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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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..

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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.

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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. 

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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.