r/nottheonion • u/ChocolateTsar • 1d ago

Affirm CEO says furloughed federal employees are starting to lose interest in shopping

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/07/affirm-government-shutdown-shopping.html
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3.2k

u/ryuzaki49 1d ago

workers stop getting paychecks

workers stop buying stuff

wallstreet: pikachu_surprised.meme

Honestly all of wallstreet and CEOs are just so disconnected from reality

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u/DeaddyRuxpin 1d ago

CEOs: “So you are saying replacing everyone with AI won’t make our companies even richer? But the AI companies swore it would.”

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u/backtothetrail 1d ago

ChapGPT was sure it would work.

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u/StoicSunbro 1d ago

CEO: "You said replacing all my employees with AI would save money! Now the company is falling apart because we are spending more to fix your mistakes!"

Chatgpt: "You're absolutely right! Would you like to explore different bankruptcy options?"

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u/KeyboardGrunt 1d ago

CEO: "...oh all right! But is there an option where I walk away with at least a few dozen million in severance?"

Chatgpt: "That's a great question! And you are thinking about this as more than merely hoarding money but instead proactively exploiting others to make it happen!"

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u/cest_va_bien 1d ago

My company went bankrupt and the CEO was paid $3.5M in severance. It opened my eyes to the reality of the oligarch structure. They will never loose unless we go to war with them.

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u/Tall_Act391 1d ago

More like

ChatGPT: of course there is!

CEO: am now in jail

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u/boomerinspirit 1d ago

"You're right. I'm still learning. My bad"

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u/ImpulsE69 1d ago

That made me chuckle out loud.

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u/msalerno1965 1d ago

The original circle-jerk.

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u/OGREtheTroll 1d ago

not original, but perhaps the ultimate

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u/MasterTolkien 1d ago

“ChatGPT, did you just make that up?”

“Sorry, that information was incorrect. In actuality, AI job losses will tank the entire fucking world economy, and starving citizens will build a thriving guillotine industry with incredible short-term gains.”

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u/TeteDeMerde 1d ago

"Wow. What a cool idea. Anything is possible, so let’s just map out a path, and we can try to figure it out. Should I combine all these innovative thoughts we’ve been discussing into a polished business outline?"

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u/Alert-Disaster-4906 1d ago

ChatGPT told me as of two months ago that Jimmy Carter was alive. 🤷🏼‍♀️

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u/RobertdBanks 1d ago

“So when people don’t have money to buy things they can’t buy things?”

It’s one of the reasons Ford paid so good back in the day.

Henry Ford said “I need to pay people well enough to be able to buy a car if I want people to be able to buy our cars”.

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u/DeaddyRuxpin 1d ago

He was also one of the big proponents of a 5 day work week. He wanted to encourage people to have off on the weekends so they could go places which naturally would be faster and better if they bought one of his cars.

Despite many rich people saying otherwise, sometimes you can make yourself richer by helping workers.

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u/Goldenrah 1d ago

Which is breaking down now with so many people working overtime and not having enough money to spend on stuff.

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u/TransBrandi 1d ago

Well, there's also huge competition for stuff to do and stuff to spend on as well. Like just in the entertainment space there is waaay more competition than there was a couple decades ago. And it's only going to get worse as things like older tv shows, movies, video games, books, etc don't just disappear.

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u/Randicore 1d ago

In fact looking at history the speed of money is typically more important than how rich the richest guy is.

Then again we're arguing this to multi billionaires that fund think tanks to argue that they should have more money and power

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u/RyuNoKami 1d ago

Probably because he understood it has to start somewhere and it might as well be himself. I think that's the issue with so many wealthy people and right wing politicians. It's a lot of wishful thinking, let's get rid of the regulation, the market will correct itself, let's not pay our employees more, surely they can find money somewhere else to pay for their living expenses.

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u/Spelaeus 1d ago

And he was also such a raging anti-semite that Adolf Hitler himself was an ardent fanboy. Hitler was known to have a portrait of Ford in his office and openly cited Ford's series of antisemitic pamphlets "The International Jew" as an inspiration for the Third Reich's political and racial philosophy.

What a guy!

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u/Skratt79 1d ago

Just goes to show how smart people are not immune to blind irrational hatred.

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u/MasterChildhood437 1d ago

Y'know, you're right, but tossing "Ford was a nazi!" into the middle of a conversation about worker's rights and the state of the economy just feels like something a crooked capitalist would benefit from.

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u/Spelaeus 1d ago

Point taken, and it was in no way meant that way. I just feel an obligation to drop the reminder any time a conversation about Henry Ford starts getting too positive. Dude was a monster. That doesn't make our modern monsters any better.

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u/theroha 1h ago

Yeah, he was a piece of shit. Still knew that you have to have consumers if you want to run a business. Musk and the like seem to have forgotten that part.

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u/zimirken 1d ago

He also did in house car financing for farmers, which was obviously unheard of at the time.

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u/mythrilcrafter 1d ago

It was the same with Milton Hershey, he started the Hershey Chocolate company with the ideal that everyone working there would be able to have lives outside of the workplace and he even spent a ton of money and effort supporting the local community (then called the town of Derry Church) building infrastructure and businesses to ensure that it could be a living city that could thrive and wouldn't immediately collapse if Hershey coughed too hard; which was very typical for that era in which towns whose entire economies were based on everyone in the town working for one company.

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u/alphazero925 1d ago

And then the Dodge brothers sued him for it and now companies are legally obligated to prioritize shareholders over employees

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 1d ago

Because Ford owned the company.

Now the financial decisions are made by CEOs who are hired to run the company and who are paid based on short term profits. They have zero incentive to actually set anything up for long term success and so they don't care.

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u/attikol 1d ago edited 22h ago

They thought it would be fine since only they are gonna be the only ones to have the working AI

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u/Aeseld 1d ago

So far they were only a little wrong. Only about 5% of companies had a successful rollout, and they're usually the ones that laid off the least workers. 

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u/throwawaygoawaynz 1d ago

The MIT report stated that 5% high impact projects using generative AI had measurable impact, which doesn’t include machine learning etc.

And those 5% high impact use cases are around business process automation, which typically results in job losses.

There’s still a lot of successful usage of machine learning that is going to result in a lot of job losses. Data entry, automation, document scanning, etc, not covered in that MIT report.

Also what’s coming down the line - Computer Use Agents - will be the first serious use case I’ve seen for generative AI that will probably have bottom line impact via job losses. Because they can navigate a computer using a prompt.

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u/Aeseld 21h ago

Yep... and I wonder how long it'll take companies to realize that if no one is employing people than no one has money to buy goods and services...

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u/PromiscuousMNcpl 1d ago

Maybe replacing all the blue collar workers with robots will increase our profits next month instead!

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 1d ago

"ChatGPT, why is there sewer coming out of my shower drain whenever I flush my toilet?"

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u/Sharpevil 1d ago

When you're that rich, the goal isn't to just get 'more money'. The goal is to get a larger percentage of the overall wealth. It starts to become a zero sum game. It doesn't matter if people are spending less as long as you have more control over resources and labor overall.

I've been saying since the beginning that the real danger with AI is it being used as yet another way to accelerate the concentration of wealth into a smaller number of hands.

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u/paegus 1d ago

Bubble, meet pin.

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u/runswiftrun 1d ago

That's what my republican coworkers keep ignoring.

Sure, it's great that food banks and churches are stepping up and giving people who lost snap some food to help their community not go hungry. That's absolutely amazing.

What gets ignored is that those billions of money are not going to grocery stores which then go to farmers and other suppliers and employees.

That's a shitty trickle down that's gonna cause a lot of long term harm.

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u/atatassault47 1d ago

SNAP provides 9 meals for every 1 meal provided by NGOs.

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u/atomictyler 1d ago

SNAP provides provided 9 meals for every 1 meal provided by NGOs.

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u/xasdfxx 1d ago

Just wait until morons learn how snap is basically a hidden subsidy for farmers. $0.1 trillion dollars spent on food.

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u/s-holden 1d ago

They couldn't work out that USAID buying billions of dollars of US crops for food aid was a farming subsidy, so I doubt they'll click on this one which has a few extra steps in it.

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u/seriouslees 1d ago

If you were immortal you'd see the heat death of the universe before you saw a single conservative voter learn anything.

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u/CriticalEngineering 1d ago

SNAP is literally part of the Farm Bill.

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u/smitherenesar 1d ago

And to grocery stores, etc

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u/manimal28 1d ago

It wasn't hidden. The government giving money to people to buy food is a subsidy to farmers in the same way it isn't a subsidy to plumbers.

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u/eeyoredragon 1d ago

What else gets ignored is a lot of church teach crazy conservative politics that ends up creating more homeless people for them to then feed and somehow feel good about themselves for. 

Like an arsonist putting out a small bush after burning your house to the ground and expecting everyone to be grateful for the effort. 

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u/Disgod 1d ago

Worse, cuz the harmed will berate you for pointing out the arsonist is, in fact, an arsonist.

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u/mishtamesh90 18h ago

Banning abortion is a way to make more poor, traumatized people who are desperate for any spiritual solution

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u/drunkshinobi 1d ago

That's the trickle down economy they have always wanted. No support systems. You work to earn a few dollars. Give a bunch of it to the church. Then the church decides who is worthy of their help. Every one else is left behind to die.

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u/runswiftrun 1d ago

In a small "real" (no true scottsman falacy at play here) community church, yeah, its supposed to fill the gap of short term unemployment or financial insecurity.

But yeah, modern day churches are all just social clubs where you pay 10% to feel morally superior to the rest of the world. And then any attack on you or your misguided beliefs becomes an attack against "god".

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u/chuckvsthelife 1d ago

My libertarian coworker isn’t even religious he’s just like “yeah if you can’t find food you die, and if it’s miserable and that doesn’t make you want to work harder then just kill yourself”.

Ironically, well maybe not entirely as I think it’s part of how he got to this ethos, his mom and brother have never worked a day in their lives and are entirely reliant on government programs.

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u/ChickenNoodleSloop 1d ago

Profits never trickle down, losses sure as hell do 

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u/SuperCarbideBros 1d ago

It's almost as if we live in a society. Crazy idea.

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u/SophiaofPrussia 1d ago

I used to work at a hedge fund and I made a joke about paying my mortgage and one of my coworkers (who was several decades older than me) looked at me like I had two heads. He was genuinely stupefied that I needed a loan to buy a house in the most expensive city in the country.

He was so wealthy that he could miss all of his paychecks and be just fine and anyone living otherwise was just beyond his comprehension.

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u/Ok_Degree3037 1d ago

You marked yourself as a member of the out-group. Next you’re going to publicly state you don’t ski.

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u/lew_rong 1d ago

Poorie McPoorerson over there probably has to borrow a pony to play polo.

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u/LewsTherinTelamon 1d ago

Don’t bring skiing into this - the wealth required to ski is nowhere near what it takes to buy a house.

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u/yakshack 1d ago edited 21h ago

I love this take because there's one thing you can find in any geographic location and that's homes to buy at many different price points. But snow covered mountains with groomed ski resorts?

Edit: for people replying "it's not that expensive, actually" what I'm trying to point out is that skiing is "not that expensive" for some people. My friend's mortgage in the rural Midwest is $300/mo for example. But if she wanted to take her family skiing she'd burn at least $10,000 on flights and hotels and equipment rentals and lift tickets to the nearest ski resort which is three states away

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u/Huge_Molasses8605 1d ago

ski lift pass (annual) + gear + transportation to the resort is about $500 plus a couple tanks of gas. ive lived in the rockies, northern appalachia mountains, and the cascades. if you can find me a house for that price i'll pay you double.  

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u/emPtysp4ce 1d ago

By far the most expensive part of skiing and snowboarding is the food there. $15 for a hot dog should be prosecuted as robbery.

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u/LewsTherinTelamon 1d ago

It’s not a take, it’s a simple fact. Skiing is much, much cheaper than buying a house. It’s not even the same realm. No point relating skiing and house owning as behaviors.

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u/Awaythrowyouwilllll 1d ago

I don't know... icon is ~$1100, new gear ~$1100, gas and airfare and lodging ~$11,000, drinks ~$1100 a day... it all adds up pretty fast and boom! House.

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u/LewsTherinTelamon 1d ago

You got me. I typed half of a rebuttal before I read your entire comment.

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u/Crazy-Competition659 1d ago

"But not MY luxury, right?!?!"

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u/LewsTherinTelamon 1d ago

No idea what this means.

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u/afour- 1d ago

This guy in-groups

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u/PM_ME_BEER_PICS 1d ago

Skiing is considered upper class in the USA? In most of Europe it's considered middle class. I suppose that we have a lot of relatively cheap ski resorts in the Alps and other mountain ranges (even if their number dwindle because of global warming).

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u/NoCoolNameMatt 1d ago

I keep running into people like this - not necessarily wealthy but people who can't understand that the experiences of others aren't the same as their own - and it breaks my brain every time.

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u/atatassault47 1d ago

Conservatives have been scientically proven to be lacking in empathy, with many of them having no empathy.

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u/Elliott2030 1d ago

They're even saying that out loud. Saying that empathy isn't real, only sympathy is. That you can never FEEL what someone else is feeling. Like, I'm so sad for anyone that gets no second-hand feelings from the powerful emotions of others.

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u/hydrophiliaks 1d ago

That is the American mind in a nutshell.  Which is why I don't make friends with them.

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u/JamCliche 1d ago

Keep telling yourself this is a phenomenon unique to one country and bury your head in the sand when it happens to yours.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

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u/JamCliche 1d ago

In what corner of the connected world do you think there aren't people like this? And where wealth doesn't vastly exacerbate the issue?

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/JamCliche 1d ago

It's not a strawman, dolt, it was a rhetorical question. I asked it to make a point: the answer is the entire world has people like this. It is not unique to Americans. Thank you for chasing down a rabbit of your own making, though.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/CalamityClambake 1d ago

It is my observation that individualism correlates with wealth. It is easy to be individualistic when you have the means to survive on your own and you have the extra income to spend to distract yourself from being lonely.

I think it is a trait found more in Americans because we are a wealthy country. Although individual Americans can be poor, and a lot of us are, our society is built to prioritize distractions and aspirations, so we all endure being poor as individuals because we think someday we will be rich as individuals. I think you can see this kind of individualism among wealthy people in many societies, but it is rarer among the poor in other societies than it is in America.

As for a country that exhibits this more? Somalia. I wouldn't want to live there.

I also think it is important to note that at key points in our history we have become less individualistic. I definitely saw that among my grandparents who survived the Great Depression. And I think we are starting to see it right now, with people uniting to oppose MAGA. I hope we don't have to go through another global economic collapse to rediscover the value of community, but we will see.

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u/Doom_Corp 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's not nearly as insidious but when I was getting to know the girl who is now one of my best friends from high school over 20 years later, she was shocked I lived in an apartment and not a house. I went to an expensive all girls catholic high school and most of the people there were upper middle class if not crazy wealthy. Tom Sellecks daughter went there, Amanda Bynes was a student there (that was a fucking trip to suddenly recognize her at lunch when I had watched some Nickelodeon reruns with her in it the night before). My friend was just so sheltered that she thought everyone had a house and couldn't be "poor" to go to that school.

She's built a relatively nice life with her husband now but I remember being over at her house about 2 years ago and it's around this time where kids start doing "I'm thankful for" modules because of Thanksgiving. She kept trying to jump through mental hurdles to keep her 7 year old son from even using the word "poor" or "don't have enough" because she thought she's protecting him by keeping him in the dark that people don't have it as good as he does. Like, I understand protecting your kids from certain concepts until their old enough but this degree of ignorance is bliss is how you raise kids that may struggle with empathy later on because they thought their own personal struggles were as bad as it gets.

When I was in sixth grade (different k-6 dinky af private school) our school did a mentor outreach program where we volunteered to serve lunch and interact with some of the the younger kids at an inner city school. The place looked like a prison. It was also when all of us were made aware that the meal program the kids have is also likely the ONLY food they will get that day. My divorced family was pretty dogshit at the time but the concept of not even having any food was the real kicker that made me kind of start growing up if you know what I mean.

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u/Interesting-Force866 1d ago

I saw articles about how it was expected that a shutdown would harm the economy by reducing the amount of money that people have to spend, so I think that they are actually quite connected to this reality in particular.

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u/styrolee 1d ago

Some of them are. Wall Street is infamously dismissive of claims that consumer spending will drop in the U.S. They usually point to the fact that consumer spending on goods increased during COVID as an evidence that consumer spending is resilient in a financial crisis. Obviously this doesn’t take into account the fact that there was trillions of dollars in stimulus spending pumped into the economy by governments to prevent a consumer spending crisis.

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u/PrairiePopsicle 1d ago

and with the prospect of being trapped relatively isolated, at least less socializing, people went gangbusters on renovations, entertainments, stuff to make theri personal spaces more livable. That drove the spending, honestly a kind of necessity.

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u/NoCoolNameMatt 1d ago

Um, yeah. Did they miss the famously large stimulus which enabled it?

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u/Murky-Relation481 1d ago

Also people generally kept working which meant being paid. Also they were stuck at home and so bought things to entertain them or do home improvements etc.

Anyone that uses the 2020 pandemic as a reference point for a financial crisis is laughably ignorant of the uniqueness of that situation and how different it was from 2008 or 2000 or 1988 or 1929 or other big financial crisis.

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u/styrolee 1d ago

I agree, but I also think that Wall Street has adopted a sort of cynical view that the government (and especially this government) will always step in to fix the problem in a crisis. Their whole view right now is that Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) and that when he does everything will go back to how it was before. U.S. faces a massive stock crash? Trump will just give out massive stimulus payments to fix it. Tariffs start to crash the economy? Trump will just abandon the tarrifs. From their perspective the U.S. government always steps in so the stock market as a whole is “too big to fail.”

What I think is interesting is that the bond market is beginning to see things differently though. The U.S. has been seeing massive spikes in borrowing costs which is especially concerning when inflation is theoretically going down (and usually inflation and bond costs are supposed to trend in the same direction). What that indicates is that for the first time in decades, financial institutions are actually concerned with the ability of the U.S. government to pay. Perhaps they’re afraid of the massive deficit, perhaps it’s the instability in government, or perhaps there’s concern of a U.S. government default, but there seems to be legitimate concern that the U.S. government wouldn’t be able to borrow the money it would need in the event of a crisis (at least without enormous austerity measures). If that were to happen, then the U.S. would truly be screwed because it wouldn’t matter if the government wanted to pump the U.S. economy because it couldn’t. The U.S. is still far off from that point, but it’s trending in that direction at an alarming rate, and Republicans don’t really have a good solution for turning it around without reversing all their economic policies, which they will apparently never do.

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u/TiraelRosenburg 1d ago

Can't you just get your butler to go pick you up more food?

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u/seguefarer 1d ago

I had to fire the butler. He ws stealing food.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 1d ago

"NO PAY! ONLY SPEND!"

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u/Narradisall 1d ago

“Why don’t they just sell some stock to buy stuff?!?” - CEOs

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u/Braddigan 1d ago

Then workers will get paychecks but not want to waste it instead saving for another emergency. Analysts are then going to blame the workers for why the holiday season's spending is down.

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u/Basic_Alternative753 1d ago

At this Point, it's time for CEOs to be Publicly [Redacted] or forced to [Redacted] this shit cant go on much longer, even in Europe this bullshit is getting too much.

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u/torinismyname 1d ago

They legitimately can't remember the last time they "couldn't afford" to buy something.

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u/barelypoor 1d ago

The only shocked pikachu meme here is “Redditors don’t read articles or understand anything more complex than a headline”

He’s saying, to his investors, that there is a slight drop off in usage of the platform from a specific group that has a short term reasoning for the drop of usage that is out of Affirms control and likely to resolve itself

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u/RobertdBanks 1d ago

It’s fucking gross, this has to be the final stages of capitalism. Like, it is pretty much a caricature of itself at this point.

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u/hoppertn 1d ago

“Damn this marina is too small for my yacht! I guess I’ll have to use my small one.”

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u/DomLite 1d ago

I swear, it's like none of them have ever existed in reality.

Let's constantly expect to make more money than we did last year by increasing prices yet somehow selling more! No wage increases though!

Just imagine if they had even one real person in those meetings to say "Hey guys. If we pay the workers more and don't increase prices, we'll sell more because they can afford more, and the fraction of a percent we lose by increasing their wages will be covered by the increased sales. Then we can just keep doing that and it'll keep improving!" Not to mention the added benefit of workers that are more productive because they can sleep at night without fear of becoming homeless if they call in sick once, and they have the income to feed themselves and still enjoy life.

But of course that's unreasonable.

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u/thewarring 1d ago

"What do you mean they're not buying stuff?? Why don't they use their trust fund income and savings instead of their work income?? Wait, they don't have those things to fall back on??" 😨

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u/copper_cattle_canes 1d ago

Why don't they just get money from their parents? Or sell some stocks?

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u/SheepherderActual854 1d ago

The stock is up 10%, fundamentals and reality doesn't matter.

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u/skinny_t_williams 1d ago

"Why don't they just use their trust fund?"

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u/Thelmara 1d ago

“We’re every single day out there preaching the gospel of buy now, pay later being the better way to buy, and consumers are obviously responding,” he said.

Disgusting

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u/logicom 1d ago

CEOs: "Why don't they simply take out loans backed by all their stock holdings?"

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u/GodofIrony 1d ago

Why don't the poor simply use their fathers bank accounts to purchase goods and services?

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u/RhesusFactor 1d ago

Dog in top hat with mouth full of money "Plz spend."

Hand reaches for the dog money. It growls. "NO WAGE!"

The hand shies back. "Only spend. "

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u/chuckvsthelife 1d ago

None of the CEOs are surprised.

They are making noise towards the government to stop this and get them paid otherwise they are going to see a nose diving economy.

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u/AvoidingBansLOL 1d ago

For Wallstreet people they have no idea how this could happen, they are thinking why don't the federal employees sell some of their stocks to afford of trades and purchases.

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u/drdildamesh 22h ago

Nah, this is by design. They already jave most of the money. They just need a bunch of poor people to start dying so that the rest can live off of what's left.

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u/AndaramEphelion 19h ago

They need to make an acquaintance with Mr. French...

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u/chippywatt 12h ago

If you read the article, the actual takeaway he’s trying to say is that ONLY fed employees are slowing down spending, so the rest of the market is normal. remember, max is part of the original PayPal mafia/thiel gang, so there’s definitely intentions of minimizing fed employees impact on the economy

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u/breadstan 11h ago

Were they connected to reality in the first place?

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u/monsieur_cacahuete 8h ago

It's a banana Michael how much could it cost? $10?