Episodi

  • The Coupon That Ate Retail: How Bed Bath & Beyond Trained Shoppers to Never Pay Full Price and Signed Its Own Death Warrant

    The Coupon That Ate Retail: How Bed Bath & Beyond Trained Shoppers to Never Pay Full Price and Signed Its Own Death Warrant
    Oct 7 2026

    Bed Bath & Beyond's iconic 20%-off coupon wasn't a marketing strategy — it was a slow-acting poison the company voluntarily swallowed for decades. We trace how a single piece of direct mail rewired consumer psychology, destroyed the company's pricing power, and created a loyalty so dysfunctional that customers only showed up when the discount did.
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    32 min
  • The Funeral That Never Ends: How One Industry Learned to Make Death Infinitely More Expensive

    The Funeral That Never Ends: How One Industry Learned to Make Death Infinitely More Expensive
    Sep 30 2026

    The American funeral industry is a masterclass in pricing power — where grief is the product, comparison shopping feels obscene, and a single federal rule from 1984 is the only thing standing between consumers and complete financial ruin. We trace how Service Corporation International quietly bought up independent funeral homes across the country, kept the local names on the signs, and built a near-monopoly that most people don't know exists until the worst day of their lives. It's not a conspiracy — it's just very, very good business.
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    34 min
  • The Middleman's Middleman: How a Company That Owns Nothing Became the Most Powerful Force in American Grocery

    The Middleman's Middleman: How a Company That Owns Nothing Became the Most Powerful Force in American Grocery
    Sep 28 2026

    You've never heard of them, but they decide which products sit at eye level on your grocery store shelf, which brands get end-cap displays, and whether your favorite regional snack ever makes it out of its home state — and they charge for all of it. This week, we pull back the curtain on slotting fees: the legally murky, rarely discussed pay-to-play system that determines what you eat, quietly funnels billions away from small food producers, and explains why your grocery store looks exactly the same in Tampa as it does in Tacoma.
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    36 min
  • The Middleman's Middleman: How a Company That Owns Nothing Became the Most Powerful Force in American Grocery

    The Middleman's Middleman: How a Company That Owns Nothing Became the Most Powerful Force in American Grocery
    Sep 28 2026

    You've never heard of them, but they decide which products sit at eye level on your grocery store shelf, which brands get end-cap displays, and whether your favorite regional snack ever makes it out of its home state — and they charge for all of it. This week, we pull back the curtain on slotting fees: the legally murky, rarely discussed pay-to-play system that determines what you eat, quietly funnels billions away from small food producers, and explains why your grocery store looks exactly the same in Tampa as it does in Tacoma.
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    36 min
  • The Coupon Cartel: How Retail's Dirtiest Secret Became a $47 Billion Industry Nobody Admits to Using

    The Coupon Cartel: How Retail's Dirtiest Secret Became a $47 Billion Industry Nobody Admits to Using
    Sep 23 2026
    Coupons were supposed to be dead — killed by prestige brands, frictionless checkout, and the rise of the 'experience economy.' Instead, they mutated into a shadow infrastructure of browser extensions, affiliate kickbacks, and manufactured urgency that now quietly skims margin from nearly every online transaction you make. This week, we pull apart the Honey-PayPal deal, the brands secretly funding the discounts they publicly pretend to hate, and why the coupon never died — it just put on a suit. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    34 min
  • The Mattress Bubble: How a Sketchy Industry Got Disrupted, Then Swallowed the Disruptor Whole

    The Mattress Bubble: How a Sketchy Industry Got Disrupted, Then Swallowed the Disruptor Whole
    Sep 16 2026
    Casper went to war with a $15 billion mattress industry built on fake markups, predatory salespeople, and showrooms designed to confuse you into overpaying — and for a minute, it looked like they were winning. Then the old industry pulled a move straight out of the SCI playbook: they didn't fight the disruptor, they cloned it, flooded the market, and watched Casper bleed out under its own hype. This is the story of what happens when a venture-capital fever dream crashes into an industry that's been running the same scam since 1865. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    28 min
  • The Funeral Industrial Complex: How Service Corporation International Turned Grief Into a Subscription Model and Buried Every Competitor Who Tried to Stop Them

    The Funeral Industrial Complex: How Service Corporation International Turned Grief Into a Subscription Model and Buried Every Competitor Who Tried to Stop Them
    Sep 9 2026
    When your customers are in the worst moment of their lives and have 48 hours to make a $12,000 decision, that's not a market — that's a trap. We go inside Service Corporation International, the quiet monopoly that spent 50 years buying up mom-and-pop funeral homes across America, rebranding them with local names, and charging corporate prices while grieving families never knew they were dealing with a Fortune 500 company. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    34 min
  • The Chicken Cartel: How Four Companies Convinced America They Were Competing While Fixing Prices, Sharing Secrets, and Carving Up the Most-Consumed Meat in the Country

    The Chicken Cartel: How Four Companies Convinced America They Were Competing While Fixing Prices, Sharing Secrets, and Carving Up the Most-Consumed Meat in the Country
    Sep 2 2026
    Last week we exposed how mattress companies weaponized confusion to pick your pocket. This week, we go to the dinner table — specifically to an industry where four corporations control 54% of the U.S. chicken supply, a whistleblower algorithm accidentally exposed a decade of coordinated price manipulation, and the victims weren't just consumers but the farmers who raised the birds and never saw a dime of the markup. The broiler chicken industry isn't just a food story — it's a masterclass in how to run an oligopoly in plain sight. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    34 min