3 charts for you today:
Faster fashion
Gen Z has a new favorite shopping app — Shein.
The company, founded in 2008 in China, has exploded into the world of fast fashion, with Google data showing it's surpassed other brands like H&M, Zara and ASOS in terms of search interest. It's also held the second spot in the iOS App Store Shopping category for much of this year, even overtaking Amazon briefly.
Shein x TikTok
Shein makes the world of fast fashion, pioneered in the late 90s by Zara, H&M and others, look glacial. "Fast fashion" meant that designs from fashion shows and runways could make it into stores in just a few weeks. Shein takes this a step further. If a top or garment design goes viral on TikTok, Shein can ramp up production almost instantly thanks to its tight control of production, and relatively small initial batches of items. That supply chain, coupled with super-low prices and endless virality on TikTok, is a powerful feedback loop.
The sheer scale and speed of Shein's operations are quite hard to get your ahead around. Its website has a feature that lets you filter which products arrived on the site by which day (there are no physical Shein stores). 8,895 products were added yesterday. 9,634 were added the day before.
Secrets and sustainability
Shein reportedly racked up more than $10bn of sales last year, but otherwise relatively little is known about the company, its operations, its owners or how sustainable its production is. Its supply chain is impressive, but not very transparent.
Baseball used to regularly be described as America's favorite national pastime. Sadly, that phrase is getting closer to retirement with every passing year, as attendance at Major League Baseball games has been falling steadily since 2007.
So it's unfortunate for baseball fans that the collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the players' union has expired — meaning the first lockout in more than 25 years. The lockout prevents players from using team facilities, and free agents can't sign new contracts until a new agreement is reached.
Moneyball
The issue at play is, unsurprisingly, money. Unlike the NBA or NFL, the MLB has no direct mechanism for players to benefit from rising league revenues. That's partly contributed to why the median salary for MLB players has fallen by 30% since 2015. During that time the median NBA salary was up 50%.
One of the core issues is the disparity between teams. The New York Yankees pull in 10x the local revenue of the smallest teams, making negotiations a little unbalanced. As the Oakland Athletics General Manager put it in Moneyball: "There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then, there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us" — that dynamic remains true today.
Starbucks workers at an outlet in Buffalo, New York, have voted to unionize — which is the first time a union has won the right to represent Starbucks workers in the company's history. Another store voted against, and a third is currently being contested.
Starbucks has 235,000 employees in the US, and the votes in New York were closely watched by Starbucks management, which had spent significant resources on trying to dissuade the stores from unionizing.
Unwanted unions
Unions have been on the decline in the US, and in other countries, for more than half-a-century — particularly in the private sector. As recently as the early 1970s, 1-in-4 private sector workers in the US was a member of a trade union. Today it's closer to 1-in-16.
Don't call it a comeback
It would be silly to take one data point at one Starbucks and call an end to a decades-long trend of declining union membership, but this isn't the first time this year that unions have caught public attention. Battles to unionize at Amazon warehouses in Alabama and Staten Island have made national headlines this year, and the US labor market is at an interesting crossroads - with job resignations at an all-time high, and many industries reporting a shortage of workers.
1)Omicron cases have jumped 250% in a week in South Africa, but anecdotal evidence increasingly suggests that symptoms are milder than in previous waves.
2) What did we all search for this year? Google's done our job for us, with its annual summary of trending searches.
3) US inflation just hit 6.8% year-on-year, which is the fastest pace that prices have risen by for nearly 40 years. Chart here.
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5) New Zealand is set to ban the sale of tobacco to its youngest generation, announcing that no-one born after 2008 will be able to buy cigarettes or tobacco products during their lifetime. Currently 13% of NZ adults smoke.
6) "Meme stocks" like GameStop and AMC have lost their buzz on trading forums, according to data reported by Axios.
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