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    For Many Small-Business Owners, a Necessary Shift to Digital Payments

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    The pandemic accelerated a transition to cashless payments, forcing a reckoning among small-business owners. But there are benefits: One owner said the switch saved her $3,000 a month.“Making It Work” is a series about small-business owners striving to endure hard times.When Egypt Otis opened her business, Comma Bookstore and Social Hub, three years ago in Flint, Mich., the pandemic was full blown. But her neighbors welcomed the literature and art she sold in her store that celebrated people of color, as well as the community programs she hosted.Despite the warm reception, Ms. Otis quickly found that she had a sales problem: Her customers wanted to pay with their cellphones.“I realized that people were hardly keeping a wallet or a physical card, which limited my ability to sell and make money,” Ms. Otis said. So she upgraded her transactions platform to include tap-and-go purchases on mobile devices. “People are not carrying cash,” she said. “It’s becoming obsolete.”The number of Americans who say they are “cashless” has jumped in the last five years. Forty-one percent of Americans said they did not use cash for their purchases in a typical week in 2022, up from 29 percent in 2018, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last October.Small-business owners increasingly are making the switch to cashless payments for several reasons, including rising consumer demand, faster checkout, lower labor costs and increased security. Those who wait risk losing revenue, experts say.But there are drawbacks to going cash-free, including a learning curve for entrepreneurs who may not understand how to set up digital payments, a lack of accessibility to credit cards for low-income consumers, and privacy concerns.Signs at a pizza joint in New York indicating it takes multiple forms of cashless payments, a switch that accelerated in the pandemic.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesJuanny Romero was an early adopter of digital payments for her small business. Fifteen years ago, when she founded Mothership Coffee Roasters, a chain of coffee shops in Las Vegas, she began using Square, a low-cost digital payments system for small businesses.“​​I was a young businesswoman and not astute,” she said. But Square saved her $3,000 a month in merchant fees for credit card processing.As Ms. Romero expanded her businesses (to four locations in Las Vegas, with two more on the way), she added more payment options, including Apple Pay and Google Pay.But she noticed a shift during the pandemic: Her customers no longer wanted to use cash, and her employees did not want to handle it. “We didn’t know where Covid was coming from,” she said. “There were still people bringing in cash, but it was scary and dangerous.”When the coin shortage hit in 2020, she ran out of cash altogether, but Ms. Romero found it saved on labor costs. “My managers were standing in line for two hours to deposit the cash,” she said. “I can’t get an armored car service to pick up $100 in cash.”Even so, customer demand prompted her to return to cash sales, which Ms. Romero said are holding steady at about 11 percent of her overall revenue. She said she would go cashless if the share dipped below 10 percent.A digital transaction at Mothership Coffee Roasters in Las Vegas.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThe pressure to adapt is growing. More that 2.8 billion mobile wallets were in use at the end of 2020, and that is projected to increase nearly 74 percent to 4.8 billion — nearly 60 percent of the world’s population — by the end of 2025, according to a study released in 2021 by Boku, a fintech companyThe United States lags other countries in adopting cashless payments. Among the most cashless countries in the world is Britain, where the pound makes up only 1 percent of all transactions, according to a report from Merchant Machine, a payment research firm based in London. But in the United States, some small-business owners do not understand the complexities of digital payments.“Smaller merchants, they don’t always have the knowledge and resources to know what to do,” said Ginger Siegel, who leads the North America small-business segment at Mastercard, which offers training to business owners like Ms. Otis of Comma Bookstore.Ms. Otis said she noticed an increase in sales when she began offering mobile payments, which made the checkout process faster. “As a retailer, you want to make the experience as efficient as possible,” she said. “It is a matter of survival.”A veteran using a tap-and-go device to collect donations for the Royal British Legion in London in 2020.Guy Bell/AlamyBenefits include immediate payment, increased sales and the ability to sell to customers who might use other currencies. “You have to set it up, but it’s worth it,” said Kimberley A. Eddleston, a professor of entrepreneurship at Northeastern University.But some business owners say they are hesitant to move too quickly, worried that today’s technology could become obsolete tomorrow. And there are compatibility and cost issues to consider, said Wayne Read, the chief executive of Forged & Formed, an online jeweler with a physical store, Studio D Jewelers, in Woodstock, Ill. In his jewelry sales, where items can be pricey, he said a speedy transaction might not be suitable. “We don’t want people to feel they have rushed their decision,” he said.Despite advances in technology, many Americans still have little or no access to financial services like credit cards and mobile wallets, although that is slowly improving. An estimated 5.9 million households did not have a bank account in 2021, down from 7.1 million households in 2019, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve.Rewards points displayed on a checkout screen at Mothership. Mobile apps allow for cashless payments and can increase customer loyalty.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesAnother obstacle to adoption is privacy concerns: Some people prefer the anonymity that cash provides. And cash is perceived as a way for consumers to remain aware of expenditures. Complicating the transition to the digital economy, the recent banking turmoil in the United States has made many depositors question the security of financial institutions.But experts agree that cash is unlikely to go away. Consumers in lower income households continue to rely on cash for payments, according to the Fed survey.And small-business owners say that despite the speed and efficiency that cashless payments offer, cash is still a viable option for their customers.“At the end of the day, I know the people I serve,” Ms. Romero said. “I would feel conflicted if I didn’t do the right thing.” More

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    Overstock Buys Intellectual Property to Rename as Bed Bath & Beyond

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    The online retailer is renaming its website and its mobile app after buying the intellectual property of the bankrupt home-goods store.Soon, Overstock.com will become Bed Bath & Beyond — at least in digital form.Overstock, which last week paid $21.5 million to acquire the bankrupt retailer’s intellectual property, said on Wednesday that it would start operating its website under the Bed Bath & Beyond name.The change will roll out in Canada in early July. Starting in August, about a month after the final Bed Bath & Beyond stores in the United States close, customers in the country who visit overstock.com will be redirected to bedbathandbeyond.com.Overstock’s mobile app and its rewards program will also be rebranded. Company executives plan to eventually bring back Bed Bath & Beyond’s popular wedding registry.As Overstock folds the bankrupt retailers’ assets into its own operations, it is considering renaming its business entirely, said Jonathan Johnson, the company’s chief executive. It might settle on Bed Bath & Beyond, he added, but other names are being considered, too.“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked over the years when we’re going to change the name of Overstock,” said Mr. Johnson, who has been at the helm since 2019.For years, Overstock.com has been trying to find a way to update its image as a liquidator, which was how it started in 1999. The company has since moved away from selling only furniture at basement bargain prices, but ultimately, Mr. Johnson said, its name was holding it back in the eyes of consumers.It’s betting Bed Bath & Beyond’s name can help change that.“We will probably have both logos for a little bit, but the goal is to transition as quickly as possible to Bed Bath & Beyond,” Mr. Johnson said.When the home-goods retailer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, Mr. Johnson saw an opportunity for his own company. In 2018, when Patrick Byrne, then Overstock’s chief executive, wanted to sell the retail business to focus on cryptocurrency technology, Bed Bath & Beyond was a potential buyer, Mr. Johnson said. That deal never happened.The tables turned when the pandemic hit and Overstock’s sales surged. Bankers approached the company, suggesting that it should purchase Bed Bath & Beyond.On the other hand, Bed Bath & Beyond was financially battered by the pandemic. Like many retailers, it had to temporarily close its stores, and its supply chain buckled as the company sought to keep up with the demand in online shopping. Sales fell drastically as company executives made several merchandising and marketing missteps.“We’ve been watching and watching, and last year when Bed Bath & Beyond fell on some troubles we started thinking, ‘Gee, if it goes bankrupt, we might have the opportunity to purchase what we like without purchasing what gave us pause before,’” Mr. Johnson said. (Overstock did not purchase Bed Bath & Beyond’s store locations or inventory.)As Overstock folds the bankrupt retailers’ assets into its own operations, it is considering renaming its business entirely, said Jonathan Johnson, Overstock’s chief executive.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesIn the week after its bid for Bed Bath & Beyond’s assets became public, Overstock added more than 100,000 bedding and bath items to its site as vendors raced to do business with the company. This was after months of Overstock’s courting them and making concessions like agreeing to hold inventory in warehouses, a rare move for the online retailer. Now, Mr. Johnson said, he does not think his company will have to do that to win vendors over.The acquisition also gives Overstock a trove of customer data. It has information on what Bed Bath & Beyond shoppers bought online and how frequently they visited the website — a helpful tool as Overstock contends with its own falling sales. On Wednesday, the company said it expected its second-quarter revenue to decline in the low 20 percent range from the year before.Overstock’s sales peaked in 2021, when more people bought furniture during the height of the pandemic. Its active customers have also been declining, and it said in April that it had 4.8 million users. Bed Bath & Beyond’s active customer list for its online shoppers is twice as large.Overstock expects that its customer count will increase in the coming months, while the average amount that shoppers spend may shrink because the small appliances and home goods that Bed Bath & Beyond was known for are less expensive than the couches and patio tables Overstock normally sells. The online retailer will also spend more on marketing to make consumers aware of its branding changes.This deal comes as U.S. consumers are spending less on furniture and more on eating out and traveling. Sales at furniture and home furnishing stores in the first five months of the year fell nearly 3 percent from a year earlier, according to Commerce Department data, which is not adjusted for inflation. “Opportunities like this come up once in a while, and they come up sometimes when times are tough,” Mr. Johnson said. “Will the category still be tough in the short to medium term? I think so, but I think getting all these new customers and rebranding helps us cut through some of that headwind.”During the integration process, Overstock plans to hire workers with marketing, merchandising and technology expertise. The company has been trying to recruit former Bed Bath & Beyond employees.As for the fate of Bed Bath & Beyond’s famed 20 percent coupon?“We’ll always be a couponer; we’ll always do the site sales,” Mr. Johnson said. “Whether we run at 20 percent as frequently as Bed Bath did — probably not. But it’ll be there for the beginning.” More

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    Congress Spotlights Forced Labor Concerns With Chinese Shopping Sites Shein and Temu

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    A congressional investigation into Temu and Shein offered new insight into services that are delivering a deluge of cheap and little-regulated products.Lawmakers are flagging what they say are likely significant violations of U.S. law by Temu, a popular Chinese shopping platform, accusing it of providing an unchecked channel that allows goods made with forced labor to flow into the United States.In a report released Thursday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said Temu, a rapidly growing site that sells electronics, makeup, toys and clothing, had failed “to maintain even the facade of a meaningful compliance program” for its supply chains and was likely shipping products made with forced labor into the United States on a “regular basis.”The report stems from a continuing investigation into forced labor in supply chains that touch on China. Lawmakers said the report was based on responses submitted to the committee by Temu, as well as the fast fashion retailer Shein, Nike and Adidas.The report offered a particularly scathing assessment of Temu, saying there is an “extremely high risk that Temu’s supply chains are contaminated with forced labor.” The site advertises itself under the tagline “Shop like a billionaire” and is now the second most downloaded app in the Apple store.The report also criticized Shein’s use of an importing method that allows companies to bring products into the United States duty-free and with less scrutiny from customs, as long as packages are sent directly to consumers and valued at under $800. Some lawmakers have been pushing to close off this shipping channel, which is called de minimis, for companies sourcing goods from China.Lawmakers said that they were troubled by what the bipartisan committee’s investigation had uncovered so far, and that Congress should review import loopholes and strengthen forced labor laws.“Temu is doing next to nothing to keep its supply chains free from slave labor,” said Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who heads the committee. “At the same time, Temu and Shein are building empires around the de minimis loophole in our import rules: dodging import taxes and evading scrutiny on the millions of goods they sell to Americans.”“The initial findings of this report are concerning and reinforce the need for full transparency by companies potentially profiting from C.C.P. forced labor,” said Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat and a co-author of the report, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.Temu, which began operating in the United States in September, told the committee that it now brought millions of shipments into the United States annually through a network of more than 80,000 suppliers that sell directly from Chinese factories to U.S. consumers. The site sells clothing, temporary tattoos, modeling clay, electronics and other items directly to consumers for low prices, like $3 for a baby romper, $6 for sandals and $8 for a vacuum.The report also contained new data showing that Temu and Shein make heavy use of the de minimis rule, together accounting for almost 600,000 such packages shipped to the United States daily.The shipping method allows retailers to sell their goods to consumers at cheaper prices, since they are not subject to duties, taxes or government fees that apply to traditional retailers that typically ship overseas goods in bulk.A Shein pop-up store last year at the Shops at Willow Bend in Plano, Texas.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesDe minimis shipping also requires far less information to be disclosed about the products and the companies involved in the transaction, making it harder for U.S. customs officials to detect packages with narcotics, counterfeits and goods made with forced labor. The number of de minimis packages entering the United States more than tripled between 2016 and 2021, when it reached 720 million.At an annualized rate, the shipments reported by Shein and Temu would represent more than 30 percent of the de minimis shipments that came into the United States last year, and nearly half of those packages from China, the report said.Both Shein and Temu have steadily taken market share from U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers and won over younger consumers by investing in sophisticated e-commerce technology and offering hundreds more new products than competitors. Among teenagers, Shein was the third most popular e-commerce site behind Amazon and Nike, according to a Piper Sandler report this spring.As their popularity has grown, so has congressional scrutiny of the firms, given their ties to China. Shein was originally based in China but has moved its headquarters to Singapore. Temu, which is based in Boston, is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings, which moved its headquarters to Ireland from China this year.Lawmakers have been questioning their relationship with the Chinese government, as well as the companies’ ability to vet their supply chains to ensure they don’t contain materials or products from Xinjiang. Last year, the U.S. imposed a ban on products from Xinjiang, citing the region’s use of forced labor in factories and mines.The Chinese government has carried out a crackdown in Xinjiang on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, including the organized use of forced labor to pick cotton; work in mines; and manufacture electronics, polysilicon and car parts. Because of this, the U.S. government now presumes all materials from the region to be made with forced labor unless proved otherwise.A young Uyghur women working in a garment factory in Xinjiang in 2019.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesShein said in a statement that it had zero tolerance for forced labor and had a robust compliance system, including a code of conduct, independent audits, robust tracing technology and third-party testing. It provided detailed information to the House committee and will continue to answer its questions, the company said.“We have no contract manufacturers in the Xinjiang region,” it said. “As a global company, our policy is to comply with the customs and import laws of the countries in which we operate.” Temu did not respond to a request for comment.Laboratory tests commissioned by Bloomberg News in November found that some Shein clothing had been made with cotton from Xinjiang. Shein didn’t dispute those findings, but said in a statement to Bloomberg that it took steps in all global markets to comply with local laws and had engaged another lab, Oritain, to test its materials.The congressional report also criticized Temu’s failure to set up a compliance or auditing system that could independently verify that its sellers were not sourcing products from Xinjiang.Temu told the committee that it had a reporting system that consumers and sellers could use to file complaints, and that it asked its sellers to sign a code of conduct specifying a “zero-tolerance policy” for the use of forced, indentured or penal labor. Temu’s code of conduct also says the company reserves the right to inspect factories and warehouses to ensure compliance.But the code does not mention Xinjiang or the U.S. ban, and Temu told the House committee that it did not prohibit vendors from selling products made in Xinjiang, the report said.Temu also argued that its use of direct shipping meant that the U.S. consumer, not Temu, would bear the ultimate responsibility for adhering to the ban on Xinjiang goods.“Temu is not the importer of record with respect to goods shipped to the United States,” the report quoted it as saying.Customs lawyers said that it was not entirely clear which party would be liable for complying with the U.S. ban, but that any company facilitating the importation of goods from Xinjiang could face civil or criminal penalties.The committee report also pictured a key chain that was listed on Temu’s website this month and labeled “pendant with Xinjiang cotton.” The key chain itself is shaped like a bud of cotton, and the report said that the Xinjiang label “may refer to the materials, the supplier, the pattern or the origin of the product.”Temu’s “policy to not prohibit the sale of products that explicitly advertise their Xinjiang origins, even in the face of mounting congressional and public scrutiny on related topics, raises serious questions,” the report said.The New York Times was not able to verify whether the product is made using Xinjiang cotton, which is barred under U.S. law. The Times found an identical product listed for sale on a Chinese wholesale site that was described as manufactured in Henan Province, outside Xinjiang.A Times review of information shared by Temu vendors on Chinese social media sites also suggested that Temu did not require sellers to provide detailed information about where their products were made or which companies manufactured them.Vendors sharing tips online about Temu’s product review process gave several reasons that Temu commonly rejected new listings: for example, if the price was too high, if the samples were inconsistent with the photos or if the goods lacked consumer warning labels. But none mentioned concerns about links to Xinjiang or the U.S. import ban.Jordyn Holman More

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    Falling Used-Car Demand Puts Pressure on Carvana and Other Dealers

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    Dealerships are seeing sales and prices drop as consumers tighten their belts, putting financial pressure on companies like Carvana that grew fast in recent years.About a year ago, the used-car business was a rollicking party. The coronavirus pandemic and a global semiconductor shortage forced automakers to stop or slow production of new cars and trucks, pushing consumers to used-car lots. Prices for pre-owned vehicles surged.Now, the used-car business is suffering a brutal hangover. Americans, especially people on tight budgets, are buying fewer cars as interest rates rise and fears of a recession grow. And improved auto production has eased the shortage of new vehicles.As a result, sales and prices of used cars are falling and the auto dealers that specialize in them are hurting.“After a huge run up in 2021, last year was a reality check,” Chris Frey, senior manager of economic and industry insights at Cox Automotive, a market research firm. “The used market now faces a challenging year as demand weakens.”According to Cox, used-car values fell 14 percent in 2022 and are expected to fall more than 4 percent this year. That shift means many dealers may have no choice but to sell some vehicles for less than they paid.The industry’s difficulties have been exemplified by Carvana, which sells cars online and became famous for building “vending machine” towers where cars can be picked up. The company recently reported a quarterly loss of more than $500 million, and has laid off 4,000 employees.In the last 12 months, Carvana piled up debt. Its stock price has fallen by more than 95 percent in the last 12 months, and three states temporarily suspended its operating license after consumer complaints.“We think there’s a decent chance the company will end up having to file for bankruptcy protection,” said Seth Basham, an Wedbush analyst. “They have too much debt for the level of sales and profitability and can’t support that debt load, and likely will need to restructure.”In a statement to The New York Times, Carvana said it was confident it had “sufficient” funds to turn its business around, noting the company had $2 billion in cash and an additional $2 billion in “other liquidity resources” at the end of the third quarter.It has also hired the investment bank Moelis & Company and is working to reduce its inventory of vehicles and cut the cost of reconditioning them.Used-car values fell 14 percent in 2022. Some dealers may have no choice but to sell some vehicles for less than they paid.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“Millions of satisfied customers have responded positively to Carvana’s e-commerce model for buying and selling cars,” the company said. “Although the current environment and market has drawn attention to the near term, we continued to gain market share in the third quarter of 2022, and we remain focused on our plan to drive to profitability.”CarMax, another used-car giant, is also hurting, although it is on much steadier ground. In the three months that ended in November, its vehicle sales fell 21 percent to 180,000, and net income tumbled 86 percent, to $37.6 million.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    With Layoffs, Retailers Aim to Be Safe Rather Than Sorry (Again)

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    Companies that ramped up hiring in areas like technology over the past few years are cutting back as customers slow their spending.The retail industry is trying to figure out its correct size.Retailers, faced with sky-high demand from shoppers during the pandemic, spent the past three years ramping up their operations in areas like human resources, finance and technology. Now, times have changed.A public that rushed to buy all sorts of goods in the earlier parts of the pandemic is now spending less on merchandise like furniture and clothing. E-commerce, which boomed during lockdowns, has fallen from those heights. And with consumers worried about inflation in the prices of day-to-day necessities like food, companies are playing defense.Saks Off 5th, the off-price retailer owned by Hudson Bay, laid off an unspecified number of workers on Tuesday. Saks.com is laying off about 100 employees, or 3.5 percent of its workers. Stitch Fix laid off 20 percent of its salaried workers this month and closed a distribution center in Salt Lake City. Last week, Wayfair said it would lay off 1,750 people, or 10 percent of its work force, and Amazon started laying off 18,000 workers, many of them in its retail division. Bed Bath & Beyond cut its work force this month as it tries to shore up its finances and prepares for a possible bankruptcy filing.While it’s not unusual for major retailers to announce store closings and some job cuts after the blitz of the holiday season, the recent spate of layoffs is more about structural changes as the industry recalibrates itself after the rapid growth from pandemic-fueled shopping. And it accompanies broader worries about the state of the U.S. economy and layoffs by prominent tech companies.“Retailers are really being cognizant of capital preservation,” said Catherine Lepard, who leads the global retail market for the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. “They don’t know how long this cooler economy is going to last, and they want to make sure they have the right cash to get through that. For retailers that are struggling, it really means tightening the belt with some cost cutting.”Sales during the all-important holiday shopping season were weaker than in years past, when growth hit record levels. December retail sales increased 6 percent from the same period last year, but that number was not adjusted for inflation, which was at 6.5 percent.Department stores posted sizable sales declines. At Nordstrom, sales in the last nine weeks of 2022 decreased 3.5 percent from a year earlier, with the company noting that they “were softer than prepandemic levels.” Macy’s said its holiday sales had been on the lower end of its expectations.Macy’s holiday sales were on the lower end of expectations, the company said. Mathias Wasik for The New York TimesThe layoffs at certain retail companies are a sign that the industry is bracing for a slowdown and another change in how people shop.“To mitigate macroeconomic headwinds and best position our business for success, we have made changes to streamline our organizational structure,” Meghan Biango, a spokesperson for Saks Off 5th, said in a statement. “As part of this, we made the difficult decision to part ways with associates across various areas of the business.” The layoffs affected divisions such as talent acquisition and supply chain.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Walmart: The retail giant is significantly raising its starting wages for store workers, as it battles to recruit and retain workers in a tight retail labor market.Tech Layoffs: The industry’s recent job cuts have been an awakening for a generation of workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.Infrastructure Money: Government spending on initiatives intended to combat climate change and rebuild infrastructure are expected to land this year. The effects on the labor market will be deep but hard to measure.Restaurant Workers: Mandatory $15 food-safety classes are turning cooks, waiters and bartenders into unwitting funders of a lobbying campaign against minimum wage increases.Not all retailers are in a defensive crouch. For instance, Walmart announced this week that it was raising the minimum wage for its store employees in a bid to attract and retain workers in a tight labor market.Still, some retailers are becoming focused less on bringing in new customers — an expensive undertaking — and more on retaining those they gained during the pandemic.“There’s a sense of conservatism,” said Brian Walker, chief strategy officer at Bloomreach, which works with retailers on their e-commerce and digital marketing businesses. “They’re still adjusting in many ways to this omnichannel retail environment and are probably seeing this as an important time to calibrate their organizations and make sure they have the right people, and not too many of them to be pragmatic and weather a potential storm.”That means fewer projects that require lots of money and time and more investments where a company can start seeing results quickly, Mr. Walker said.Ms. Lepard agreed. “This isn’t the economy to really get creative and take on high risk,” she said. “There might be a pulling back of some of that innovation in future investment to make sure they’re pacing themselves.”It’s also a moment for retailers to assess what e-commerce abilities they need. In the early months of the pandemic, online sales exploded as many brick-and-mortar stores went dark. That growth has slowed. E-commerce traffic in North America declined 1.6 percent in the third quarter of 2022 compared with a year earlier, according to Bloomreach’s Commerce Pulse data. Conversion rates — the measure of someone’s buying an item after seeing it advertised — dropped 12 percent during the same period.“This is where people overshot the runway,” said Craig Johnson, president of the retail advisory firm Customer Growth Partners, who has tracked the industry for 25 years. “This works like a ratchet. It might go up to 27 percent, but that’s going to normalize,” he added, referring to the share of total e-commerce spending for the first year of the pandemic, when many stores were grappling with Covid restrictions and closures.When online spending was rising, many companies pushed to fill roles that could help them meet the demand. Now they have to adjust to a new reality.“Unfortunately, along the way, we overcomplicated things, lost sight of some of our fundamentals and simply grew too big,” Niraj Shah, Wayfair’s chief executive, said in a note to employees last Friday. His company, which reported in November that its net revenue was down 9 percent from a year earlier, is looking to save $1.4 billion.Demand for luxury goods is still there, but those retailers say they need to restructure to continue to innovate.Mathias Wasik for The New York TimesIn the luxury sector, the shopper demand is still there, but a restructuring is needed to continue to innovate. As part of its layoffs, Saks.com also separated its technology and operations teams.“We are at a point in our trajectory as a digital luxury pure-play where we need to optimize our business to ensure we are best positioned for the future,” Nicole Schoenberg, a Saks spokeswoman, said in a statement. “These changes are never easy, but they are necessary for our go-forward success.”While reducing head count might help save costs in the short term, retailers will have trouble in the future if they do not also address how to improve the customer experience online, said Liza Amlani, founder of Retail Strategy Group, which works with brands on their merchandising and planning strategies.“With Wayfair, and as with many digital players, what we’ve seen in the last three years is that they scaled and grew too quickly,” Ms. Amlani said. “They banked on an influx of spending across digital. They didn’t invest where they needed to invest.”The retail layoffs are an about-face from 2021, when companies couldn’t hire frontline workers fast enough. After the initial jolt of the pandemic, which led many retailers to furlough or outright fire workers, many people received stimulus checks from the government. They wanted to spend that money, and when companies needed to ramp up in-store services again, they often struggled to find enough workers.Recalling that difficulty might give some retailers pause before they lay off workers this time, Mr. Walker said. If a steep downturn never comes, or if there’s a sudden rebound in demand, companies don’t want to be stuck without enough employees.But the next few months could be rough for retailers, as profit margins shrink and revenue growth slows from what it was the past couple of years. In that kind of environment, investors generally like to see large companies take steps to cut costs. And once layoffs begin, a kind of industry groupthink can set in.“Once a couple of companies start to do it,” said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who researches management and human resources, “then it creates some momentum where then you’ve got to explain why you’re not doing what everybody else is doing.” More

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    Tech Layoffs Continue as Shares Fall and Interest Rates Rise

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    Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter.One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.It was a boom that seemed as if it would never end. Tech piled up victories, and its competitors wilted. Carvana built dozens of flashy car “vending machines” across the country, marketed itself relentlessly and offered very attractive prices for trade-ins.“The whole tech industry of the last 15 years was built by cheap money,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst with Guidehouse Insights. “Now they’re getting hit by a new reality, and they will pay the price.”Cheap money funded many of the acquisitions that substitute for organic growth in tech. Two years ago, as the pandemic raged and many office workers were confined to their homes, Salesforce bought the office communications tool Slack for $28 billion, a sum that some analysts thought was too high. Salesforce borrowed $10 billion to do the deal. This month, it said it was cutting 8,000 people, about 10 percent of its staff, many of them at Slack.Even the biggest tech companies are affected. Amazon was willing to lose money for years to acquire new customers. It is taking a different approach these days, laying off 18,000 office workers and shuttering operations that are not financially viable.Carvana, like many start-ups, pulled a page out of Amazon’s old playbook, trying to get big fast. Used cars, it believed, were a highly fragmented market ripe for reinvention, just the way taxis, bookstores and hotels had been. It strove to outdistance any competition.The company, based in Tempe, Ariz., wanted to replace traditional dealers with, Carvana said grandly, “technology and exceptional customer service.” In what seemed to symbolize the death of the old way of doing things, it paid $22 million for a six-acre site in Mission Valley, Calif., that a Mazda dealer had occupied since 1965.More on Big TechLayoffs: Some of the biggest tech companies, including Alphabet and Microsoft, have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts. But even after the layoffs, their work forces are still behemoths.A Generational Divide: The industry’s recent job cuts have been eye-opening to young workers. But to older employees who experienced the dot-com bust, it has hardly been a shock.Supreme Court Cases: The justices are poised to reconsider two crucial tenets of online speech under which social media networks have long operated.In the Netherlands: Dutch government and educational organizations have spurred changes at Google, Microsoft and Zoom, using a European data protection law as a lever.Where traditional dealerships were literally flat, Carvana built multistory car vending machines that became memorable local landmarks. Customers picked up their cars at these towers, which now total 33. A corporate video of the building of one vending machine has over four million views on YouTube.In the third quarter of 2021, Carvana delivered 110,000 cars to customers, up 74 percent from 2020. The goal: two million cars a year, which would make it by far the largest used car retailer.An eye-catching Carvana car vending machine in Uniondale, N.Y.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThen, even more quickly than the company grew, it fell apart. When used car sales rose more than 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, that created a supply problem: Carvana needed many more vehicles. It acquired a car auction company for $2.2 billion and took on even more debt at a premium interest rate. And it paid customers handsomely for cars.But as the pandemic waned and interest rates began to rise, sales slowed. Carvana, which declined to comment for this article, did a round of layoffs in May and another in November. Its chief executive, Ernie Garcia, blamed the higher cost of financing, saying, “We failed to accurately predict how all this will play out.”Some competitors are even worse off. Vroom, a Houston company, has seen its stock fall to $1 from $65 in mid-2020. Over the past year, it has dismissed half of its employees.“High rates are painful for almost everyone, but they are particularly painful for Silicon Valley,” said Kairong Xiao, an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School. “I expect more layoffs and investment cuts unless the Fed reverses its tightening.”At the moment, there is little likelihood of that. The market expects two more rate increases by the Federal Reserve this year, to at least 5 percent.In real estate, that is trouble for anyone expecting a quick recovery. Low rates not only pushed up house prices but also made it irresistible for companies such as Zillow as well as Redfin, Opendoor Technologies and others, to get into a business that used to be considered slightly disreputable: flipping houses.In 2019, Zillow estimated it would soon have revenue of $20 billion from selling 5,000 houses a month. That thrilled investors, who pushed the publicly traded Seattle company to a $45 billion valuation and created a hiring boom that raised the number of employees to 8,000.Zillow’s notion was to use artificial intelligence software to make a chaotic real estate market more efficient, predictable and profitable. This was the sort of innovation that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about in 2011 when he said digital insurgents would take over entire industries. “Software is eating the world,” he wrote.In June 2021, Zillow owned 50 homes in California’s capital, Sacramento. Five months later, it had 400. One was an unremarkable four-bedroom, three-bath house in the northwest corner of the city. Built in 2001, it is convenient to several parks and the airport. Zillow paid $700,000 for it.Zillow put the house on the market for months, but no one wanted it, even at $625,000. Last fall, after it had unceremoniously exited the flipping market, Zillow unloaded the house for $355,000. Low rates had made it seem possible that Zillow could shoot for the moon, but even they could not make it a success.Ryan Lundquist, a Sacramento appraiser who followed the house’s history closely on his blog, said Zillow realized real estate was fragmented but perhaps did not quite appreciate that houses were labor-intensive, deeply personal, one-to-one transactions.“This idea of being able to come in and change the game completely — that’s really difficult to do, and most of the time you don’t,” he said.Zillow’s market value has now shrunk to $10 billion, and its employee count to around 5,500 after two rounds of layoffs. It declined to comment.The dream of market domination through software dies hard, however. Zillow recently made a deal with Opendoor, an online real estate company in San Francisco that buys and sells residential properties and has also been ravaged by the downturn. Under the agreement, sellers on Zillow’s platform can request to have Opendoor make offers on their homes. Zillow said sellers would “save themselves the stress and uncertainty of a traditional sale process.”That partnership might explain why the buyer of that four-bedroom Sacramento house, one of the last in Zillow’s portfolio, was none other than Opendoor. It made some modest improvements and put the house on the market for $632,000, nearly twice what it had paid. A deal is pending.“If it were really this easy, everyone would be a flipper,” Mr. Lundquist said.An Amazon bookstore in Seattle in 2016. The store is now permanently closed.Kyle Johnson for The New York TimesThe easy money era had been well established when Amazon decided it had mastered e-commerce enough to take on the physical world. Its plans to expand into bookstores was a rumor for years and finally happened in 2015. The media went wild. According to one well-circulated story, the retailer planned to open as many as 400 bookstores.The company’s idea was that the stores would function as extensions of its online operation. Reader reviews would guide the potential buyer. Titles were displayed face out, so there were only 6,000 of them. The stores were showrooms for Amazon’s electronics.Being a showroom for the internet is expensive. Amazon had to hire booksellers and lease storefronts in popular areas. And letting enthusiastic reviews be one of the selection criteria meant stocking self-published titles, some of which were pumped up with reviews by the authors’ friends. These were not books that readers wanted.Amazon likes to try new things, and that costs money. It took on another $10 billion of long-term debt in the first nine months of the year at a higher rate of interest than it was paying two years ago. This month, it said it was borrowing $8 billion more. Its stock market valuation has shrunk by about a trillion dollars.The retailer closed 68 stores last March, including not only bookstores but also pop-ups and so-called four-star stores. It continues to operate its Whole Foods grocery subsidiary, which has 500 U.S. locations, and other food stores. Amazon said in a statement that it was “committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies.”Traditional book selling, where expectations are modest, may have an easier path now. Barnes & Noble, the bricks-and-mortar chain recently deemed all but dead, has moved into two former Amazon locations in Massachusetts, putting about 20,000 titles into each. The chain said the stores were doing “very well.” It is scouting other former Amazon locations.“Amazon did a very different bookstore than we’re doing,” said Janine Flanigan, Barnes & Noble’s director of store planning and design. “Our focus is books.” More

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    For Tech Companies, Years of Easy Money Yield to Hard Times

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    Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 annualized growth rate in the third quarter.One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.It was a boom that seemed as if it would never end. Tech piled up victories, and its competitors wilted. Carvana built dozens of flashy car “vending machines” across the country, marketed itself relentlessly and offered very attractive prices for trade-ins.“The whole tech industry of the last 15 years was built by cheap money,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst with Guidehouse Insights. “Now they’re getting hit by a new reality, and they will pay the price.”Cheap money funded many of the acquisitions that substitute for organic growth in tech. Two years ago, as the pandemic raged and many office workers were confined to their homes, Salesforce bought the office communications tool Slack for $28 billion, a sum that some analysts thought was too high. Salesforce borrowed $10 billion to do the deal. This month, it said it was cutting 8,000 people, about 10 percent of its staff, many of them at Slack.Even the biggest tech companies are affected. Amazon was willing to lose money for years to acquire new customers. It is taking a different approach these days, laying off 18,000 office workers and shuttering operations that are not financially viable.Carvana, like many start-ups, pulled a page out of Amazon’s old playbook, trying to get big fast. Used cars, it believed, were a highly fragmented market ripe for reinvention, just the way taxis, bookstores and hotels had been. It strove to outdistance any competition.The company, based in Tempe, Ariz., wanted to replace traditional dealers with, Carvana said grandly, “technology and exceptional customer service.” In what seemed to symbolize the death of the old way of doing things, it paid $22 million for a six-acre site in Mission Valley, Calif., that a Mazda dealer had occupied since 1965.More on Big TechLayoffs: Some of the biggest tech companies, including Alphabet and Microsoft, have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts. But even after the layoffs, their work forces are still behemoths.A Generational Divide: The industry’s recent job cuts have been eye-opening to young workers. But to older employees who experienced the dot-com bust, it has hardly been a shock.Supreme Court Cases: The justices are poised to reconsider two crucial tenets of online speech under which social media networks have long operated.In the Netherlands: Dutch government and educational organizations have spurred changes at Google, Microsoft and Zoom, using a European data protection law as a lever.Where traditional dealerships were literally flat, Carvana built multistory car vending machines that became memorable local landmarks. Customers picked up their cars at these towers, which now total 33. A corporate video of the building of one vending machine has over four million views on YouTube.In the third quarter of 2021, Carvana delivered 110,000 cars to customers, up 74 percent from 2020. The goal: two million cars a year, which would make it by far the largest used car retailer.An eye-catching Carvana car vending machine in Uniondale, N.Y.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThen, even more quickly than the company grew, it fell apart. When used car sales rose more than 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, that created a supply problem: Carvana needed many more vehicles. It acquired a car auction company for $2.2 billion and took on even more debt at a premium interest rate. And it paid customers handsomely for cars.But as the pandemic waned and interest rates began to rise, sales slowed. Carvana, which declined to comment for this article, did a round of layoffs in May and another in November. Its chief executive, Ernie Garcia, blamed the higher cost of financing, saying, “We failed to accurately predict how all this will play out.”Some competitors are even worse off. Vroom, a Houston company, has seen its stock fall to $1 from $65 in mid-2020. Over the past year, it has dismissed half of its employees.“High rates are painful for almost everyone, but they are particularly painful for Silicon Valley,” said Kairong Xiao, an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School. “I expect more layoffs and investment cuts unless the Fed reverses its tightening.”At the moment, there is little likelihood of that. The market expects two more rate increases by the Federal Reserve this year, to at least 5 percent.In real estate, that is trouble for anyone expecting a quick recovery. Low rates not only pushed up house prices but also made it irresistible for companies such as Zillow as well as Redfin, Opendoor Technologies and others, to get into a business that used to be considered slightly disreputable: flipping houses.In 2019, Zillow estimated it would soon have revenue of $20 billion from selling 5,000 houses a month. That thrilled investors, who pushed the publicly traded Seattle company to a $45 billion valuation and created a hiring boom that raised the number of employees to 8,000.Zillow’s notion was to use artificial intelligence software to make a chaotic real estate market more efficient, predictable and profitable. This was the sort of innovation that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about in 2011 when he said digital insurgents would take over entire industries. “Software is eating the world,” he wrote.In June 2021, Zillow owned 50 homes in California’s capital, Sacramento. Five months later, it had 400. One was an unremarkable four-bedroom, three-bath house in the northwest corner of the city. Built in 2001, it is convenient to several parks and the airport. Zillow paid $700,000 for it.Zillow put the house on the market for months, but no one wanted it, even at $625,000. Last fall, after it had unceremoniously exited the flipping market, Zillow unloaded the house for $355,000. Low rates had made it seem possible that Zillow could shoot for the moon, but even they could not make it a success.Ryan Lundquist, a Sacramento appraiser who followed the house’s history closely on his blog, said Zillow realized real estate was fragmented but perhaps did not quite appreciate that houses were labor-intensive, deeply personal, one-to-one transactions.“This idea of being able to come in and change the game completely — that’s really difficult to do, and most of the time you don’t,” he said.Zillow’s market value has now shrunk to $10 billion, and its employee count to around 5,500 after two rounds of layoffs. It declined to comment.The dream of market domination through software dies hard, however. Zillow recently made a deal with Opendoor, an online real estate company in San Francisco that buys and sells residential properties and has also been ravaged by the downturn. Under the agreement, sellers on Zillow’s platform can request to have Opendoor make offers on their homes. Zillow said sellers would “save themselves the stress and uncertainty of a traditional sale process.”That partnership might explain why the buyer of that four-bedroom Sacramento house, one of the last in Zillow’s portfolio, was none other than Opendoor. It made some modest improvements and put the house on the market for $632,000, nearly twice what it had paid. A deal is pending.“If it were really this easy, everyone would be a flipper,” Mr. Lundquist said.An Amazon bookstore in Seattle in 2016. The store is now permanently closed.Kyle Johnson for The New York TimesThe easy money era had been well established when Amazon decided it had mastered e-commerce enough to take on the physical world. Its plans to expand into bookstores was a rumor for years and finally happened in 2015. The media went wild. According to one well-circulated story, the retailer planned to open as many as 400 bookstores.The company’s idea was that the stores would function as extensions of its online operation. Reader reviews would guide the potential buyer. Titles were displayed face out, so there were only 6,000 of them. The stores were showrooms for Amazon’s electronics.Being a showroom for the internet is expensive. Amazon had to hire booksellers and lease storefronts in popular areas. And letting enthusiastic reviews be one of the selection criteria meant stocking self-published titles, some of which were pumped up with reviews by the authors’ friends. These were not books that readers wanted.Amazon likes to try new things, and that costs money. It took on another $10 billion of long-term debt in the first nine months of the year at a higher rate of interest than it was paying two years ago. This month, it said it was borrowing $8 billion more. Its stock market valuation has shrunk by about a trillion dollars.The retailer closed 68 stores last March, including not only bookstores but also pop-ups and so-called four-star stores. It continues to operate its Whole Foods grocery subsidiary, which has 500 U.S. locations, and other food stores. Amazon said in a statement that it was “committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies.”Traditional book selling, where expectations are modest, may have an easier path now. Barnes & Noble, the bricks-and-mortar chain recently deemed all but dead, has moved into two former Amazon locations in Massachusetts, putting about 20,000 titles into each. The chain said the stores were doing “very well.” It is scouting other former Amazon locations.“Amazon did a very different bookstore than we’re doing,” said Janine Flanigan, Barnes & Noble’s director of store planning and design. “Our focus is books.” More

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    Billions of Dollars at Stake in a Puzzling Holiday Shopping Season

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    It promises to be unpredictable, with retailers and consumers still figuring out how much will be spent and on what kinds of goods.No one quite knows what to make of this year’s holiday shopping season. But billions of dollars are riding on it.After two pandemic holiday seasons messed with doorbusters, party plans and supply chains, retailers were hoping that this year would be a return to sanity. But just as it started to appear that families and stores could pull out their old playbooks, along came near-record inflation and the war in Ukraine, only increasing general unease about the state of the world.Some things are looking up. The pandemic has receded, supply chains generally stabilized, and the labor market is strong.But in March, the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates to slow down inflation, just as retail executives were making plans for which toys, wreaths and fuzzy socks shoppers would buy come winter. To try to ensure a robust shopping season, retailers leaned in early and often. Christmas trees showed up at Costco in August. Amazon threw what amounted to a second Prime Day in October. And it seems every day has brought ads for Black Friday deals, like the ones that Target offered throughout October.Still, shoppers seem confused. Should they buy now or later? Purchase for a lot of people or put a priority on a few? Give items or shared experiences? Trust online deliveries or go with local shops?“The truth is, we don’t know whether consumers will spend more or less on gift giving or whether they’ll do more shopping online or in the mall,” Etsy’s chief executive, Josh Silverman, told investors recently.That has left companies making predictions for the all-important retail season that amount to a shrug.“We’re not quite sure how strong holiday spending will be versus last year,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, told investors in October, “and we’re ready for a variety of outcomes.”Or, as Peter Boneparth, the chair of Kohl’s board, told analysts this month, “I think everybody believes that Christmas will come, but I don’t think anybody out there knows for sure exactly what’s going to happen.”Feeling inflation’s squeezeMathias Wasik for The New York TimesInflation is on everyone’s mind. Higher prices on all sorts of items have made people rethink what they’re buying and whom they’re buying for. While inflation is moderating slightly, it’s at the highest levels since Indiana Jones was bullwhipping raiders of the Lost Ark at the mall cineplex.More on Big TechMicrosoft: The company’s $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, which rests on winning the approval by 16 governments, has become a test for whether tech giants can buy companies amid a backlash.Apple: Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is dealing with a shortage of workers. Now, that plant is getting help from an unlikely source: the Chinese government.Amazon: The company appears set to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, in what would be the largest cuts in the company’s history.Meta: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work forceThe National Retail Federation predicts that holiday sales in November and December will increase 6 to 7 percent from last year, but that’s below the rate of inflation.“Folks are really looking for deals this year,” said Melissa Burdick, who spent a decade at Amazon and founded Pacvue, which helps big brands sell online. “They’re shifting what they’re buying to favor lower-priced brands and more necessary items.” She summed up the sentiment as: “I used to want Bose headphones. Now I will buy chips on sale on Amazon.”Cristian Tinoco, 19, who works 45 hours a week at a gym in Seattle and attends community college, said his family would focus on spending Christmas together after a rocky year.“Gas has especially gone up. I probably spend about $400 a paycheck on gas because I commute 35 minutes each way, each day. I have three siblings, so my parents have four kids at home and spend more than $1,000 a month on groceries. I help sometimes pay for food with my paycheck.“My student loan application got messed up, so I’ve been paying for college out of pocket. I don’t want to drop out. I may finally be able to start saving. I want to buy a truck — it just feels like me.”The experience is the thingPeople spent two pandemic years buying stuff. With stimulus checks, rising wages and nowhere to go, last year’s holiday season generated the biggest annual growth in retail spending on record — 14.1 percent.This year, Covid-19 travel restrictions have eased, and masking mandates are virtually gone. Retailers are bracing to lose out on spending as more people go on trips, attend concerts and eat out.The Transportation Security Administration said screenings were up 33 percent from last year, and concert bookings are up 51 percent, according to Eventbrite.“They were reminded that life is very short, and coming out of this pandemic they want to experience life again,” Mike Daher, an executive at the consultancy Deloitte, said.Mary Anna Ball, 25, a ballerina and research analyst in West Virginia, usually starts squirreling away Christmas gifts in July but this year wants to give gifts that will help her family experience the world.“I love sweaters and little kitschy things like that, but I know not everyone is that way, and you’ll kind of remember the experience more than when you’re going through your clothes of, ‘How did I get this sweater?’ If you give an experience, that’s something you’ll remember a bit longer, or maybe it’ll introduce you to a new hobby or something like that.“I have two younger brothers. Some people get siblings tattoos. I refuse to do that. But they’ve said it would be fun to go skydiving one day. I thought, I can get them a voucher and, whenever they can, they can just go down and skydive or something.”Christmas came early in many storesMathias Wasik for The New York TimesGetting what you want this year shouldn’t be a big issue. Remembering last year, when popular items were stuck at ports or somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, brands ramped up production, and retailers ordered more products. They did this earlier than usual to make sure items arrived on time, but the supply chain improved. When orders arrived earlier than expected, retailers piled items in warehouses that in some cases were already stuffed with merchandise ordered in 2021.That, combined with uncertain consumer demand, left retailers with record-high inventories, according to data from the Census Bureau.That’s leading to more deals and a hodgepodge of goods on store floors, no matter the season. In other words, Christmas came early to stores.Mike Campese, a guitarist and instructor in Las Vegas, knew this year was going to be strange when he saw holiday merchandise unusually early.“The other day, I was in Costco, and as soon as you walk in, the very first aisle is the Christmas stuff. It is still September! Oh, my God.“It is the earliest I have seen it. Usually the day after Halloween it’s like the malls are playing Christmas tunes and the decorations are up. Some people go shopping in September. I can’t do that. I am not in the spirit yet.”Waiting on deals, even for everyday itemsAmazon tried its best to hype an early holiday sale at the start of October. Some of the top-selling products in the United States — like Crest Whitestrips and protein powder — weren’t exactly typical presents.“No one is buying gifts for Christmas,” said Jason Murray, an Amazon veteran whose company, Shipium, advises online retailers. “They are buying for themselves.”It doesn’t matter much to retailers, who used the early holiday sales to try to offload products before most shoppers had even picked out their Halloween costumes. But it signaled that shoppers are motivated by deals, no matter what they’re for. After two years of limited discounts, shoppers are showing they are willing to hold out for a bargain.Brands are getting on board. “We made too many,” the bike maker Specialized said on its website, telling customers that they can “save BIG.”Rakuten, an online platform that offers deals and shopper rewards, said retailer participation in Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions was the “biggest in the last three years.”Natalie Rodriguez, 47, who works for the Indiana Department of Revenue, said the products on sale weren’t what she wanted to give for Christmas.“I am really cognizant of those deals that are coming up right now. I think it is a grab to see who gets my money first. Am I taking advantage of it because I perceive it was a deal?“On the Amazon sale, I had 150 things in my cart and saved for later, but I didn’t see anything that is comparable to what I would think is a Black Friday deal. When I was a kid, Black Friday was superlow-cost, like 80 or 90 percent off. Most of what I saw was 30 and 40 percent on some items. It’s like, ‘Nah, I will just pass,’ especially if it is not an essential item. Crest Whitestrips were a great deal, but I don’t need them right now.“All I got was a $50 gift card with a $10 bonus on it.”On-time arrival, finallyFor years, largely spurred on by Amazon, consumers got used to fast shipping — often in two days or less. The pandemic upended that. Driver and inventory shortages meant people had to plan ahead.This year, industry experts do not expect another Shipageddon. There are more than enough delivery and warehouse workers to meet demand. Shippers should be able to deliver 110 million packages a day, almost 20 million more than shoppers are expected to order, according to ShipMatrix, a consultancy.“Because of experiences of what has gone on with global supply chains in the last few years, folks are stretching the holiday season over a longer period,” said Jamil Ghani, the vice president of Amazon Prime.Miranda Rosas, 21, a student at the University of California, Merced, was nervous about late-arriving Christmas gifts, so she started ordering last month.“Shipping last year was so awful, and a lot of items that I ordered a little bit last minute came in time, thankfully, but it took a long time. I tried to start a little sooner.“I really thought that it was going to take a couple weeks or a whole week and then it would ship and then it would take another two weeks to come. Now, a lot of my stuff it’s been like, ‘Oh! Already?’”Luxury is its own thingMathias Wasik for The New York TimesThe vibes are good for people with money to spare.More than three-quarters of luxury shoppers say they plan to spend the same as or more than last year, according to a survey from Saks. Twice as many as last year said they planned on dressing up in formal attire for the holidays, and 40 percent wanted to “self-gift” shoes. Luxury goods companies are giving signals that they’re confident about the U.S. market. This month, Estee Lauder agreed to buy Tom Ford for $2.8 billion, widening its reach into fashion apparel.“Customers are going back to a social life,” said Geoffroy van Raemdonck, chief executive at Neiman Marcus, whose top customers spend an average of $25,000 a year with the brand. “This is one of the first holidays that they feel more comfortable sharing it with their loved ones. I think that there’s a lot of good things coming with the holiday.”Sabah Essa, 49, a style adviser at Neiman Marcus in Atlanta, has been working with her clients, who include doctors, housewives, reality-TV stars and young professionals, to build their holiday wish lists.“Mostly everyone wants a big expensive piece compared to last year. For example, someone maybe got a Prada bag last Christmas, and now they’re upgrading it to high-end jewelry.“They want to find an outfit for going out to dinner or a party or birthday or to grab a gift for another friend. Everybody is just really happy to go out, and they can go without a mask.“A lot of them are also traveling. They want their suitcase to be all new stuff.“One client wants to give his wife 30 different gifts for her turning 30. He wants to have that plus Christmas because her birthday falls right around Christmas. The gifts are all different ranges, from stocking stuffers to high-end jewelry to Chanel bags to shoes — a lot of shoes, from sneakers to heels to boots.“It helps that we offer our clients a glass of champagne when they come in to make it easy for them to shop. Or if they want a cup of tea or coffee. It’s more fun than the years in the past now.”Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity. More