaries and more generous benefits, which can lure nurses away from permanent employment. Hospital leaders describe a situation in which full-time nurses and traveling nurses are sitting side by side at a nursing station, with the latter telling the former how much money they are making in this new role.
In the Chartis survey of rural health systems, hospital leaders named “more financially lucrative opportunities” as the No. 1 reason for their nurses leaving, followed by pandemic burnout and retirement.
There isn’t an easy solution to the nursing crisis. The worrisome trends actually predate the pandemic; in 2018, <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29183169/">a study in the American Journal of Medical Quality</a> projected more nursing shortages to appear from 2016 to 2030, concentrated particularly in the South and the West.
The aging workforce is part of the problem, and not enough students are enrolling in nursing school to offset those losses, according to <a href="https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-information/fact-sheets/nursing-shortage">the American Association of Colleges of Nursing</a>.
There are some provisions in Democrats’ pending <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/10/28/22748554/biden-budget-build-back-better-democrats-child-care-taxes">Build Back Better legislation</a> to support the health care workforce by forgiving loans for medical education, incentivizing more doctors and nurses to practice in underserved areas, and providing more funding to hospitals that run graduate education programs.
But hospitals don’t believe it will be enough. They are preparing for a world in which Covid-19 is endemic, a regular part of the medical calendar — and their staffs are still overstretched.
“They are concerned with the overlap of a winter surge and more flu circulating,” Feldpush said. “They do not expect to see any alleviation in staffing shortages or costs.”
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vox Why the US nursing crisis is getting worse

Covid-19 may no longer be surging widely across the United States, but America’s hospitals are still experiencing a staffing crisis that i...

The paradox of American freedom

America is uniquely obsessed with “freedom.” You can see it in our politics. You can hear it in our discourse. But we’re also, strangely, a country full of fortunate people who are constantly fretting about their lack of freedom.
Why is that?
There isn’t a single answer to a question like this, or even a good one, but a recent book by Sebastian Junger called <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Freedom/Sebastian-Junger/9781982153410">Freedom</a> searches for one anyway.
The book orbits around a long walk Junger and a few friends took several years ago. They hiked hundreds of miles of East Coast railroad lines, carrying everything they needed on their backs and sleeping wherever they could. Everyone involved had experienced combat (Junger’s a longtime war reporter who embedded with an infantry unit in Afghanistan while shooting the documentaries Restrepo and Korengal), and they were all looking for ways to process that trauma. Junger later documented the trip in a 2014 film, <a href="https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-last-patrol">The Last Patrol</a>.
Junger’s book weaves the account of the hike with various stories from history — everything from labor strikes to women’s resistance movements to bloody battles with Apache raiders — and in the end, it all comes back to a meditation on human freedom and all the ways we seek and defend it, especially in a country as divided and unequal as America.
I reached out to Junger for this week’s episode of <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vox-conversations/id1081584611">Vox Conversations</a> to talk about what he learned out there on the railroad lines. Like the book, we cover a lot of ground — the meaning of personal freedom, what we owe other people, and why these things are bound up with each other. We also talk about becoming parents, and how that experience changed the way we thought about freedom and responsibility in our own lives.
Below is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vox-conversations/id1215557536">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/search/vox%20conversations">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations">Stitcher</a>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
I know your goal in this book and elsewhere isn’t to weight conservative notions of freedom against liberal notions of freedom. I understand, as a writer, why you want to avoid that. But I do think we can address this in a nonpolitical way. I think there’s a really crucial tension that we have to touch. The tension is this paradoxical relationship between freedom and obligation.
You write: “For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for if not died for. That raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed.” Shortly after that, you say, “The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.” Why did you think it was so important to make that point?
<h4>Sebastian Junger</h4>
Because I feel like there’s a strange idea in American society right now, and I think it’s because we’re not under any direct threat, and because we’re not under a direct outside threat, it’s possible to imagine our own government as a threat.
There’s this idea that’s sort of arisen, that you can live your life without ever being told in any way what you can and can’t do. It’s complete nonsense. Humans have never lived like that. Even people that think that, they, like good little doobies, drive on the right-hand side of the road, and they know they can’t drive on the left-hand side of the road. At a red light, they stop, because they know if they don’t, they might kill somebody. If they don’t care about that, they might kill themselves. If they don’t do that, they might get a ticket. Everyone is very carefully obeying all these rules, but some people think that the government actually doesn’t have a right to regulate and to enforce and to create strategies that benefit the greater good.
The great thing about a democracy is if you think that the government is overreaching — and the government’s great at overreaching ... I mean, it’s not like it doesn’t do that. I get it. — But if you think that that’s the case, you have recourse. You can go to the courts or you can vote the bastards out. You can go to the polling booth.
But the one thing you can’t do in a democracy is use violence to change an outcome. As soon as you use violence to change that outcome, you’re actually creating the opposite of a democracy. You are on the road to fascism.
The one exception that I actually think I might want to insist on is that there is a history in this country of protest movements that have sometimes turned violent. These movements, they’re groups of people insisting on their basic rights. The labor movement of 100 years ago, the civil rights movement, these protests sometimes were violent, but sometimes it takes violence to get the attention of an immoral government that’s not interested in acting in a free and fair way.
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<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
I guess I’ve always thought of freedom as an activity, not a condition. There’s a tendency, especially in our culture, to think of freedom as “freedom from.” To be free is to not be tyrannized by some outside power, and that’s fine, but it’s incomplete. You can be free of tyranny, but if you’re destitute, if you’re abandoned, if you don’t have agency because your most immediate needs aren’t being met, you’re not free in any meaningful sense. I say all that because it’s why I think we’re obliged to care about the condition of other people if we believe in freedom as a universal right.
Ok, that’s the end of my rant, I promise.
<h4>Sebastian Junger</h4>
No, you’re absolutely right. I didn’t go into these contemporary issues in America in my book, because the issue of freedom, it doesn’t change that much over the ages. I was trying to write a book about what allows humans to maintain their autonomy in the face of a more powerful group. Throughout history, very disempowered and often very mobile groups were able to evade or outfight larger dominant groups that wanted to oppress them. The extraordinary thing about humans, unlike any other mammal, is that a smaller individual or a smaller group can actually outfight a larger one. I wanted to understand how that worked. How do we maintain our autonomy in the face of a more powerful group?
Sometimes that more powerful group is your own government. The labor movement 100 years ago, there were totally disenfranchised foreign workers working in the textile mills in Massachusetts, and they faced down the National Guard and the corporations and the government, and they got the laws changed.
One of the ways they did that was incorporating women into their ranks. Once you put women on the front line of a protest, the cops often do not dare use mass violence. They’re way more willing to do that against men. As one frustrated policeman said in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, he said, “One good cop can handle 10 men. But it takes 10 cops to handle one woman.” That changed the tactical dynamic on the streets that allowed those protests to succeed.
But let me just add to that: What I was saying about freedom from an enemy or freedom from oppression within your own society, those are the classic conservative and liberal concerns. Conservatives are concerned with an outside threat, and liberals, they’re much less worried about outsiders. In fact, they’re often quite open to them culturally. What they’re worried about is internal unfairness. If you take those two concerns and you marry them together in one society, you have a society that can both protect itself and run a fairly equitable system. Either one by itself wouldn’t work very well.
There’s actually a lot of data. There’s a wonderful book, I’m looking at it right now on my bookshelf, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Our-Political-Nature-Evolutionary-Origins/dp/1616148233" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/Our-Political-Nature-Evolutionary-Origins/dp/1616148233?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22527243[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22527243[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Our Political Nature</a>, by Avi Tuschman. Maybe you know it. He collects all the studies that show that our political predilections are partly hereditary. About 50 percent of the variance of our political opinion comes from our genetics, it’s inherited. That to me means that a basically conservative or liberal viewpoint had to have been adaptive in our evolutionary past. When they’re in roughly equal measure within a society, you’re at this sort of sweet spot where you can defend yourself and you’re running a society that’s fair and therefore stable.
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
This theme of the importance of groups, of community, of solidarity, was at the heart of your last book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/144344958X" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/144344958X?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22527243[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22527243[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Tribe</a>, which was about combat soldiers and the transition back to “normal” life. Soldiers come home and that intensity is gone, the sense of immediate and overwhelming purpose is gone. Even the title of your documentary about the hike, <a href="https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-last-patrol">The Last Patrol</a>, gestures at this longing to recapture the emotional intensity of war. Was that something that was clear to you from the outset, or did this part of it become clear once you were out there on the road?
<h4>Sebastian Junger</h4>
No, I knew how it would work out there. I mean, listen, the interesting thing about having to find water is that it creates the proper value for water. If you can just get water by turning on a faucet, it doesn’t have any value. If you have to go looking for it, suddenly water has value. Suddenly being warm has value, being safe has value.
I know that the only way to survive and function effectively in a raw environment like that, particularly the semi-industrial one that we were in, which had all kinds of social threats as well, it was to be in a small group that was quite loyal to itself, and where people were willing to do very hard things to make sure everyone was okay.
Since I wrote Tribe, I had this thought: “How do you define ‘tribe’?” It’s one of those elusive words, like freedom. You try to define it, and then it sort of squirts to the side and you’re like, “No, that’s not it either.” You can’t quite pin it down. And I was like, “This is ‘tribe.’ I will make sure that whatever happens to you will happen to me too. We’re going through this together.”
This small group that I walked with along the railroad lines, that’s very much how we were. At one point we had a 110-degree heat index, and one guy really started falling out. We were all carrying 50, 60 pounds on our back, even 70 sometimes if we were loaded up with food. We had to get where we were going. One of us said to the guy who was falling out, “Listen, man, I’ll take your pack.” He put 60 pounds on top of 60 pounds, and strapped it on and walked that way until the guy who was having trouble felt a little better and took his pack back. That’s “what happens to you, happens to me.” We’re in this together.
What I would say about Tribe, in the third chapter, I talk about soldiers because that’s the most immediate current topic that the public is familiar with. But actually, in the beginning of the book, I’m talking about how community works, and why the tribal community has always been so appealing.
Along the American frontier, there are many, many cases of young people, young Americans, absconding to the Natives. Running off to join the Natives. As Benjamin Franklin himself lamented, there were no examples of Native peoples going in the other direction. This is a white Christian society that thinks it’s superior, but people were sort of voting with their feet, as it were, and all of the migration was towards the tribal. You didn’t have the church breathing down your neck, you weren’t behind the plow 12 hours a day plowing up some rocky field. You didn’t have these awful sexual and social mores of colonial society.
Interestingly, all the way on the other side of the world, the Great Wall of China has always been thought of as having been built to keep out that sort of barbarian horde, the nomads on the steppe that invaded mainland China, invaded the Chinese empire and didn’t destroy everything. Obviously that was an element, but what many historians now think is that the wall was also there to keep people, impoverished Chinese farmers, from fleeing to nomadic society.
Nomadic society is always more equitable, more egalitarian than sedentary, agricultural society, where you can accumulate wealth and pass it on through generations. The beginnings of class structure start with agriculture. What the early Chinese were trying to do is keep their own people from absconding to the native peoples across the wall as well.
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To hear the rest of the conversation, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/2VlEBYdYRhV6gwzGa6GJHu?si=IiN2MLctQBGe6lW2ORbNag">click here</a>, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vox-conversations/id1215557536">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/search/vox%20conversations">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations">Stitcher</a>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/11/8/22763202/vox-conversations-sebastian-junger-freedom">https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/11/8/22763202/vox-conversations-sebastian-junger-freedom</a>

vox The paradox of American freedom

America is uniquely obsessed with “freedom.” You can see it in our politics. You can hear it in our discourse. But we’re also, strangely, a ...

People still can’t get enough of Princess Diana

Time to go Diana-watching again. The People’s Princess is once again back on our screens, and one of the most beloved sports on both sides of the pond is back in season. All the classic iconography is there, again and again. The sapphire engagement ring, the black sheep sweater, the dashing blonde haircut; in Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, in The Crown, in Diana: The Musical (which is streaming on Netflix and soon to reopen on Broadway): there she is, there she is, there she is.
As all of these Diana stories are happy to remind you, Princess Diana, who married Prince Charles in 1981 and divorced him in 1996, died in a car crash in 1997. You would be forgiven for wondering why, then, she seems to be suddenly inescapable 24 years later. Yet here she is, over and over again, on screen after screen, ducking her head and smiling shyly up at the camera lens, lovely and tragic and doomed.
Something about Diana seems to strike us, just now, as perfect for revisitation. In Spencer, Diana is a gothic heroine, wandering around the queen’s moldering country seat in the lonely splendor of her white evening gown, palpably aware that she has been imprisoned by her own beauty. In The Crown, she’s part innocent naif, part calculating manipulator, roller skating through the palace with her headphones on. In Diana: The Musical, she’s a put-upon girlboss, striving for global celebrity and adoration in the face of obstacle after obstacle from the recalcitrant royal family. Always, she becomes a metaphor for femininity writ large: its glamours and seductions, the way it traps and limits with its queasily close embrace.
Here are three of the big reasons Princess Diana is so inescapable just now.
From the very beginning of her fame, back when she was just Prince Charles’s girlfriend, Diana has been an object of fascination because she fits a particular cultural trope. She was one of those blondes who seems to be simultaneously very innocent and very sexy, and whose innocence works to render her sexiness nonthreatening: It’s safe to desire her, because she does not realize that she is desirable. (Marilyn Monroe and Britney Spears fit the same archetype.) “I have never seen such a strong charge of innocently provocative sex,” one of Diana’s wedding guests wrote in his diary the night of the wedding.
I call this pop cultural trope <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/21593569/princess-diana-explainer-crown-netflix-marilyn-monroe-britney-spears-innocence">the virgin sacrifice</a>. The name fits first because we are usually fascinated by the virginity or lack thereof of the women who fit the trope, and second because we tend to devour these women alive at the merest hint that they might not be as innocent as they seem: that they might wield their charisma intentionally, as a weapon; that they might not be virgins after all. The contradiction seems to continually fuel both obsession and outrage, driving us to pant lasciviously after tabloid coverage. We seem to long to see the innocent virgin at the heights of her desirability, and at her most fallen and desperate.
Diana embodied this binary with considerable style within her lifetime, which is part of why she was one of the most discussed and photographed women in the world at the time. But to look at why she’s having another moment right now, we’ll have to look at two of today’s big cultural conversations.
As a culture, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22350286/2000s-pop-culture-misogyny-britney-spears-janet-jackson-whitney-houston-monica-lewinsky">we are currently obsessed with looking back at the stories of the wronged women of the ’90s and the ’00s</a>. The revisitation is sometimes pegged to the premiere of <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22276585/framing-britney-spears-us-weekly-perez-hilton-daniel-ramos">Framing Britney Spears</a>, the New York Times documentary that argued earlier this year that Spears was unfairly targeted by a predatory media, but it would be more accurate to say that Framing Britney Spears is the culmination of a longer, ongoing trend of looking backward.
The popular podcast <a href="https://yourewrongabout.com/">You’re Wrong About</a>, which began in 2018, built its name in part on debunking cultural myths about women like Anna Nicole Smith and Monica Lewinsky. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/9/14/16301552/i-tonya-harding-kerrigan-review-tiff">Tonya Harding was the subject of an Oscar-winning film in 2017</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/arts/television/lorena-bobbitt-documentary-jordan-peele.html">an acclaimed 2019 documentary revisited Lorena Bobbitt</a>. Hardly a month seems to go by these days <a href="https://www.gawker.com/media/the-cultural-revisionism-industry">without a cultural artifact informing us that we all got it badly wrong</a> when we made one particular woman the butt of a global joke 20 years ago.
Part of this reconsideration seems to come from how drastically the cultural norms around feminism and misogyny have shifted over the past few decades, especially after the tumultuous upheaval brought on by the Me Too movement in 2017 and 2018. We veered out of one decade where snickering over nonconsensual upskirt photos was a perfectly normal late-night comedy joke into another in which revenge porn has a name and a criminal sentence attached to it. It’s natural, in the wake of such a rapid shift, to want to look back with wide and blinking eyes: Wow. We really all said some things then that we never would today, didn’t we?
And as the baby boomers begin to age out of their long-held positions as cultural gatekeepers, millennials have begun to take their place. With that changing of the guard comes enough accumulated cultural power that those who grew up in the ’90s and ’00s can indulge in a preoccupation with the decades of their childhood, and with how retrograde they can appear in hindsight.
“For me, it was kind of a rite of passage to look at stories that I remembered adults reporting on when I was a child and then seeing just how bad of a job they’ve done some of the time,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22350286/2000s-pop-culture-misogyny-britney-spears-janet-jackson-whitney-houston-monica-lewinsky">Sarah Marshall, co-host of You’re Wrong About, told Vox earlier this year</a>. “We just abused women for sport in the media, and I feel like that’s generationally something important to look at. What was in the media and the bloodstream when you were a child? How were the adults who were in charge of the culture then maybe not doing as good a job as you would like to try and do now?”
Enter Diana, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/princess-dianas-death#section_3">literally hounded to her death by a ravenous tabloid press</a>. The tragedy of Diana’s story makes her a perfect fit for our current moment of reexamination. But there’s an added wrinkle to Diana’s story that no one else has, one that makes her especially ripe for revisitation this year.
One of the signs that Diana is having a moment is that the women’s retailer Anthropologie has what is clearly a full Diana-themed section on its website this fall, complete with a Diana-look-alike model. But interspersed among all the photographs of shaggy blonde pageboy haircuts and classic English riding boots, there are photos of another model whom Anthropologie seems to believe goes with Diana: a woman who bears a striking resemblance to Meghan Markle, the daughter-in-law Diana would never live to see.
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1636407049_3344_51221" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22988371,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2HSfOjQ2KhhutWjcnhvFvqFXDqU=/0x0:2204x1014/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tIdoTv5pM-LEH8p8BmKNZJde8tU=/0x0:2204x1014/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6muVuq258_f_zevk4keAk7o2j-c=/0x0:2204x1014/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jRx1J0KxEwz9GIHyBeHCaWzEyDU=/0x0:2204x1014/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cXpcMzpHSq3ouIV-15EwXdSUsDM=/0x0:2204x1014/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ANgYKMZWpCoOU2IU46Mq5IbYiGs=/0x0:2204x1014/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3DUx92t1kj7g3nQQtjACSykNyY8=/0x0:2204x1014/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XZEP4MZnJNFqXRI0iet4Hisg_5M=/0x0:2204x1014/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ziP12T-xTqKKFaGjmyle3960X84=/0x0:2204x1014/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="2204" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7zy_pavJ6aA28LZpiK4H5Ui1PlA=/0x0:2204x1014/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VFy_IGVCkt_p5GK4buPqXAtWdts=/0x0:2204x1014/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rIqRCweKSCxvBzoHxh_IUvnjBZs=/0x0:2204x1014/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wLRr_lLjRbAr5e1Ria8SPvvZoOs=/0x0:2204x1014/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/618hKsX_R7D59ojpbZwTbQpN9zc=/0x0:2204x1014/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7SbHGOSZyWBpyeANoGeEHgL0sZQ=/0x0:2204x1014/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ldEi-pXNmp4ONG7zXqSj118AX_M=/0x0:2204x1014/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FEJgDIIVKSWjkMslTeRiHYKLcOI=/0x0:2204x1014/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BgTkHdW8ZPxGCv3I-DXrSlgv3fk=/0x0:2204x1014/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0_3Rl_AfTt3YTW6-QnXJWnMCaxI=/0x0:2204x1014/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2204x1014):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22988371/FB_BWulXEAc5x8F.jpeg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>Anthropologie’s Diana section features a Meghan Markle look-alike model.</figcaption>
<cite>Anthropologie</cite></figure>
Meghan Markle, who knows her way around a publicity narrative as well as Diana did, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22323456/harry-meghan-markle-diana-oprah-interview-cbs">has repeatedly aligned herself with Princess Diana</a> in the time since she and her husband Prince Harry left the royal family in 2020. In <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22323456/harry-meghan-markle-diana-oprah-interview-cbs">a much-discussed interview with Oprah this March</a>, Meghan and Harry explained that much like Diana, Meghan had faced intense mental health struggles upon joining the royal family.
“What I was seeing was history repeating itself,” Harry said, adding, “When I’m talking about history repeating itself, I’m talking about my mother. When you can see something happening in the same kind of way, anybody would ask for help.”
The pair said they relied on the money Harry inherited from Diana to support themselves as they withdrew from the royal family, and Meghan compared their decision to talk to Oprah to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-57163815">Diana’s infamous choice</a> to go public about her discontent with her marriage to Prince Charles. Throughout the interview, Meghan wore a diamond bracelet that had belonged to Diana.
Meghan and Harry offer a potent reminder of the power of the Diana story: the tale of a beautiful princess trapped within an unfeeling royal system, driven slowly toward despair, is a killer narrative arc in any decade. But they also offer a valuable new twist on the old tale.
Diana was caught in a loveless marriage, and Charles was both unable and unwilling to support her in the way she needed to be supported. But Meghan and Harry have made it clear that they are facing their own trials and tribulations together, as partners — so when Meghan needed to leave the royal family, Harry left with her.
They’re offering the public a rare chance to redeem the memory of the virgin sacrifice whose life we destroyed. So while pop culture remains committed to constantly revisiting the details of what happened to Diana and why, Harry and Meghan offer us a chance to retell the Diana story yet again — this time with a happy ending at last.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22761449/princess-diana-spencer-musical-crown-movie-tv-theater">https://www.vox.com/culture/22761449/princess-diana-spencer-musical-crown-movie-tv-theater</a>

vox People still can’t get enough of Princess Diana

Time to go Diana-watching again. The People’s Princess is once again back on our screens, and one of the most beloved sports on both sides o...

5 questions about Eternals — and what its ending means for the MCU

While I’m not sure if <a href="https://www.vox.com/22761699/eternals-post-credits-scenes-spoilers-harry-styles-nick-fury">Eternals</a> is the best Marvel movie in the studio’s history, I think it is one of the strangest. It may also be the most ambitious. Chloe Zhao’s superhero foray purposely shakes up everything we — Marvel fans, the Marvel-curious, or maybe the people who haven’t tuned in since Endgame — thought we knew about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The Eternals have been on earth since the beginning of time! They’re cosmic entities who created human civilization! They’re also horny but not good at sex scenes! And they may or may not be responsible for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima!
What?
A movie as sweeping and weird and as Marvel as this may have left you with some questions about the Eternals, the galaxies they’re supposed to be creating, or their relative culpability for history’s great disasters. If so, you’ve come to the right place. I have them too.
Here are some possible answers to the biggest questions you might still have about Eternals after watching it. And if you haven’t seen the movie yet, needless to say, spoilers follow!
In Eternals, the eponymous superhero group saves us from their own creators, the Celestials, stopping the end of the world by minutes, if not seconds. Sersi (Gemma Chan) halts the Celestial named Tiamut from hatching by turning him to stone, and reverses what seems a for-sure-cataclysmic apocalypse. Before that, Deviants — the villainous animal-like beings — pop up and start wrecking London and a global earthquake happens. The attacks and earthquake make worldwide news, so one would think this international event would, for sure, be observed by Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Right?
Yet, none of them come to the rescue.
<a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/11/3/13508070/doctor-strange-post-credits-scenes-spoilers">Doctor Strange</a>, who is allegedly monitoring Earth for threats? Silent. Okoye, who’s in technologically advanced Wakanda and was part of Black Widow’s global observation team in Endgame? Nowhere to be found. Captain Marvel, who also reported to Nat in Endgame, does not make an appearance either. Neither do Ant-Man nor the newest Avenger, Shang-Chi.
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<figcaption>More Eternals from Eternals!</figcaption>
<cite>Courtesy of Marvel Studios</cite></figure>
Eternals provides no explanation as to why not a single Avenger is at least curious about how close we were to the end of Earth. The only reasoning that fits in with the story that Marvel previously constructed (i.e., that there’s always an Avenger or two monitoring what’s happening on Earth) is that we’ll eventually find out that they’re off on another adventure.
Maybe Doctor Strange is stuck repairing the multiverse, Captain Marvel is off in space, Ant-Man is doing something with the Quantum Realm, Okoye has her hands tied in Wakanda, and Shang-Chi isn’t fully part of the team yet? After all, the last time we saw Nick Fury, he was in space taking a vacation. Perhaps this is what gets the team back together.
It doesn’t seem like it’ll happen soon.
The mid-credits scene for Eternals contains a big clue. Eros a.k.a. Starfox (Harry Styles) is introduced into the fold, and basically tells the existing team that they’ll need his help to confront Arishem, the Celestials’ leader, and get their kidnapped friends back. That basically sets up a sequel in which the Eternals go up against Arishem, right? And since the Avengers didn’t intervene in the movie, they currently have no business with the Eternals or Arishem.
But there are a couple of tidbits that are a bit curious. The first is Dane Whitman (Kit Harington); Dane, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22761699/eternals-post-credits-scenes-spoilers-harry-styles-nick-fury">in the final credits scene</a>, is about to touch a magical sword and become the superhero known in the comic books as the Black Knight. Before he touches the sword, Blade’s disembodied voice (Mahershala Ali) tells him to stop. Hence, there could be a story in which Dane joins Blade or the Eternals to rescue Sersi, which sets up an Avengers and Eternals meetup.
But there’s more: In Eternals, Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) creates rings that allow the ancient heroes to absorb cosmic power. These rings are very, very similar to the Ten Rings that Shang-Chi possesses. As established in one of <a href="https://www.vox.com/22640516/shang-chi-post-credits-scenes-captain-marvel-hulk-eternals">Shang-Chi’s post-credits</a> scenes, Shang-Chi’s rings are of unknown origin: Wong, Captain Marvel, and Bruce Banner analyze them and the only thing they can surmise is that the rings are very old, very powerful, and have a beacon attached to them. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the very old and very powerful Eternals now have rings that seem to be emitting a signal.
So prior to the movie’s release, following a few initial screenings, whispers about its plot started coming out. In particular, there was a fair amount of talk about the movie’s flashback to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. It was described, somewhat disingenuously, as “Phastos did Hiroshima.”
That’s not quite what happens. But people were confused, maybe even tickled, at the sheer absurdity of that prospect.
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<figcaption>Phastos feels bad about the bomb, guys.</figcaption>
<cite>Courtesy of Marvel Studios</cite></figure>
In the film, there is a flashback scene to the bombing of Hiroshima. Phastos and Ajak (Salma Hayek) are in the Japanese city, grieving over the bombing. The mushroom cloud looms in the sky. Phastos’s power is invention, and he feels like his help in the past pushed humanity toward this. Ajak assures him it didn’t, but that doesn’t stop him from grieving.
Granted, the optics of making these two Eternals feel and maybe even be tangentially responsible for the American government’s bombing of Hiroshima is a choice. It could be interpreted as these two fictional beings — played by people of color — having responsibility for the mass death perpetrated by a predominantly white government at the end of World War II. That’s part of the reason everyone defaulted to absurdity when they read about the scene.
But it seems like what director Chloe Zhao was getting at in this scene, and which the movie plays with constantly, are the ideas of colonialism and isolationism. The Eternals were sent to Earth to help cultivate humanity and rid the planet of Deviants at the same time. They set technological advancements, civilizations, medicine, arts, and everything in between into motion. But they also are told not to intervene and to let humans sort out their differences, no matter how gruesome or horrific — e.g., slavery, American Indian genocide, the Holocaust, WWI, etc. Those decisions weigh on their eternal souls.
Your mileage may vary on how well you think Zhao executed this. There were definitely some clunky, gummy parts. When I first saw the movie, I interpreted the Hiroshima scene as Phastos coming to terms with that isolationism and how he set humanity on a path that eventually led to an atomic bomb being detonated, rather than “Phastos did Hiroshima.”
I don’t believe the movie really wants you to think their isolationism is a good thing. They fail to realize that conflicts and violence may be something humans learned from watching the Eternals hunt down Deviants. The Eternals could’ve stopped such atrocities and they didn’t. Also, their long game hinges on the complete destruction of Earth. They’re not supposed to be inherently good beings.
The main crux of the movie is that the “good” Eternals have a change of heart and realize humanity is worth saving, but how each one comes to that conclusion isn’t tidy either. Ajak is more altruistic and is inspired by how the humans and Avengers fought Thanos. Sersi and Phastos are swayed in large part because they fall in love with humans.
When it comes to Phastos, that 1945 flashback is important because that’s when he loses all faith in humanity. He’s fine with abandoning humans forever. That faith is only restored by his husband and their son.
Since <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/4/26/18514287/avengers-endgame-ending-explained-spoiler">Endgame</a>, Marvel storytelling has been pushing around the idea of alternate dimensions as the studio’s new big adventure. In <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22318436/wandavision-episode-9-wanda-future-spoilers">WandaVision</a>, Wanda Maximoff shows that, among other things, she can warp reality itself. In <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22522332/loki-review-marvel-tom-hiddleston-owen-wilson">Loki</a>, it was revealed that alternate timelines do exist and that the organization in charge of them has lost all control. The upcoming Spider-Man movie, No Way Home (a collaboration between Sony and Marvel) is allegedly going to introduce some <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22698513/venom-2-let-there-be-carnage-post-credits-scene-tom-holland-spider-man">dimension-jumping heroes and villains</a>.
So, it seems like this giant, swirling, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22632477/shang-chi-marvel-mcu-multiverse-eternals-wandavision-loki-disney-plus">maybe-confusing multiverse</a> is here to stay. The bigger mindfuck is that The Eternals introduces a concept to layer on top of that: There are all-powerful cosmic beings called Celestials, and they’re constantly creating new universes.
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1636408392_5077_46375" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22989996,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_VUih5H2e_7as13cMsPWrEZFztM=/0x0:6048x4027/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fSvekLgfnJ3qmDSW3cFrgi8SpN4=/0x0:6048x4027/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ofzLNnbMVgUc3aKkQeSUWSkMJws=/0x0:6048x4027/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GEW5kzWQ1SzyE1jjZwj69io4XCI=/0x0:6048x4027/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ri6lSYTo-NNxjCunftusUjhvLQo=/0x0:6048x4027/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0ODoCLBqeOgxUvVbsQnDWWN7cbw=/0x0:6048x4027/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KtKc8OArK9z_PZnVNEzNOStFxvo=/0x0:6048x4027/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wk9VDOCtWcr9PBg4JWGst_GIY-k=/0x0:6048x4027/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xruP7hmd9T9BmC0Z8BbrDy73jDA=/0x0:6048x4027/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="6048" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cqcM4R9s4csGce_InLD1fg7TSXY=/0x0:6048x4027/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cdxP7IdV02sbgpojGnMZgxiyHg4=/0x0:6048x4027/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5G4KEY3ojxECpUSxQnFOb7Tr_Y8=/0x0:6048x4027/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RPkv-Y2BE7wD8gpx6TtRaK1mnq0=/0x0:6048x4027/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Dn3LWo3Y4XmpZXc8QlJSoReUTYo=/0x0:6048x4027/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WCZMjqNPkdqt00lEmr-9lOP3p3c=/0x0:6048x4027/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/q4mzKGYqExQFci43cBsXz3-TocA=/0x0:6048x4027/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/R9gdBHYwi8HBa4YZs5J_S8p9q5w=/0x0:6048x4027/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eE00s0Q8P8fEjjw_Zowtld6Q4cg=/0x0:6048x4027/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7NhiMuYwy34NnlnEJRYBOf_EtAc=/0x0:6048x4027/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6048x4027):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22989996/SLH_02817_RC.jpg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>The Eternals have cute outfits!</figcaption>
<cite>Courtesy of Sophie Mutevelian/Marvel Studios</cite></figure>
For fans, that means there’s not only the possibility of alternate dimensions and parallel timelines, but there could be whole unidentified and maybe not-yet-created universes throughout the MCU, all with their own different timelines and dimensions. We could be headed down an endless rabbit hole of possibilities but, it’s ultimately Marvel’s call.
An immediate effect — already in progress — will likely be more of a distinction between Avengers who take on these big cosmic adventures (e.g., Captain Marvel, Thor, Doctor Strange, the Guardians of the Galaxy) and Avengers who are more street-level (e.g., Hawkeye, Black Widow, and the upcoming She-Hulk) and handle terrestrial business. We saw the beginnings of this with the debut of Marvel’s Disney+ shows like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the ending of Black Widow. The split might be inevitable given how big the MCU feels like it’s going to get.
What this also means for the MCU is probably the introduction of some cosmic villains for the Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain Marvel to take on. It all but sets up an introduction of the famed comic book villain Galactus, who literally eats planets. Galactus has run into the Avengers and Fantastic Four more than a few times (and the latter group has a movie in the works). SWORD, which was hinted at in a Spider-Man: Far From Home <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/7/16/20693929/spider-man-far-from-home-post-credits-scene-fury-skrull-sword">post-credits scene</a> and referenced in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/7/16/20693929/spider-man-far-from-home-post-credits-scene-fury-skrull-sword">WandaVision</a>, is an observation agency that deals with space threats and should factor more and more into the future of the MCU too.
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<figcaption>Beauty ≠ sexy!!</figcaption>
<cite>Courtesy of Sophie Mutevelian/Marvel Studios</cite></figure>
I am not here to bury the Eternals sex scene nor am I here to exalt it. The only thing I can say is that the rules of sex scenes are not simple nor are they finite, and even a scene involving Richard Madden and Gemma Chan on a beach can go wrong.
Two regular-looking people could film the steamiest scene in cinematic existence. Two beautiful people could film the most flaccid sex scene known to man. I do not make the rules!
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/11/8/22766114/eternals-ending-post-credits-blade-harry-styles-avengers">https://www.vox.com/2021/11/8/22766114/eternals-ending-post-credits-blade-harry-styles-avengers</a>

vox 5 questions about Eternals — and what its ending means for the MCU

While I’m not sure if Eternals is the best Marvel movie in the studio’s history, I think it is one of the strangest. It may also be the mos...

Drop shipping, explained

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“Can I tell you a really easy way to make money online?” asks Maddie, a doe-eyed 20-something, in a TikTok that’s been viewed over 1 million times. It is so easy, in fact, that making money “<a href="https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdYS4Fuq/">basically requires no skill at all</a>” — just a laptop and a wifi connection.
Maddie is one of the many hustle-culture figures on the internet who has gained popularity by encouraging their followers <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@makemoneywmak/video/7019318522681576710?_d=secCgYIASAHKAESPgo8wGBhYdW%2FO0SUTY1CG%2BaQskgvhJluAq9ldI22bB4D2nU%2FJ6HILKiSL1wdnKTGoVurueNEbuOMid8IEVyiGgA%3D&checksum=f974cca36c35ae6e5f4edae9674a4b51781dbc00f8e03d8fae63fbf2e89cc153&language=en&preview_pb=0&sec_user_id=MS4wLjABAAAAX4cD2SJXs21ZajtkD6MXoytqzpLewyJ5sVah2KP3YcO1isKQCbUvn_WpO7Q2wpGG&share_app_id=1233&share_item_id=6942853987519565061&share_link_id=3D70D83C-25A3-4F76-A7F0-33499DECB2CF&source=h5_m&timestamp=1634761980&tt_from=copy&u_code=d38da9c9m0idg1&user_id=6626396359836762117&utm_campaign=client_share&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=copy&_r=1&is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&lang=en&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=6990741887707874822">to start a business</a>, usually through a practice called drop shipping. All a person needs is an idea of what they’re going to sell, a website, and boom, they’ve got a potentially profitable side hustle that could make anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand per week. “We’re going to be drop shipping with Printed Mint,” Maddie goes on, referring to a print-on-demand company that creates customized products. “Don’t be afraid of that word.”
A few years ago, this disclaimer — that users shouldn’t “be afraid” of drop shipping — might not have been necessary. And several years before that, most people probably hadn’t ever heard of the term unless they worked in retail operations or supply chain management. Drop shipping is the method of shipping an order directly from a manufacturer to a customer’s home, without the retailer holding any inventory. This business model actually predates the internet by several decades and has become integral to how e-commerce operates.
Today, however, many consumers associate drop shipping with a breed of semi-shady e-commerce sellers, notorious for arbitraging wholesale items for profit and <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22745054/instagram-boutique-drop-shipping-ghost-stores">relying on the trappings of small businesses to gain shopper trust</a>. These sellers only serve as the middleman between consumers and manufacturers, without seemingly providing any labor or value-add to the products they’re selling. As a result, they’re often regarded as scammers or fraudsters. Michigan’s attorney general has even <a href="https://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,4534,7-359-81903_20942-512905--,00.html">issued a consumer alert on drop shipping</a>, cautioning people to be wary of whom they buy from online.
Through years of commercialized conditioning, the average shopper has grown accustomed to buying things from online brands they’ve never heard of. People don’t often wonder about where their stuff comes from, how it’s made, or why it takes so long to arrive. Consider the <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22555723/tiktok-viral-products-cerave-sky-high-mascara-amazon-leggings">“TikTok-made-me-buy-it”</a> phenomenon, which turns a faddish gadget like a sunset lamp or <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/14/21057307/tiktok-lights-keto-friendly-bread-beauty-fridges-seo-products">LED lights</a> into a coveted item for an online audience. This behavior creates a ripe environment for all kinds of drop shippers, from the “reputable” sellers to the novices hoping to earn a quick buck.
Drop shipping — and the forces that enable an individual to outsource, buy wholesale, rebrand, and sell overseas goods — is a pronounced feature of global capitalism, not a bug. Aided by e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Shopify, this model has sprung from the interwoven, complex network of material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and sellers to affect nearly every American who shops online. Still, these business ventures are rarely regulated, at least in the US. Drop shipping has been allowed to persist and proliferate with the backing of some of the biggest e-commerce companies in the world. So, are these “scams” or potentially legitimate business endeavors? It depends on how you consider their middleman role — and, by extension, how these intermediaries are enabled by the global capitalist economy.
Per its simplest definition, drop shipping is a way for retailers to fulfill customer orders. After a customer purchases a product — online, in a physical store, over the phone, or in a catalog — the order is shipped directly from the wholesale supplier to their home, so the retailer doesn’t have to keep inventory on hand. This method was historically championed by mail-order companies, like <a href="https://www.wholesaleted.com/the-history-of-dropshipping/">J.C. Penney, Sears</a>, and <a href="https://www.ikea.com/us/en/this-is-ikea/about-us/our-heritage-pubde78e100">Ikea</a>, and later brick-and-mortar stores to sell furniture, appliances, mattresses, or products that were too unwieldy to constantly keep in stock.
With the e-commerce boom in the 2000s, more retailers turned to drop shipping to efficiently fulfill online orders. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/8/28/20833645/wayfair-many-brands-websites">Wayfair</a>, one of the internet’s biggest furniture stores, is a drop shipper; it doesn’t manufacture any of the products it sells, but works with a network of 11,000 suppliers to drop ship listed products directly to customers.
Over the past two decades or so, an emergent class of independently run drop shippers has entered the e-commerce equation, made possible first by platforms like Amazon and eBay, and later Shopify. These are virtual brands and storefronts with little capital, no inventory, and few employees. They are essentially digital facades constructed by independent entrepreneurs, who, in the model of Wayfair, don’t own or handle any physical inventory before setting up shop. These solo merchants tend to provide very little or vague information about a product’s provenance. As a result, many consumers regard drop shipping, and the cottage industry of e-commerce entrepreneurs behind these enterprises, with disdain.
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“Most drop shippers don’t have a direct relationship with the factories they source from, and aren’t able to verify the authenticity or quality of the product,” said Sid Gupta, CEO of Quince, an online marketplace that ships goods directly from manufacturers to consumers. “All these factors are open questions for consumers, who’ve only gotten smarter and savvier over time.”
The term has a loaded meaning, according to Ayelet Israeli, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School: “We know that many direct-to-consumer and digital-native brands use the drop-ship model to deliver products, but people don’t consider them to be drop shippers.”
What is the difference, then, between a drop shipper and a direct-to-consumer (DTC) startup? DTC brands like Allbirds and Casper use the drop-ship model to deliver goods, but have significantly more control over how their products are made and shipped out. These companies are also bolstered by venture capital funding, which helps them scale quickly. These categories, however, are not mutually exclusive. A DTC brand, like the fitness apparel company Gymshark, can begin as a drop-shipping endeavor before fine-tuning its supply chain and product design.
That’s because drop shipping has a very low barrier to entry. Launching a store is so easy, in fact, that reporters have <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wxgk/can-you-get-rich-from-dropshipping">blogged about their attempts</a> at <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/7715/how-i-made-100-dollars-by-starting-a-sketchy-online-store-and-you-can-too">doing so</a>. On YouTube, tutorials about how to start drop shipping can range from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwDP37jDffo">about 10 minutes</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG-KXQUDpts">an hour</a>, where an experienced drop shipper walks a newbie through the process of creating a store and finding a product to sell.
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Find a unique product on AliExpress
Build a store for the product on Shopify
Drive traffic to your store through ads on Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, etc.
Once demand is validated with dropshipping, begin private labeling and ordering in bulk from Alibaba.
— Ricky Amador ‍ (@ecomricky) <a href="https://twitter.com/ecomricky/status/1455308705013063687?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 1, 2021</a></blockquote>
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“The first important step in drop shipping has always been and will always be finding your product,” advises <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG-KXQUDpts">one seller</a>. “This is what you’re going to sell and advertise to customers, so you have to make sure your product has demand or is trending so you can make money from it.” Then, on an e-commerce platform like Shopify, the seller can build out a storefront centered on that product, mark up the product costs, and find an overseas supplier or wholesaler through AliExpress. Only when an order is placed on the drop shipper’s site does the seller have to purchase the product (at wholesale price) from the supplier, who is then responsible for shipping the item to the customer.
As profitable as this model can be in the short term, drop shippers have to eventually scale for the business to retain customers and grow. Otherwise, it might not be profitable in the long run. A seller can, for example, improve shipping times and offer more products, factors that might attract customers. “A lot of the very good drop-shipping brands are constantly evolving,” said Tan Choudhury, a 24-year-old entrepreneur from Puerto Rico, who runs multiple drop shipping businesses and a YouTube channel. “Lifting a product off AliExpress is a good way to get started, but once you have capital, the ideal goal is working towards private-labeling your products and creating a real brand, like what Gymshark did.”
In his 2017 investigation of Instagram’s many dropshipping brands, the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-strange-brands-in-your-instagram-feed/550136/">identified Shopify</a> as the favored e-commerce platform behind these online stores. Shopify, according to Madrigal, served as “the base layer for an emerging ecosystem that solders digital advertising through Facebook onto the world of Asian manufacturers and wholesalers who rep their companies on Alibaba and its foreigner-friendly counterpart, AliExpress.” While Shopify is largely responsible for powering this latest iteration of dropshipping brands, it was not the first company to do so.
In 2021, online sellers have multiple avenues to grow their shop: through influencer marketing, targeted ads, or by producing viral content. About two decades ago, this level of growth was largely unfeasible — until eBay and Amazon opened up their platforms to third-party retailers.
Third-party sellers, a category that includes drop shippers, currently account for <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/259782/third-party-seller-share-of-amazon-platform/">about 50 percent</a> of Amazon’s commercial activity. Thousands of merchants sell through <a href="https://sell.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://sell.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22527942[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22527942[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)</a>, a program akin to drop shipping that guarantees Amazon about a 15 percent cut of sales. FBA requires sellers to invest in merchandise — whether their own or from an overseas manufacturer — and store it in Amazon warehouses for the company to handle packing, shipping, and returns. For shoppers, this offers a semblance of quality control. Even if a product is technically sold by drop shippers, the order arrives in an Amazon package and is subject to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GQ37ZCNECJKTFYQV" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GQ37ZCNECJKTFYQV\u0026ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22527942[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"nodeId":"GQ37ZCNECJKTFYQV","ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22527942[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>returns and refunds under Amazon policy</a>.
“Amazon, and before that eBay, helped sellers generate traffic for individual products,” said Alexander Chernev, a professor of marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “Sellers didn’t need a physical store to ship things out. They didn’t even have to sell multiple products. They could be very successful, even if only one product they sold was in high demand.”
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<aside><q>“Sellers didn’t need a physical store to ship things out. They didn’t even have to sell multiple products.”</q></aside>
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As more people recognized the potential to profit quickly from drop shipping, sellers flocked to any virtual marketplace that welcomed them, like Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, and even Depop. Eventually, some grew tired of being <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-changed-search-algorithm-in-ways-that-boost-its-own-products-11568645345">subjected to Amazon’s interests</a>. They <a href="https://youtu.be/m5FXzrqharM?t=149">claimed</a> that <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/788109/amazon-retail-market-share-usa/">Amazon’s growth</a> over the past decade has made it harder to sustain an independent business (Amazon accounts for about 37 percent of all e-commerce sales in North America). Still, many sought out other platforms that took less revenue from sales and allowed sellers to retain a distinct brand identity and connection with customers.
“At some point, sellers realized that they didn’t need Amazon to generate traffic anymore,” Chernov said. “They could start their own website. And social media, in a sense, replaced some of the product discovery functions that Amazon provided.”
This is where Shopify (and other website builders, like WordPress’s WooCommerce) comes in. The platform, according to Chernev, “connected the dots for sellers” by providing back-end support: website creation, payment processing, email marketing, assistance with targeted advertising, and perhaps most crucially, a drop-shipping service called Oberlo that pulls products directly from AliExpress. Through these features, Shopify became the platform of choice for modern drop shippers and anyone who wanted to sell stuff online, from direct-to-consumer brands to content creators. The expansion of drop shipping is a testament to Shopify’s emerging dominance in e-commerce, and is sustained by the rise of <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22412098/social-commerce-explainer">shoppable social media</a>.
To be on the internet is to exist in a <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22412098/social-commerce-explainer">prolonged state of ambient shopping</a>. You can be scrolling through Instagram or TikTok or Pinterest and be presented with a host of nifty, must-have gadgets. Products and brands can suddenly <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22555723/tiktok-viral-products-cerave-sky-high-mascara-amazon-leggings">garner cult followings</a> after going viral, sometimes overnight. This is a boon for drop shippers, who try to anticipate or even kick-start trends by either going viral or bombarding users with ads. Take, for example, Halara, the athleisure brand behind the <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22667186/exercise-dress-tiktok-hype-explained">TikTok-famous exercise dress</a>. It is <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/PetiteFitness/comments/li2uzw/has_anyone_tried_halara_clothing/">rumored</a> to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/OutdoorVoices/comments/mp56zr/outdoor_voices_dupe_drop_shipping_warning/">drop ship</a> from AliExpress, but users don’t seem to care. They’ve grown familiar with the brand through its relentless ad strategy.
Social media, then, creates a layer of legitimacy to these endeavors — which I’ve referred to as “<a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22745054/instagram-boutique-drop-shipping-ghost-stores">ghost stores</a>” run by ghost sellers — while directing customer traffic to them. This symbiotic relationship between social media and sellers is, of course, a major boon for Shopify. One company manager <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22412098/social-commerce-explainer">described</a> it this way: “Social media networks provide the audience, and Shopify provides the storefront.”
Shopify is in a position to be, as <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/23/21075314/shopify-ecommerce-jeffree-star-shane-dawson-kylie-jenner-allbirds">Patrick Sisson reported for Vox</a>, “arming the rebels” by positioning itself as the small business antithesis to Amazon: “Shopify argues that by creating a merchant-first software product and constantly adapting to fast-moving changes in how we shop online, it helps support more entrepreneurship and new business, which ends up benefiting the consumer in the long run.” Its merchants don’t have to succumb to the rules of a virtual marketplace and can maintain some level of independence, unlike Amazon sellers.
The drop-ship craze, though, has threatened all kinds of small business owners, from artists to designers. They have to contend with copycat designs and compete with lower prices set by independent drop shippers, all while holding limited stock.
Ghost sellers have invaded most marketplaces in recent years, even <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2021/04/10390031/dropshipping-depop-sellers-aliexpress">secondhand resale platforms like Depop</a>. (Since March 2020, Depop has cracked down on drop shippers.) On Etsy, which is owned by Depop’s parent company, the prevalence of drop shippers appeared to alter the fabric of the site, which was once a haven for handmade, crafty goods. It began with Etsy’s policy change in October 2013, when sellers were allowed to work with outside manufacturers to make their products, so long as the designs were original. This decision, as <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/9/4/20841475/etsy-free-shipping-amazon-handmade-josh-silverman">Kaitlyn Tiffany explained in her excellent 2019 piece for Vox</a>, was necessary so sellers could keep up with customer demand. In hindsight, it was a turning point for Etsy, which grew cluttered with low-quality junk — mostly print-on-demand products that were drop shipped to customers.
Nancy Quiaoit, an artist and Etsy seller since 2013, told me that it is increasingly difficult to find handmade or specialty items through Etsy’s search function. She surmised that since drop shippers and resellers list items with high quantities attached, their stores rank higher on Etsy’s search.
“Recently, I went through seven pages [of Etsy stores] and only found two stores, which weren’t reselling items, printed T-shirts, or cheap jewelry which aren’t really handmade,” Quiaoit told me in an email. “These are simply printed pieces that can be found literally anywhere.” Ultimately, Etsy turned a blind eye to lower-quality merchants, wholesale resellers, and drop shippers. It was a financial trade-off, and the company grew more profitable as it blindly welcomed more sellers. <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/409371/etsy-annual-revenue/">Etsy</a> had its biggest sales year to date in 2020, earning $1.7 billion in revenue.
The biggest winners in the Great Drop-shipping Game are still the tech platforms that are actively profiting from it, but every day, thousands of drop shippers, from the aspiring to the seasoned, hope they can emerge as the second-biggest winners of the e-commerce boom.
The hustle doesn’t always reap the promised rewards. Drop shipping isn’t exactly a pyramid scheme, but its economic distribution is staggered like one. (Such is also the case for <a href="http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11857.jpeg">global wealth distribution</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/16/17693198/ceo-pay-gap-income-inequality">corporate inequality</a>.) It’s a finite endeavor, even though some entrepreneurs like to boast that it’s a pathway to corporate and financial freedom. New sellers are competing for attention and money from a limited pool of shoppers, sourcing from the same list of mass-produced goods on AliExpress or Zendrop.
There are a handful of sellers at the very top who claim to be raking in millions in revenue, thereby becoming able to quit their jobs, maybe jet-set around the world, and invest the money they’ve made into other ventures. And at the bottom are the vast majority of drop shippers, whose stores are unprofitable and fail to “take off.” These participants eventually quit, and a few even lose money from their initial investments. In this sense, drop shipping can seem like other get-rich-quick schemes on the internet, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22688317/mlm-covid-19-pandemic-recruiting-sales-paparazzi">like MLMs</a>, with its share of gurus and doctrinaires.
In the middle tier of this pyramid are the entrepreneurs who are earning a living wage, or supplementing their drop-shipping income through paid digital courses and personalized one-on-one calls. These gurus are, in a sense, drop shipping business advice and building an audience through hustle culture platitudes. They are glorified pawns in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/3/16/22332680/newnew-creator-economy-pearpop">creator economy</a>, a middleman monetizing the secrets of his unverifiable “success” and marketing it to anyone willing to pay for it. Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dropshipping/">Reddit</a> and <a href="https://forum.alidropship.com/">e-commerce forums</a> are full of struggling- to semi-profitable sellers, who for the most part aren’t earning enough to turn their store into a full-time endeavor.
Even those who are raking in sales feel that they are “living on borrowed time,” wrote journalist Sirin Kale <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dropshipping-instagram-ads">for Wired UK</a>. Apparently, Facebook is growing hostile to drop shippers and advertising costs are ballooning. TikTok can increase the likelihood of a product going viral for free, but the internet’s trend cycles are hard to predict and the app’s algorithm is hard to crack.
A number of successful drop shippers, too, have <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/11-months-and-750-000-later-i-decided-to-close-my-drop-shipping-business-heres-why-e4d96eb5cb83">called it quits</a> after a certain amount of time. As a way out, they sell their company to private investors and use that money to search for another business idea to scale. The end goal, according to Choudhury, is to turn his ventures into fully fledged DTC brands.
Meanwhile, the onus has increasingly fallen on the shopper to determine the legitimacy and quality of the stuff they buy, even when platforms incline them to make impulse purchases. “People don’t care about brands the way they used to,” said Israeli, the marketing professor at Harvard. “Amazon and other e-commerce platforms have turned everything into a commodity that’s distinguishable only by price. Most consumers buy items based on reviews and price.”
Still, shoppers like to believe there’s something special or distinctive about the things they buy, even when it can be sourced elsewhere. This is not as much of a concern for more commonplace “commodity goods,” like a water bottle or a yoga mat, so long as they’re affordable and arrive as promised. The internet has made us so removed from the things we buy that it matters very little where they’re from. A customer is often only really enraged once they realize the blatant scale of the mark-up; for example, if they discover that an item of clothing they bought for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22745054/instagram-boutique-drop-shipping-ghost-stores">$90 costs only $26 on AliExpress</a>.
And while there is an inherent layer of risk to buying anything on the internet, Amazon, PayPal, and other payment providers have stringent customer protection policies that allow people to dispute transactions or request refunds for defective or faulty products.
“Consumers are getting smarter, which means they’re no longer falling for an untrustworthy or scammy-looking website,” said Jordan Welch, a 23-year-old former drop shipper who makes YouTube videos about e-commerce and marketing. “Facebook is doing a really good job at cracking down on ads with copyright or stolen content. They will shut down your store if enough customers give you negative reviews.”
It’s no longer enough, according to Welch, to drop-ship for a quick buck and “burn,” or get rid of, the store. “You have to do things ethically, just like with any business,” he said. Welch added that he’s currently turning his former drop-ship venture into a DTC brand by working directly with manufacturers and shipping companies from China.
The drop ship to DTC pipeline is why Welch thinks the model is here to stay: “What drop shippers are doing is finding a product and connecting people with that product. People have been doing this way before the internet, way before Shopify. We might one day switch to advertising in the metaverse, but I don’t think this exchange will ever go away.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22763901/drop-shipping-explained">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22763901/drop-shipping-explained</a>

vox Drop shipping, explained

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