ICYMI - Shopping on Etsy Sucks Now
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, Amanda Mull, to talk about how the enshittification of online shopping came for Etsy. The platform used to be a thoughtful reprieve from the cheap, mass-produced products on Amazon, but now it’s plagued by a number of the same problems. With cheap junk and AI allegations abound, where can the Shein and Temu-haters go to actually find what they’re shopping for?
This podcast is produced by Vic Whitley-Berry, Daisy Rosario, and Kate Lindsay.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture. And today we're welcoming back to the show, |
| 0:24.7 | culture writer Amanda Mull. Hello Amanda. Hi, nice to be here. So good to have you on this |
| 0:31.0 | absolutely freezing day. We both just barely made it here. But Amanda is a senior reporter at |
| 0:37.2 | Bloomberg Business Week. She writes about consumer culture. Previously, she was a staff writer at The Atlantic. And has written some of my favorite pieces, including the HGTV Occasion of America. Your sweaters are garbage. It's too easy to buy stuff you don't want. And online shopping has become a giant fake product machine. |
| 0:55.0 | And those last two headlines are particularly relevant to what we're here to discuss today, |
| 0:59.2 | which is why online shopping has become so fraught. But first, I want to ask you a different |
| 1:04.9 | question, which is, how do you feel about gift guides. |
| 1:15.8 | Oh, I have like a long relationship with gift guides. |
| 1:20.0 | I started out my career working in a website called Pursblog. |
| 1:21.3 | Shout out to Pursblog. |
| 1:23.2 | I worked there for 10 years. It is about the luxury accessories industry. |
| 1:25.4 | So, of course, during holiday season, we made a lot of gift guides. And I made a lot of the gift guides that we made for 10 years. I would sometimes make a dozen per year myself. I think that they are sort of a fascinating encapsulation of, like, internet commerce and, like, the different mechanisms and, |
| 1:45.2 | you know, incentives that create the internet shopping environment that we have. |
| 1:51.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:52.4 | I still peruse a gift guide occasionally. |
| 1:54.5 | Somebody with really good taste or, like, like, subject matter expertise and something, I |
| 1:58.4 | think, can still make a really worthwhile gift guide. |
| 2:01.2 | Yeah, making a gift guide is a skill, which I know from not having it. |
| 2:05.7 | Because when I was at Refinery 29, I'd often get assigned a gift guide. |
| 2:10.4 | And sorry to whoever used those gift guides, because I was just finding whatever I could to like hit a a minimum of like slide show pages. It was, |
| 2:20.8 | it was not curated. But there is a discourse about this. And it's all over my feeds, but particularly |
| 2:26.9 | substack. And so I don't know. It might be a substack specific discourse, which is cursed sentence. |
... |
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