It’s been 20 years this week since we all sat in this weird, yet peaceful darkness as a good chunk of the East coast lost its power. Thinking back on those couple of days where nothing worked, everyone seemed to band together as a community, and streets were almost completely empty, there were a lot of similarities to what we faced with Covid.

Where were you when you had no power for days? I remember sitting on the front step of my friend’s house and then walking around the neighbourhood with a candle like I was a Druid. The interesting part was social media wasn’t widespread like it is today and so although we all were connected through cell phones and instant messaging, there was this feeling of complete disconnection from technology.

Unlike the pandemic where video calls made you see people even more than you might’ve wanted to.

This week's issue is a 3 minute read:

💰️ That’s how they get ya

😀 My current favourite YouTube content

🪄 Hocus Pocus @ Amazon

Subscriptions: You have too many

Wanna know what a good business model is? Subscriptions. Wanna know what an even better business model is? Subscriptions people forget about. You know the one - it costs you something like $10-$20/ month and hides in your credit card bill just enough that you remind yourself you should cancel it and then go back to watching Netflix - another subscription you forget you have.

Gym memberships used to be the recurring payment people would just let trickle on monthly but new stats reveal that forgetting about these monthly payments can boost a business’ revenue by as much as 200% but on average closer to 30-80% - which is still a good chunk of change for literally doing nothing!

The set it and forget model is finally being clamped down in the US where having consumers re-enrol in a subscription could be a thing in the near future. The average person in North America spends roughly $200/month on subscriptions. Sure a lot of that is probably TV and music but all these little $10-15/month charges add up.

Experts say the way you really go cold turkey with you subscriptions is to change up your credit card. That’s the only way you’ll truly know if monthly Japanese candy boxes are really worth paying for monthly.

Humouring the scammers

I’ve recently blessed my YouTube feed with hilarious videos of scammers from Indian call centres trying to perform their scam on the YouTuber while the YouTuber films all of it. Exhibit A:

But it’s gotten to the point where some of the scammers actually know that they’re talking to a YouTuber so the video takes this weird turn where the seemingly fourth wall is broken down and now the truth comes out about what the scammer does and what the YouTuber does and there’s this Spiderman pointing at eachother moment.

According to FBI data, in 2022 these scam call centers stole over $10B from U.S. citizens, which is an absolutely insane amount of money to obtain through this bogus phone calls.

Can you hear me?

This is the one question you should never answer if you think a scammer is calling you. They want you to say “Yes” so that they can record your voice saying “Yes” and then bring that to anywhere where you do online transactions so that they can use your voice to authenticate and perform transactions.

And this is why no one picks up the phone anymore when a number shows up that they don’t recognize.

They call it “Amazon Magic”

Ever shop on Amazon and notice a product has like 5000 reviews and they’re all positive? Was it a good product? Possibly. Were there any negative or low star reviews? If you do encounter products like this then just know that there could be some funky business going on behind the scenes to get poor reviews and ratings removed from a product page for the right price.

For $200-$400 there’s a service for Amazon sellers via Telegram and other instant messaging groups where they get access to “company insiders” who can help remove poor ratings and reviews from your store and share data with you on competitors.

Apparently Amazon is aware of all of this. And they have people internally whose sole job is to make sure no one is taking any company secrets and sharing them to the broader Amazon community worldwide. But given how big Amazon is, I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to see stores that have thousands of reviews but not a single level of negativity.

Doesn’t this news make you want to get into Amazon selling now? Or are you now planning on paying extra attention to the reviews. Either way, when there’s a will, there’s a way. In this case there’s a bit of magic too.