You Can Buy Haunted Dolls on eBay

Future Commerce

From dead-and-undead-again crypto cycles to eBay’s paranormal side, we explore the range of the paranormal in this week’s installment of Spooky Commerce. Listen now!

Crypt-O-Currency, Panic Buying and Paranormal Ducks

Key takeaways:

• eCommerce giants like Pinduoduo (Temu’s parent company) are contributing to deflation in China by flooding the market with cheap goods.
• Disaster alerts compete with the attention economy. In our daily flurry of push notifications, we might also be alerted of an impending natural disaster.
• Despite repeated crashes, the cryptocurrency market continues to revive itself.
• {00:03:55} "The visual language of a hurricane is lines at retail or empty shelves having been bought out. It’s part of the cultural act of a disaster... commerce is so disrupted in a moment of disaster." – Phillip
• {00:19:10} "I don't know which is worse, this horrific porcelain doll I'm looking at called the 'Haunted Effanbee Doll' from the 1930s, or the fact that it's listed at $12,000." – Phillip
• {00:27:20} “I am not clicking that link. Oh, it’s a duck? Okay, link me that one.” – Brian
• {00:31:00} “There's a lot of stuff that's sold on the Internet that's actually really hard to validate whether it can do what it says that it does. And I bet there are reviews of this duck that make it sound like people had paranormal experiences with it… Individual experiences are what we use to validate whether something is trustworthy to purchase.” – Brian
• {00:33:00} "Do the delivery drivers know they’re transporting haunted relics?" – Sarah

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