I really enjoyed the author's 2017 piece, "There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch"[1] (linked in article, also discussed in [2]). This one, not so much, and I feel compelled to explore _why_ I feel this article doesn't work as well.

First, here's my attempt at a synopsis of the article. I only read it once, and admittedly found it hard to follow, so I'm sure a few details are off.

- There are a bunch of fake-seeming storefronts on Amazon selling various products in unrelated categories at high markup. The business model seems to be basically massively automated Alibaba drop-shipping. Rather than providing a material or marketing value-add, the sellers are banking on buyers not doing any comparison shopping.

- A lot of these storefronts are connected with a shady Christian university chancellor who had profiteered off of content farming via a journalism company called IBTimes, a business that acquired Newsweek in 2013 and ran WaPo-style tactics to ramp up the clickbait.

- Separately of that, the chancellor has covertly supported the entrepreneurial ventures of his university's graduates. This usually takes the form of either 1) acquiring fledgling existing businesses, ramping up the prices, setting up Shopify online storefronts and profiteering off unscrupulous consumers, 2) creating brick-and-mortar storefronts that sell a mix of marked-up retail goods and returned items from these Amazon storefronts, or 3) some mix of 1 and 2.

- It's not clear how approach #2 makes money, since some of these brick-and-mortar storefronts are in extremely high-rent areas, e.g. Manhattan and San Francisco.

- Also, many of the businesses connected to this organization are currently under investigation for commercial fraud.

So why doesn't this article "work?" Well, to extract the above synopsis, we have to wade through:

1. A non-linear narrative about the author's acquaintance getting some goods from one of these storefronts returned to their parents' house. This has no connection to the rest of the piece. Seems like it was just a mistake.

2. A labyrinth, Pepe Silvia-style thumbtack-and-yarn exposition on a bunch of overly precise yet insignificant investigation details (storefront names, suppliers, warehouses, products) and recurring literary devices to match (e.g. "warehouse foo sells unrelated items x, y, and z")

3. An anecdote about buying some lipstick from one of these places, then returning it.

4. Some anecdotes about visiting some of the storefronts and observing that they're kind of weird and empty.

5. Some excerpts from email transaction with some of the "players" involved in this whole scheme, which don't amount to much - PR fluff basically, which could have been made up. We don't know.

6. Lots, and lots, and lots of exposition about the "journey" to figuring all this stuff out - I reverse image searched this pic, which lead me to this business page, which was connected to this trademark, etc. etc. (none of which exceeds the standard Google-fu any reader of this piece is probably capable of doing themselves, or needs to read about at length)

7. Half-baked, Baudrillardian navel-gazing divergences about how weird and dreamy and postmodern all this is.

I felt myself a little ripped off by the time I got to the bottom of the article and learned that, in fact, we have _no idea_ what the answer is to some of the core questions prompted by this piece. How do these ritsy storefronts make money? If they don't, are they just laundering money? If so, for what illegal activities? Is it connected to the IBTimes fraud? Whom exactly are they defrauding? What exactly is the relationship of the university to the IBTimes and these stores? And so on, and so on.

I feel like if the author had simply made a PDF providing a simple, linear narrative - similar to her watch story - it wouldn't have mattered that these questions went unanswered. The mechanics of the drop-shipping operation are sufficiently compelling. But the platform (a newspaper) and the piece's pretense (long-form, old school investigative journalism) demand unwieldy narrative inflation that isn't really merited by the meat of the story, and that ultimately makes it feel that much less satisfying.

[1] http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154934