| The National Retail Federation says more than 157 million Americans will go shopping on Saturday, so we thought this was a good opportunity to turn the newsletter over to senior reporter Amanda Mull, who’s all about the retail beat. Plus: College football’s new playoff format starts tonight, and we’ve got stories about Oregon football’s biggest booster and how an agent sees the NIL system for compensating athletes. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. As the holiday shopping season comes to an end, I’d like to reintroduce myself. I’m Amanda Mull, a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of our Buying Power column, which you can find every month in print and even more frequently online. We introduced Buying Power this year to cover what I euphemize as “consumer culture.” In practice, that means I interrogate all of the ways business and society shape each other through the everyday interactions people have with the economy. That provides my work with a wide remit, but as you might guess, it includes many stories about retail and consumer products. In the past six months, I’ve written about everything from the underappreciated trend-driving power of nurses and teachers to why America’s chain pharmacies have broken their own business model by locking up so much of their inventory behind clear plastic. Here’s a sample of Buying Power:  Illustration: Saratta Chuengsatiansup for Bloomberg Businessweek How Bogg Bags, the Crocs of Totes, Won Over America’s Moms For a certain type of American woman—busy suburban moms, teachers and health-care workers, in particular—a Bogg tote is suddenly the hottest thing going, catapulting the company from about $3.6 million in sales in 2019 to a projected $100 million this year, according to Bogg. That growth has come almost entirely from word of mouth, a trend propelled by people rarely credited as trendsetters. What Everyone Gets Wrong About Luxury Handbags Luxury goods, whether they’re handbags or supercars or fine wine, don’t straightforwardly adhere to the pricing rules that govern most consumer products. When the thrill of buying something expensive is fundamental to the pitch to customers, the price itself becomes part of the product.  Photographer: Steven John Miner for Bloomberg Businessweek Putting Olive Oil in a Squeeze Bottle Earned This Startup a Cult Following Graza’s highly recognizable, easily maneuverable squeeze bottles, which allow novice cooks to mimic the way the pros use cooking oil in restaurant kitchens, have proved to be a gateway to a type of buyer the zillion other olive oils never worked all that hard to woo. Retailers Locked Up Their Products—and Broke Shopping in America The practice has since metastasized to so many kinds of products in so many more stores—big-box discounters, beauty retailers, chain pharmacies—that it’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass. The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops. They, at least, have someone ready and waiting to take things out of lockup. | 
