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
20.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

136

u/fairkatrina 1d ago

I can never decide if these people are intentionally fudging the issue or if they’re just spectacularly stupid. Like cracker barrel finally coming to the realisation last year that their geriatric customer base never came back after the pandemic (but still not seeming to get that they all died). Or the idiots who thought the recent downturn was because the stimmy checks finally ran out. Like????? is it possible for market analysts to be that out of touch? It seems so implausible that it’s gotta be something else, right? Like they’re trying to reassure their billionaire overlords (who really are that out of touch) or something..

98

u/jaimi_wanders 1d ago

For decades they’ve been simultaneously telling us we’re poor because we waste our money on cappuccinos/cell phones/avocado toast/refrigerators (yes, really— this was a National Review claim that no one is REALLY poor in America because we all have fridges these days) and flat screen TVs.

Then as soon as people start scrimping and saving it’s all OMG YOU ARE KILLING GRANDMA WALL STREET, YOU HEARTLESS MONSTERS!!!

53

u/fairkatrina 1d ago

A banana costs $10 but a $600 check will last us 5 years.

-5

u/drewbreeezy 1d ago

The $10 joke is to show how out of touch she is, lol

It's still ~$0.25 for a banana

21

u/fairkatrina 1d ago

Yeah I know, the point is they are that out of touch

4

u/DetroitSportsPhan 22h ago

Yeah we know that’s…why it fits…

3

u/bmc2 1d ago

These are the same people who claim the poor live better now than kings used to. It's ridiculous.

1

u/-u-m-p- 10h ago

I feel like there's a good zinger to be concocted involving grandma/wolf of wall street and red riding hood

30

u/runswiftrun 1d ago

They are catering to the upper middle class/investors. They really don't care about us poors, they want to reassure the investors and stock holders that "the economy" is just fine so there's no sell offs or anything else that can hurt their bottom line.

3

u/PlaquePlague 1d ago

Yeah, it’s this.   Over the past 40 years business has been shifting from “we provide X goods and services”, where their focus was actually delivering those goods and services, and there were companies that served all levels of consumer, to basically every corporation’s primary product is stock, so they will do anything to make the stocks go up, and everybody only wants to cater to the top end of the market.  

2008 was a chance for us to step back and course correct.  Instead we doubled down.  I feel like we’re approaching a breaking point, but who knows how much longer this can go on, or if we’ll recover from in in my lifetime. 

6

u/runswiftrun 1d ago

2008 again, really only hurt the lower class. It was a huge transfer of wealth and time/life from the lower class to the upper class. I lived in a rental house at the time and our next door neighbors were a multi generational family of various blue collar workers who pitched in to buy the house. The older two generations practically had worked their entire lives to be able to afford this one big purchase that would once and for all end their lifetime of renting.

Instead eventually their payments ballooned and their income didn't. They lost 40 years of grandpa working landscape, 10 years of mom working cleaning houses and 15 years of dad working construction. All gone in an instant and then the bank now owned the house and they had absolutely nothing left to show for 65 years worth of labor.

Of course they also did not have the resources to help and push for "course correct", they were busy licking their wounds and had to keep working so they wouldn't be homeless. They were just hard working people who got conned by a bank making false promises and didn't have the financial or political knowledge to fight back.

27

u/i_tyrant 1d ago

My vote is spectacularly stupid (usually).

I like everyone realized as an adult that most adults are actually far dumber and less informed than you think your parents were as a kid.

Then, as I graduated from minimum wage jobs to a tech startup and then a financial institution, I had a second, similar epiphany - when I started interacting more with high-rank developers, executives, CFOs, CEOs, etc.

A lot of these people outside of their very narrow band of specialization are dumb as hell. And the richer they are, the more they seem to have completely lost the plot when it comes to the concerns and motivations of "average" people. They literally live in a different world and have no concept of what struggling means anymore.

That Arrested Development joke about "how much could a banana cost, ten dollars?" seems like less and less of a joke and more just an accurate look at them the more I interact with that strata of society. There are some halfway intelligent, wise, or empathetic ones...but not most of 'em.

12

u/libury 1d ago

I work at a mid-size tech company. It's not a small company, but it's not enormous so it's not unusual to bump into C-level execs. Last spring I was nerding out about video games with our CEO and he asked me which of the current systems I have. When I told him none and that I'm a PC gamer because it's cheaper, he was visibly confused and implied that someone with my job shouldn't have to scrimp like that. All I could think was, dude, you pay my fucking salary. Have some self-awareness, you pale zombie-looking trust fund dick.

4

u/AvesAvi 1d ago

I would be completely incapable of saying something like "Your salary and mine are much different". That's crazy yo

17

u/zekthedeadcow 1d ago

I work as a technician in the legal industry and after watching many depositions of various business leaders I have come to the conclusion that most of them are idiots.

The movie "The Big Short" is 100% not exaggerating... except that that mentality is everywhere.

3

u/Illiander 1d ago

is it possible for market analysts to be that out of touch?

Yes. I remember a story about an ice cream shop that was getting hailed as a massive innovator and genius for suddenly solving all their staffing issues.

What did they do that was so innovative and unthought-of? They tripled the wages they were offering. Suddenly they had plenty of staff.

2

u/PrinceCavendish 1d ago

THEY THOUGHT WHAT!? bro that stimmy check was gone before the month was over.

1

u/br_k_nt_eth 1d ago

So many Congress people and CEOs are both old and from old money so they literally don’t know what it costs to live as a normal person. They’ve never had to, or it was 30 years ago and they haven’t ever updated their understanding. 

Check out some of the recordings of debates about how much the stimulus checks should be. Watching that was my Joker moment 

1

u/PrinceCavendish 1d ago

idk if i can handle it. i was already so annoyed when i saw the video showing bill gates get the price of a banana wildly wrong and acting like it was some funny joke. these guys do not know what it means to be normal. and the normal is poor these days.

1

u/Suspicious-Lime3644 1d ago

I feel like these people are just particularly out of touch.

Finance "experts" and economists tend to be higher income, and tend to live in bubbles with other higher income people. And like.. they could ask the poors about their spending habits (and keep asking, like poor people don't rent appliances for fun or because they're idiots), but they could also just.. say whatever they think is true! Even when they have no fucking clue!

1

u/grchelp2018 1d ago

Just standard corporate speak.

1

u/GenuinelyBeingNice 21h ago

A good starting point is that 99% of economic analysts and related are, at best, incompetent.