Robbing 'Em Blind

Labubu boo-hoo, and "monetizing" brick-and-mortar customers

A curious thing I’ve noticed about the whole Labubu fad¹ and similar things is the rise of “blind boxes.” These are retail packages with one of a series of products in them, but you don’t know which one is in a given box. Furthermore, the probability of each figure, or of a subset of figures, is different: there are rare and common figures/plushies/charms/etc., plus “secret” ones, limited editions, and other things like this.

The TLDR is that if you want the full run of, say, eight figures in a given collection, you can’t buy those eight figures directly (except on the secondhand market). Nor, for that matter, can you buy just the one or two you really like. You can only buy one single box that has any one of the eight in varying probabilities, and buy some statistically determinable (for the manufacturer) number of boxes to eventually amass the entire set.

This sounds rather like the premise of a future dystopian economy in an old sci-fi novel. Nonetheless I would dismiss it as a bunch of silly, pointless, occasionally cute junk, but for the amount of money it seems to generate, the amount of hype it receives, and the number of people who, as they experience it, get sucked into blind-box shopping quasi-unwillingly. (Labubu is probably the most famous and/or current of these things, but there are a million copycats and they come and go. Plus, of course, counterfeits.)

The subreddit “shopping addiction” has a number of threads on this topic, where people commiserate about wasting money, getting sucked into blind-box collecting, feeling like they’re missing out, etc.

Like:

As if my shopping addiction wasn’t enough, I’ve fallen victim to blind boxes. The fact that they drop limited amounts and sell out so fast makes me obsess over them even more. Yesterday I ordered 2 Care Bear figurines not because I like Care Bears but because it was just the thrill of the chase and I feel so much dopamine when something sells out and I was able to snag one. And now I’m sitting here wondering what I’m going to do with 2 care bear figurines when they get here and $50 poorer. All of this is just so stupid. This isn’t me at all. I’ve spent so much money on labubus, cry baby’s, Sonny angels….ive never in my life been into these things until this year.

Or:

These blind boxes pray even more on gambling tendencies than normal shopping, they can be so addictive once you fall in.

I didn’t even know what labubu were until a couple of friends of mine started posting them. I was like “wth is this? Looks like a gremlin”. And I naively asked “what’s the point? I don’t get it am I too old?” Anyway turns out there wasn’t really a good answer and I felt a little bad for my questioning like that, because all she could say was “umm you just collect them”.

Anyway my point is that if you remove all avenues of being exposed to this stuff, the stimulus goes away. TikTok, all social media relating to it including instagram, mute people you follow if you need to, don’t watch their YouTubes, get off the websites. This is all entirely fabricated in those spaces, a FOMO sensation, being part of a gang that I’m sorry no one cares you are a part of.

Or:

As for blind boxes, I tried it a couple of times for funnsies for those that were cheap enough and the fomo got the best of me. My opinion is that it is fun and thrilling in the moment. But after if you don’t get what you wanted, it’s disappointing. Really stay away from it. Honestly having only one would have been ideal and felt more complete and whole. For shopping addicts this is very dangerous territory.

I tend to take people at their word when they describe their own psychology, rather than imagine that my counsel to “try harder” making a difference.

You could say it’s just a fad: like Pogs, or Tamagotchi. (Pokémon could have turned out to be a fad too, but it has much more staying power; maybe because at heart it appeals to the childlike wonder of exploring as much as it does to the desire to collect).

But blind boxes do not strike me as whimsical and harmless like those other fads. Blind-box retailing seems to me, as it does to many of the people bemoaning their own compulsive shopping habits, like stealth—or maybe just plain old—gambling.

What is stealthy about it, though, is that it seems like a way of translating gambling into the physical consumer world in a way that has never really been done before. A way of hacking normal retail/commerce with a different sort of activity not forbidden, but not intended.

I assume the “blind box” concept is legal—that is, that it does not strictly speaking run afoul of any trade or consumer-rights or gambling laws—but I actually wonder if it should be. In any case, it strikes me as working against, or exploiting, the basic trust we have in markets and retail being governed both by laws and a kind of trust and set of expectations.

If I’m not quite spelling it out above, it seems predatory and just a level below legitimate business. I don’t exactly blame companies for doing it. And in a way, it isn’t that different from trading-card booster packs. Maybe even those were a bad precedent!

I can imagine, back in the 1990s, if we had simply said, no, you know what, you can’t sell random packs of trading cards for a fixed price where the consumer doesn’t know what’s in the package. The right to know what you’re buying, and the duty to disclose exactly what is for sale, what is being purchased, and what the consumer is entitled to, is fundamental.

Maybe we haven’t had to spell it out quite like that before, but it has always been the basic understanding that governs commerce. Sorry, “the customer is agreeing by buying the trading-card pack to the fact that he doesn’t know what’s in it” is not legitimate. Gambling is not a normal consumer transaction and is not going to be treated as such.

Maybe this wouldn’t pass constitutional muster. Maybe it sounds a bit prudish, like the people who thought pinball and arcade games were gambling. To be quite honest, I’m not sure if I even mean it. But I mean it enough to have written it down.

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In the same general vein as this is the way in which the logic of end-user license agreements has eroded firm ownership of physical products. Or, at least, the ways in which manufacturers would like this to be so.

A couple of years ago, my father bought—and returned after reading the terms in fine print—a thermostat which claimed that by installing it, you were agreeing to a series of terms, including, insanely, that nobody under the age of 18 be allowed to operate the thermostat.

Now, this particular term is most likely a blanket bit of legalese having to do with data collection—i.e., neither enforceable nor very meaningful, and more of a way for the company to elide liability for collecting data on minors than a limit on the consumer’s rights—but it still feels like a kind of “does not compute” result: a warning sign that we took a wrong turn somewhere.

The concept that a physical product that lives in your home is not fully and completely yours—that by merely opening the package you are agreeing to whatever the manufacturer has printed on a folded piece of newsprint in six-point type—is foreign to the world of physical products. It comes from the world of software, where a physical copy of a software program (or an instance of a download, or a digital file) has long been understood as a vessel for a program the consumer does not own and is using under license, governed by the end-user license agreement.

This makes enough sense in the context, because software is different; a copy of Microsoft Windows or Doom is a meaningfully different sort of product than a kitchen table. Books and music are similar; ownership of a copy of a book or album does not imply, even in the absence of an end-user license agreement, ownership of the intellectual content, or the right to copy it and sell it yourself.²

Anyway, the thermostat is problematic to me because, like the blind box, it is an example of a concept from outside of the world of physical consumer goods, and the general expectations around their buying and selling, creeping into it.

Here’s a screenshot of the general terms of service from Carrier:

This all makes me think about consumer advocacy. We had to fight for the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act in the 1970s. We used to have a consumer advocacy movement that cared about these things. We still do—right-to-repair is a big area for that right now—but it feels a bit old-fashioned at a time when we need it arguably more than ever. I think we forget how much work went into securing the protections we now take for granted.

We’ve slowly lost the idea that we have rights in commerce, that it isn’t a wild west. The endless advertising, the ubiquitous apps, the evaporation of mail and phone calls except for junk mail and spam, the deluge of gray-area products available everywhere online. It all feels like everyone who is supposed to be responsible for holding things together is abdicating their responsibility.

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One more item. I want to note something I’ve noticed about the customer experience shopping at Lowe’s. I typically go there because I got a nice discount on my Weber grill for opening a credit card, and I buy a fair amount of home-improvement stuff, so it made sense to get the card (which comes with an everyday five percent discount) and make Lowe’s “my” store for most of this sort of shopping.

However, the customer experience is typically pretty lackluster. I think it is probably a tad worse than the orange guys. Lowe’s has few employees just walking the sales floor, available to be asked questions. That seemed common when I was a kid; it’s difficult to find someone now. Often they’re doing some other task³ and are not exactly “available.” Few of them know the store layout, either. When I ask where something is, they almost always pull out a store tablet and simply look up the item online, the same as I would.

I don’t really blame the store for not training people when they know churn is going to replace them in a few months. I don’t know what the answer is; maybe it’s just look it up myself and stop expecting a certain level of customer service from a big-box store. But I miss that. Because I can remember it.

But that’s just the table-setting. The thing I really don’t like is that now, on more visits to Lowe’s than not, I get approached by someone wearing what looks like a store uniform, get asked how I’m doing or even if I’m finding everything I need, and then am subjected to a sales pitch about gutters or windows. It’s almost funny; it’s a bit like getting approached by a couple of clean-cut young men and being asked if you know Jesus Christ. (Maybe they’re the Ladder-Day Saints.)

Some people disagree about how bad this is—here’s a Reddit thread about it. But it’s frustrating, because typically, one of the things you generally expect as a customer in a store is that you are going to be left alone as long as you’re not doing anything untoward. Aggressive salespeople are out of fashion. So it’s weird to be subjected to what is sometimes a bit of an aggressive pitch by someone who isn’t even with the store. It isn’t really even “sales” as we think of it in retail. In essence, you are being solicited to, by a third party, while in the store.

In general—regardless of the fact that the store is private property and that this is another one of those general expectations rather than legal realities—the freedom to shop and be left alone in a physical store is pretty fundamental. So having wandering salespeople who aren’t even store employees, or even selling something in the store, seems like a break in the implied social contract. It is, really, something that feels beneath a large, professional company with, one would assume, a reputation to uphold.

Even more than that, it’s the logic of “enshittification” applied to the physical world. Normally, you shop, the store sells. You’re there to buy stuff. You’re not there to have your attention monetized by third-party salespeople. It seems to me Lowe’s is effectively subjecting its customers, without notice much less agreement, to being advertised to in the manner that we are advertised to online as a condition of accessing a website. No doubt the store benefits from opening up its sales floor and its customers’ time and attention to these sales pitches.

But as the meme goes, isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?

Social card image credit Flickr/Choo Yut Shing, CC BY 2.0

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Related Reading:

Now, Folks, It’s Time For “Who Do You Trust!”

Why *Does* It Feel Like Things Are Always Getting Worse?

The “Vibecession” Was (And Is) Real, But It’s Not About The Economy

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1. I’m sorry that I know what it is.

2. Of course, this is achieved by copyright law, not by a previously unknown concept. To my knowledge, the fundamental question of whether an end-user license agreement really meets every legal definition of a true contract has never been fully tested.

3. At Home Depot, I had to interrupt a guy cleaning up a Sakrete spill to help me with lumber; while he was helping me, his boss walked by and said, “Hey, did you clean up that spill yet?”