Many Happy Returns

Plus: Remembering Betty White [View this email online]( [Pop Culture Happy Hour]( by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when one Emma [was not like another](. It was the week when [COVID changed everything]( for Sundance and the Grammy Awards. And it was the week when [Elmo's feud with Rocco]( was the hot gossip. Let's get to it. Opening Argument: Many Happy Returns Sometimes, I have the good fortune to use this space to advance an arcane theory about television. Sometimes I use it to talk about a news event of interest. Today, I want to tell you about the weirdest thing I have been watching on YouTube recently. It has to do with returns. Amanda Mull [wrote a piece for The Atlantic]( in October about the fact that when online purchases in particular are returned, they generally aren't worth going to the trouble of vetting and inspecting and reselling. They're sort of cursed (my word, not hers), and it's really just a problem of getting rid of them. As it turns out, one thing that can happen to them is that people order pallets of them, knowing either something or next to nothing about what they're getting, and then they open the pallets for the benefit of YouTube viewers. (These videos are not new, to be clear; they are just new to me.) [Consider Hopescope](. Hope has just over a million followers as of this writing (she's been running a promotion where she would give away, among other things, a Peloton when she hit a million). She buys a lot of weird stuff in different videos and shows it off: lost luggage, used Kardashian clothes, knock-off versions of movie dresses. But one of the things she does is buy pallets of Amazon returns from a liquidation site. (And Target returns, incidentally.) The merchandise comes to her in massive pallets full of mystery, and she opens the packages and sees how she fared. She tends to go for pallets that are labeled as if they're mostly clothes. Oooh, leggings! Underwear! A KFC Christmas sweater! One time, she bought a pallet that seemed to have been damaged: a bunch of the clothes looked like they had been burned and/or run over. The clothes might not have been much to look at, but there was clearly a heck of a story there. I might have paid just for the story. This might seem like a pretty chill hobby, but I am always startled when she reveals that she paid something like $1500 for a box of returns that are supposedly "worth" $20,000. She keeps some things, donates some things, resells some things, and throws away things that have been, for instance, on fire at some point. She always seems to feel that in the end, she did well, but ... what is doing well, actually? She is not the only person who does this. There are different genres of these videos. People who are clothing-oriented do them. I've seen a bunch of people who are tech-oriented who crow about getting $2000 worth of "tech" for $150 or something, and then open the box and find a lot of mislabeled cables and printer ink and, often, one or two things that really were sold for a pretty high price and really do seemingly work; you just don't get to decide what they are. (I once saw a stray apparently unopened Anova sous vide machine -- a pretty decent grab -- show up in a clothing pallet and the person was like, "Eh, I don't know what this is." Similarly, one guy got a Dire Straits record on vinyl and said, "Never heard of them.") Of course, the reveals -- it's a hot styling tool for your hair! It's expensive earbuds! It's a Nespresso! -- are only the beginning of figuring out what you've actually done. Because these things have been returned. That means many have been opened, many have been used, many have been found wanting in some way. Again: Many have been used. I saw a guy who was pretty psyched about a pair of earbuds until he saw ... the evidence that they had been in someone's ears. Ditto a shaver that had been used to shave someone's ... something before being returned. [There's one couple I have seen]( that has actually done a couple of rounds of tracking how much money they can make by buying and trying to resell (like on Facebook Marketplace) the items in a pallet. They have found it to be ... somewhat unsatisfying. The woman estimated that once she accounted for her time, she earned about 12 bucks an hour "flipping" a pallet, after quite a bit of effort. It's better than nothing! But I don't think the actual monetary gain is the goal here at all. It's the surprise of it and the performance of it. And it's the promise of getting something for nothing, even if the something is not something you want. These folks use the word "worth" in the stretchiest and most generous way possible -- "This is worth $300!" just means that's what it was being sold for on Amazon. The fact that something was once sold for a particular price does not actually imbue it with that substantive value (ask the people who invested in Theranos). What's really striking is how these videos underscore the onslaught of stuff, and the acquisition and disposable nature of stuff, and the fact that sometimes, just getting a bunch of stuff that's so cheaply made it's not worth trying to resell piece by piece makes these YouTubers feel like they're getting away with something. (I also think that in effect, these people have discovered the dollar store, and could get a similar effect by going into a dollar store with their eyes closed and just taking home the first 50 things they ran into.) There was a guy who summed this up [in one video]( so perfectly that I wrote down his comment immediately. He had just found, among his "tech" stuff, a package of 100 interoffice mail envelopes. Just ... interoffice mail envelopes, in there with the doggie camera and the filthy earbuds. He didn't need them, didn't want them, knew immediately he would throw them away, but he was still really impressed that he'd gotten such great value. He said: “No use for these, unfortunately, but damn!” --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend: I’ve only started watching the ABC drama Women Of The Movement, which is focusing its first season on Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley. The idea of looking at this story from his mother’s point of view is intriguing and smart. The PBS series All Creatures Great And Small returns on Sunday night for a second season. If you like your television comforting and pretty to look at, give it a try. The Peacock series Wolf Like Me, starring Josh Gad and Isla Fisher, premieres Thursday. I haven’t decided how I feel about it yet, but I dig how weird it is. (That’s about all I want to tell you until you get a chance to see it.) Finally! We are very excited that there’s a new way to support the show! It’s called Pop Culture Happy Hour+, and it means you’ll get the same episodes, but via a sponsorship-free feed. If you prefer or your circumstances dictate, you can absolutely continue listening the same as before in the regular feed with sponsorships. If you’re interested, check out your options and figure out a plan that works for you at [plus.npr.org/happy](. (A note: The implementation of this specifically on Apple seems to have a glitch right now where new episodes that drop are presented for the first couple of hours as subscriber-only, which they are not supposed to be, and then it resolves. We are working to get this fixed.) What We Did This Week: [Betty White image]( Kevin Winter/Getty Images Betty White passed away, and Stephen and I [sat down to talk about]( her long and illustrious career. If you get the sense that we both really loved her game-show appearances the most, you wouldn't be entirely wrong. I also [wrote a remembrance of her]( and a reflection on how "what an adorable grandma-type" can be really reductive. We [shared an encore episode]( where Stephen, Glen and I talked about our favorite Nintendo Switch games. [Neda Ulaby and I talked about]( the new Netflix film The Lost Daughter. Roxana Hadadi and Jordan Crucchiola joined me for a chat about [the fascinating and mysterious Showtime series]( Yellowjackets. And Bob Mondello and Jourdain Searles talked to me about some of the 2021 movies [we want to make sure you don't miss](. [I wrote about]( Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who was convicted this week of defrauding her investors. [Glen reviewed Peacemaker]( the HBO MAX show spun off of The Suicide Squad. What's Making Us Happy: Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - What's making Bob Mondello happy: [Resident Alien]( on SyFy - What's making Jourdain Searles happy: [The Criterion Channel]( Alfred Hitchcock [film collection]( including the film Marnie - What's making Linda happy: [Mouth To Mouth by Antoine Wilson]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. [Find a Station]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+](. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? 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