Business
Patt Morrison: Will L.A. ever produce more gimmicky, lovable pitchmen like Cal Worthington?
There is no patron saint of Los Angeles pitchmen, and really, there should be.
After all, ad astra per huckstera — to the stars through salespitchery, right? The job is open, as are the nominations.
An early favorite, and a standard setter even in L.A.’s strenuous real estate game, is Harry Culver. He was the 20th century whiz-bang who parlayed a $2,000 option on 93 acres of barley fields and sales gimmicks and stunts into land deals that begat the city he — modesty be damned — named for himself.
This mantle of commercial sainthood is reserved for those characters who invested their identity and personality — faked or authentic — in their schtick. Disembodied voiceover announcers are not in the running. Let us not speak of them in the same category as true pitchmen. A longevity trophy may have to go to an Orange County dealership’s jingle that “You won’t get a lemon from Toyota of Orange,” even though it mangles the two citric syllables of “orange” into a single ugly one — “ornj.” It’s been on the airwaves for about 50 years — almost as long as California has had its pioneering Lemon Law protecting us from getting stuck with junkers.
And if there were a trophy for the ad getting the most and fastest hits on the mute button, the Kars4Kids jingle would likely own it. The Jewish children’s charity has burrowed into the national brainpan for more than 10 years and attracted government scrutiny for its charitable disbursements. This summer, its CEO went to court against New York’s concealed carry gun law, arguing that it leaves Jewish children vulnerable to antisemitic attacks.
Now, for the real candidates for the choicest place in our pitchman pantheon.
Almost all of them are car salesmen, for manifold reasons. The first reason, after World War II, the biggest car market in this big, world-saving nation was in Southern California. The second, that thrive-or-die market demanded that you make a name for yourself, or you get out of the game.
In the 1950s, the game was delivering some self-inflicted wounds. Dirty-dealing practices like “boraxing” — advertising cars that didn’t exist — and rolling back odometers seemed like S.O.P. “Every speedometer was flipped back,” is how a Beverly Hills Studebaker salesman named William L. Plunkett described that “common” practice from the 1950s.
The low ebb came in 1957, when an L.A. County grand jury heard testimony about fudged contracts and trade-in scams, and indicted a dealer and more than a dozen of his associates. The dealer was H.J. Caruso, the father of future L.A. businessman, philanthropist and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso. The elder Caruso pleaded guilty to what he thought was a deal for a misdemeanor, but there was no such deal, and Caruso and his lawyer couldn’t get the plea changed. Caruso went to jail for a year and was on probation until 1970, when his plea was changed to not guilty and the case was dismissed.
So the gimmicks got schtickier, more frantic, and more desperate to claim the honor of honest, sincere, authentic — and entertaining.
But first, the non-car-dealer contenders.
Earl Scheib
You can pinpoint when you came to live in L.A. by the price that you first remember Scheib advertising to paint your car — from $24.95 in the 1960s to $119.95 by the time he died in 1992. He was the face, and voice, of his business. “I’m Earl Scheib. I’ll paint any car for only (fill in the price here) — no ups, no extras.” He developed a singular painting technique that extended his empire to many states and Europe. Henry Ford once said that a customer could order a Model T in any color, so long as it was black. Scheib’s special offer was good only for a few basic colors, and that special price wasn’t special, just the everyday charge. And the law, in its civil form, like the Federal Trade Commission, had a few words about what Scheib could and could not do in his ads. Scheib’s pitch line earned him a spot on the chair in pitchman’s Valhalla — next to Johnny Carson and his big desk on national TV. He created his own TV spots and told the TV stations running his ads the precise moment he wanted them to interrupt the late movie at a suspenseful moment and drop them in.
How a man born in San Francisco and spending his life in L.A. spoke with a kind of modified Panhandle twang is as much a mystery as the generation of commercial airline pilots who delivered their cockpit patter in Chuck Yeager’s West Virginia cadences.
Larry the mattress guy and Irwin, his beleaguered accountant
Mattress shopping is almost as bewildering and unpleasant as car shopping. Selling a personality gimmick surely catches a buyer’s ear better than some ad comparing models and prices. Although Larry’s accelerando warble pledge from the 1990s kind of does that — “We’ll beat anyone’s advertised price or your mattress is … FREEEEEE!” — it’s the spousal-style ”You’re killing me, Larry” bickering over discount prices that has drilled this bit into your brain. The Larry and Irwin characters are the mattress company owner and L.A. native Larry Miller, and his childhood friend and a real accountant, Irwin Sigmond. As befits a family-owned company, Irwin and Larry’s dynamic became “The Honeymooners” of radio ads.
Ron Popeil
Ron Popeil, the man behind late-night, rapid-fire TV commercials, at his office in Beverly Hills in a file photo.
(Reed Saxon / Associated Press)
If you ever stayed up late with a sick baby or woke up way too early with a bad hangover, Ron Popeil probably kept you company. In his groundbreaking infomercials, he was a master of the art of selling solutions in search of problems. Who knew you absolutely couldn’t live without his Pocket Fisherman, or Veg-o-Matic, or Mr. Microphone, until Popeil told you so? People needed cars, but Popeil had to create a need for his aspirational gadgetry. And for decades he did — so brilliantly that his place in pop culture may last longer than his adman innovations. SNL sent him up when Dan Aykroyd dropped a fish into a “Bass-o-Matic” blender.
If you were about to write a letter to the editor to let me know I forgot Popeil’s “But wait, there’s more” line — don’t. That come-on was the creation of Arthur Schiff, the father of the Ginsu knife and myriad other direct-marketed gizmos, and the developer of that most identifiably infomercial line, which of course made its way into his obituary.
Miss Cleo
Not many women got into the pitchman game, but Youree Dell Harris, born and brought up right here in Los Angeles yet claiming Jamaica as her native land and accent, became a TV meme from the 1990s as the midnight psychic Miss Cleo (“Call me now!”).
She brought in big money for the company that put her on the air, until those businesses were sued by the Federal Trade Commission for defrauding people, and had to hand back a half-billion dollars to customers and stop peddling psychic services by telephone. The hallmark of a true TV pitchperson meme — parodies and a documentary.
And now for the top contenders, the car salesmen — a sampling, FYI, not an encyclopedia entry.
Les and Roger Bacon
Their Hermosa Beach Ford dealership flourished from the ’40s into the ’60s. The slogan was “Get off your couch and get on down to Les Bacon Ford,” but that was meek compared to the family’s ad antics — bashing an old car with a bat and wham knocking the price down $100 wham for every bang. In trade, the Bacons once took a cemetery lot, some land in San Bernardino, and a newspaper printed on the day Lincoln died, April 15, 1865. The Easy Reader obituary for Roger Bacon reported that he’d once offered a free new Ford to anyone who would perch atop a 60-foot pole for 30 days. When one daring man reached Day 29, Bacon sent up word that the man’s wife was in a bar across the street with another man — and the pole sitter abandoned his post.
Tony Holzer
A man of many car incarnations, Holzer was once the “Honest John” dealer, decked out in white robes, wings and an illuminated halo. In another character, he was, probably briefly, “Hog Wild Tony Holzer, a Bundle of Bedlam in Beverly Hills.” Holzer was a Dutch American who once sued a man named Giuliana to settle their argument over who was entitled to sell cars under the name “the smiling Irishman.”
Victor Snyder
Trader Vic’s Pacoima car lot sold “Miracle Cars,” with the honesty-adjacent slogan “If it’s a good car, it’s a Miracle.” Good to his stage name, he took trade-ins, among them a set of golf clubs and a dog he became devoted to. He did business out of a 1918 adobe gas station and handed out lollipops to his customers’ kids. Like the big guys, he too has his own documentary, from 1975.
Chick Lambert and Fletcher Jones
Not partners, but both used dogs as their ad schtick. Lambert always appeared with Storm — always a German shepherd, but, a la Lassie, not always the same German shepherd. And Jones in 1946 opened a used car lot in downtown L.A. In his TV spots, he cuddled a puppy — again, not always the same puppy — and his ads promised that some of your cash on the barrelhead would go to save the lives of cutie pets like this one. Today Fletcher Jones dealerships sell Toyotas in Carson and Mercedes-Benz “motorcars” in Newport Beach.
Frank Taylor
Taylor’s downtown dealership did a bang-up business with Christian churchgoers because his ads vowed, “No Sunday selling.” What Taylor did not reveal, a PR man later did: that he leased his site from a church that wouldn’t permit any Sabbath business. So Taylor turned necessity into a virtue.
‘Crazy Car Men’
Honorable mention to Steve and Curtis at Willowbrook Chrysler for grabbing for the wacky glory of yore days with parody spots; in one, a salesman in a hospital gown says his prices are so low he’s had to sell a kidney to make ends meet. I would be gobsmacked if these were ever broadcast anywhere much beyond Facebook and YouTube.
Calvin Coolidge Worthington
Car dealer Cal Worthington records a TV commercial in 1974 with his “dog” Spot.
(Marianna Diamos / Los Angeles Times)
And now we get to the heavyweights.
As chatty as President Coolidge was monosyllabic, Cal Worthington spent as much as $2.5 million a year on advertising that, in his platinum years, put him and his “Go see Cal” jingle on television a thousand times a week, mostly from dusk to dawn.
His original joke, making fun of his dog-hugging competitors above, became his signature line: “my dog Spot,” who was never, ever a dog. A hippopotamus, a coati, a penguin, a gorilla chained to a car bumper, and a goose who once crapped on Worthington’s lap right there on Johnny Carson’s show. Once, Worthington rode Shamu the SeaWorld orca like a bronco.
He never really liked cars, he told me once; “I got trapped in the car business.” But it made him rich, and for an Osage County, Okla., boy who made his Scarlett O’Hara vow that he’d never be hungry again, that was a compromise he gladly made. Worthington came here in 1949, and in time he had dealerships from Anchorage to Phoenix, and piloted his own plane to most of them. It was planes that he loved, and he flew more than two dozen combat missions in World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He told The Times in 1979 that electric cars were the future — clean, quiet and “up to 200 miles on one charge.” But in 2002 he went to Sacramento to lobby against a bill to rein in CO2 emissions from cars.
When TV airtime was cheap, he’d riff for three or four minutes, telling cornpone jokes, extolling the virtues of his “Fords, Shivvys and Tyotas,” and promising to eat a bug if he couldn’t make a deal. But getting squeezed into a 30-second spot was not to his liking — and it probably wasn’t worth whatever he had to pay to rent the hippo.
In 1978, state and federal regulators went after his dealerships, accusing them of deceptive advertising like bait-and-switch tactics, altering smog devices to improve performance and selling as “beautiful, clean and sharp” cars that were “in generally poor condition [with] exceptionally high mileage.” Worthington settled four years later without admitting doing anything wrong. He was married and divorced four times; his eldest child was old enough to be grandfather to his youngest. He liked pretty women, he said, and French Champagne, and babies, and yes — dogs.
Earl ‘Madman’ Muntz
Earl “Madman” Muntz poses with his Napoleonic mascot and one of his Muntz Jet automobiles.
(Los Angeles Times)
Earl Muntz was the brilliant Barnum of pitchmen, a man who made and lost several fortunes, only one of them selling cars. He came to L.A. in the 1930s, selling from “used car row” on Figueroa. He bought 176 radio spots a day on 13 stations, but the free promotions he got dwarfed that; radio joke writers worked him into scripts for Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello. Bob Hope mentioned him 32 times in 39 shows. There was even a Muntz joke in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie “State of the Union.”
What was mad about the Madman? He and his cartoon avatar dressed in red long johns and a Napoleon bicorne hat. Crazy like a fox: In 1947 he grossed $72 million in car sales. “We buy ‘em retail and sell ‘em wholesale — more fun that way,” was one of his slogans.
Then, into the 1950s, he manufactured a television set with a larger screen than most, and broke the price floor by selling it for under $100. “I want to give ‘em away, but Mrs. Muntz won’t let me. She’s crazy!” his ads burbled. He mailed TV knobs by the hundreds to Angelenos, with a note telling them to call and he’d bring over the rest of the set. In one year he sold $55 million in TV sets.
He named his daughter TeeVee, although his wife — the final tally was seven — changed it later to Teena. Color TV did in the Muntz TV, but he moved right along to car stereos and his own four-track tape. He bought a Capitol Records catalogue for $75,000 to put music in those tape decks. In 1967, he sold 30 million car stereos and tapes. He made money and went broke and made money again.
His dumbest business move — saying no to the chance to be the U.S. distributor for a funny little car called the Volkswagen. “I drove the car and didn’t like it. I still don’t like it, but I was a damned fool to turn it down.”
He started a business selling kits for prefabricated stamped aluminum houses, sold 11, and closed up shop. He started renting RVs to travelers, and that went bust when they broke down out in the vastness of the American heartland.
His most personal failure has become an oddball success. He designed a high-concept American luxury sports car, the “Muntz Jet.” It was ahead of its time in many ways, with seat belts, a padded dashboard and a backseat liquor cabinet. He had them painted in crayon-brights straight out of the “Barbie” movie — purple, yellow, pink, red — with his Napoleon caricature on the hubcaps. He made fewer than 400 of them. They cost about $6,500 to make and he sold them for $5,500, to very few takers. Today, if you can find one, they can fetch a price nudging six figures.
Broke or flush, Muntz had swagger, all right. In the thick of the Red Scare, he asked an advisor whether he should announce that he was a communist, just for the headlines he’d get. He dated famous women and befriended famous men. He was relentlessly charming, always questing for the new and novel, and living large and lively. He drank highballs, smoked Luckys and drove a custom Lincoln with a TV and VCR in the dashboard. In the documentary “Madman Muntz: American Maverick,” actress Angie Dickinson said his funeral was “one of the funniest funerals I’ve ever been at.”
Could we have a Worthington or Muntz type today?
That kind of universal grip on the public’s mental scenery — it probably can’t happen anymore. The audience is too fragmented, spread too thin across a fractured media landscape for any catchphrase, any peddler, however inventive, to reach this scale of recognition. Muntz and Worthington were big; it’s the airtime that got small.
The only possible new contender I’ve heard recently — and there may be others, in alternate universes of TV and radio that I don’t see or hear, which proves the point I just made — the only possible contender I’ve heard lately is on terrestrial radio. His name is Aaron Adirim, an émigré from Latvia with an MFA from NYU, and a pitchman for his own California window installation business.
His signature slogan is a bit wordy, but delivered with verve and sincerity, which makes sense because he wrote it: “Our installation technique is so precise, we do not break your stucco.” And here comes the earworm: “Your house could be covered with potato chips, and we wouldn’t break one.”
It’s good, but can it bear the tests of time and fickle audiences? Will he too have to eat a bug to make a deal and stay in our brains? Or maybe just eat that stucco?
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
The Biden administration issued sweeping rules on Monday governing how A.I. chips and models can be shared with foreign countries, in an attempt to set up a global framework that will guide how artificial intelligence spreads around the world in the years to come.
With the power of A.I. rapidly growing, the Biden administration said the rules were necessary to keep a transformational technology under the control of the United States and its allies, and out of the hands of adversaries that could use it to augment their militaries, carry out cyberattacks and otherwise threaten the United States.
Tech companies have protested the new rules, saying they threaten their sales and the future prospects of the American tech industry.
The rules put various limitations on the number of A.I. chips that companies can send to different countries, essentially dividing the world into three categories. The United States and 18 of its closest partners — including Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — are exempted from any restrictions and can buy A.I. chips freely.
Countries that are already subject to U.S. arms embargoes, like China and Russia, will continue to face a previously existing ban on A.I. chip purchases.
All other nations — most of the world — will be subject to caps restricting the number of A.I. chips that can be imported, though countries and companies are able to increase that number by entering into special agreements with the U.S. government. The rules could rankle some foreign governments: Even countries that are close trading partners or military allies of the United States, such as Mexico, Switzerland, Poland or Israel, will face restrictions on their ability to purchase larger amounts of American A.I. products.
The rules are aimed at stopping China from obtaining from other countries the technology it needs to produce artificial intelligence, after the United States banned such sales to China in recent years.
But the regulations also have broader goals: having allied countries be the location of choice for companies to build the world’s biggest data centers, in an effort to keep the most advanced A.I. models within the borders of the United States and its partners.
Governments around the world, particularly in the Middle East, have been pumping money into attracting and building enormous data centers, in a bid to become the next center for A.I. development.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters on Sunday that the rule would ensure that the infrastructure for training the most advanced artificial intelligence would be in the United States or in the jurisdiction of close allies, and “that capacity does not get offshored like chips and batteries and other industries that we’ve had to invest hundreds of billion dollars to bring back onshore.”
Mr. Sullivan said the rule would provide “greater clarity to our international partners and to industry,” while countering national security threats from malicious actors that could use “American technologies against us.”
It will be up to the Trump administration to decide whether to keep the new rules or how to enforce them. In a call with reporters on Sunday, Biden administration officials said that the rules had bipartisan support and that they had been in consultations with the incoming administration about them.
Though companies in China have begun to develop their own A.I. chips, the global market for such semiconductors is dominated by U.S. companies, particularly Nvidia. That dominance has given the U.S. government the ability to regulate the flow of A.I. technology worldwide, by restricting U.S. company exports.
Companies have protested those limitations, saying the restrictions could hamper innocuous or even beneficial types of computing, anger U.S. allies and ultimately push global buyers into buying non-American products, like those made by China.
In a statement, Ned Finkle, Nvidia’s vice president for government affairs, called the rule “unprecedented and misguided” and said it “threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.”
“Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead,” he said. Nvidia’s stock dipped nearly 3 percent in premarket trading on Monday.
Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in a statement that the company was confident it could “comply fully with this rule’s high security standards and meet the technology needs of countries and customers around the world that rely on us.”
In a letter to Congressional leadership on Sunday that was viewed by The New York Times, Jason Oxman, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a group representing tech companies, asked Congress to step in and use its authority to overturn the action if the Trump administration did not.
John Neuffer, the president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said his group was “deeply disappointed that a policy shift of this magnitude and impact is being rushed out the door days before a presidential transition and without any meaningful input from industry.”
“The stakes are high, and the timing is fraught,” Mr. Neuffer added.
The rules, which run more than 200 pages, also set up a system in which companies that operate data centers, like Microsoft and Google, can apply for special government accreditations.
In return for following certain security standards, these companies can then trade in A.I. chips more freely around the globe. The companies will still have to agree to keep 75 percent of their total A.I. computing power within the United States or allied countries, and to locate no more than 7 percent of their computing power in any single other nation.
The rules also set up the first controls on weights for A.I. models, the parameters unique to each model that determine how artificial intelligence makes its predictions. Companies setting up data centers abroad will be required to adopt security standards to protect this intellectual property and prevent adversaries from gaining access to them.
Governments facing restrictions can raise the number of A.I. chips they can import freely by signing agreements with the U.S. government, in which they would agree to align with U.S. goals for protecting A.I.
Under the guidance of the U.S. government, Microsoft struck an agreement to partner with an Emirati firm, G42, last year, in return for G42 eliminating Huawei equipment from its systems and taking other steps.
The Biden administration could issue more rules related to chips and A.I. in the coming days, including an executive order to encourage domestic energy generation for data centers, and new rules that aim to keep the most cutting-edge chips out of China, people familiar with the deliberations said.
The latter rule comes in response to an incident last year in which U.S. officials discovered that Huawei, the sanctioned Chinese telecom firm, had been obtaining components for its A.I. chips that were manufactured by a leading Taiwanese chip firm, in violation of U.S. export controls.
The announcements are among a flurry of new regulations that the Biden administration is rushing to issue ahead of the presidential turnover as it tries to close loopholes and cement its legacy on countering China’s technological development. The administration has issued new limits on exports of chip-making equipment to China and other countries, proposed new restrictions on Chinese drones, added new Chinese companies to a military blacklist, and hurried to finalize new subsidies for U.S. chip manufacturing.
But the A.I. regulations issued Monday appear to be among the most sweeping and consequential of these actions. Artificial intelligence is quickly transforming how scientists carry out research, how companies allocate tasks between their employees and how militaries operate. While A.I. has many beneficial uses, U.S. officials have grown more concerned that it could enable the development of new weapons, help countries surveil dissidents and otherwise upend the global balance of power.
Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser for technology analysis at the RAND Corporation, said the rules would create a framework for protecting U.S. security interests while still allowing firms to compete abroad. “They are also forward-looking, trying to preserve U.S. and allied-led supply chains before they are offshored to the highest subsidy bidder,” he said.
Ongoing egg shortages in California due to the spread of bird flu among livestock are bringing another early 2025 challenge to local restaurants, especially brunch spots that rely heavily on eggs for menu items.
It’s also unclear how the ongoing fire disasters that erupted Tuesday could affect eggs and other staple ingredients. But, in light of difficult times overall for the industry and a traditionally slow January, some restaurateurs earlier this week said they have already been forced to raise prices for diners, or are weighing whether to do so, according to multiple interviews.
In San Luis Obispo, Philip Lang, who has operated Bon Temps Creole Café for nearly 30 years, said he increased the price on egg items on his menu right before Christmas. For instance, a $15 menu item now costs $17 for two eggs.
Before the bird flu outbreak, he paid $20 for a case of 15 dozen conventional eggs. Since bird flu, the price has kept doubling, starting from about $50 to now about $110 a case.
“Eggs go into all of our dishes,” he said of his restaurant that only opens for breakfast and lunch. “We make our hollandaise with eggs and dressings with eggs.”
He said most diners are understanding but some still express disappointment.
In Irvine, eggs go in just about every dish at Burnt Crumbs, from bestselling Japanese-style soufflé pancakes to the breakfast fried rice, said chef-owner Paul Cao. On an average week, Cao said his kitchen goes through 180 to 225 dozens of eggs. Cao is now having to pay more than double compared to three months ago — up to $130 for a case of 15 dozen eggs.
The H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus continues to spread across the globe, curtailing egg supply and making them more expensive and difficult to find. There’s no sign of relief, with scientists and health officials fearing we’re on the verge of another global pandemic. In California, egg prices have soared to $8.97, a 70% increase in the last month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Cao said he doesn’t plan to raise prices for now. “I’ll give it until March — first quarter 2025, if this doesn’t trend in the right direction, we will have to raise prices. We can’t keep eating costs,” he said.
He’s afraid of losing customers but said he can’t sustain the price increase for long. “When egg prices go up $2 per dozen, that costs us a couple thousand a month,” he said.
Chef Walter Manzke, second from left, and the kitchen team at République in Los Angeles. The restaurant, like many others, is weighing increasing the cost of some egg dishes as the bird flu outbreak continues to affect egg prices.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Walter Manzke, who co-owns République with wife and partner Margarita Manzke, said he feels lucky that he can still procure good eggs from his distributor despite the shortage.
He doesn’t expect to raise prices on his menu yet but is definitely feeling the squeeze because so many of his well-known dishes use eggs — including his popular French toast.
“We’re just doing the best we can,” he said of the Hancock Park restaurant that ranked No. 4 last year on The Times’ 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles guide. “Compromising on quality is not an option.”
On Friday, Delilah Snell, who operates Alta Baja Market, temporarily raised prices to her egg dishes by $1 at her restaurant and market in Santa Ana.
Snell is now paying $131 for a case of 15 dozen free-range organic brown eggs. In October, she paid around $70. She said she could pay less for lower-quality eggs but doesn’t “want to compromise the quality” her customers have come to expect.
On the front counter menu of her store, she posted a sign that reads: “Over the past few weeks, our prices have gone up 40% (and are continuing to rise) because of the bird flu. As a result we need to add a $1 surcharge to all dishes with eggs to cover this expense to still provide you with a high-quality product.”
Once prices drop, she said, she’ll remove the surcharge.
The spike in egg prices comes on the heels of a slow COVID-19 pandemic recovery, as many restaurants in Southern California continue to struggle.
Lang of Bon Temps said there is now a notice on top of the menu that alerts customers to the $1 temporary increase per egg.
The notice reads: “Due to the bird flu that has caused the price of eggs to quadruple in recent months, we find it necessary to add a surcharge of a dollar per egg for all dishes containing eggs until the price of eggs comes down. We regret each time we are forced to raise any of our prices. Please know that we are not doing this for profit, only to maintain our business during these difficult times. Thank you for your understanding.”
Lang said he plans to do away with the surcharge once prices go down to about $50 for a case of 15 dozen eggs.
The cost of eggs soared by 70% in the last month in California, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
(Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press)
As egg prices tick up, several shoppers are also reporting shortages.
On Tuesday afternoon, Cao said the egg shelves at Song Hy market in Little Saigon in Garden Grove were more than half empty. The store, known for its inexpensive groceries, was selling cage-free medium eggs for $8.99 a dozen, according to a video he provided.
Around the same time, an egg cooler at a Trader Joe’s in Irvine was already nearly half empty after having just received a fresh shipment late that morning, one shopper said. A day earlier, at a nearby Costco, Cao said there was a line of at least 12 people waiting to grab a case of a dozen eggs from shelves that were half empty.
Some restaurant owners, such as Jasmin Gonzalez, who runs Breezy in San Juan Capistrano, have opted to raise prices on other menu items and avoid a price hike on the restaurant’s popular egg dishes.
Her restaurant — which serves a Filipino-inspired brunch — will be closed for a couple weeks for a remodel, she said, and she’ll likely raise prices on some items once it opens, mostly on higher-margin items, such as coffee. That would help the restaurant offset the price of eggs and other increased costs, including the statewide minimum-wage increase, she said.
Gonzalez said she doesn’t feel comfortable changing the price of her $14.99 breakfast burrito, a bestseller.
“I don’t want people paying $16 or $17 for breakfast burritos,” she said. “I don’t like the way that feels.”
Lauren Eager got into thrifting in high school. It was a way to find cheap, interesting clothes while not contributing to the wastefulness of fast fashion.
In 2015, in her first year of college, she downloaded the app for Poshmark, a kind of Instagram-meets-eBay resale platform. Soon, she was selling as well as buying clothes.
This was the golden age of online reselling. In addition to Poshmark, companies like ThredUp and Depop had sprung up, giving a second life to old clothes. In 2016, Facebook debuted Marketplace. Even Goodwill got into the action, starting a snazzy website.
The platforms tapped into two consumer trends: buying stuff online and the never-gets-old delight of snagging a gently used item for a fraction of the original cost. During the Covid-19 pandemic, as people cleaned out their closets, enthusiasm for reselling intensified. It was so strong that Poshmark decided to go public. On the day of its initial public offering in January 2021, the company’s market value peaked at $7.4 billion, roughly the same as PVH’s, the company that owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, at the time.
Then, the business of old clothes started to fray.
Using the Poshmark app, Ms. Eager and others said, started to feel like trying to find something in a messy closet. The app was cluttered with features that did not work or that she did not use, and it felt “spammy,” she said, sending too many push notifications.
Many platforms found selling used items hard to scale. Now, online resellers are trying to recalibrate. Last year, ThredUp decided to exit Europe and focus on selling in the United States. Trove, a company that helps brands like Canada Goose and Steve Madden resell their goods, purchased a competitor, Recurate. The RealReal, a luxury consignor, appointed a new chief executive as the company tried to improve profitability.
Poshmark is undergoing perhaps the biggest reinvention. In 2023, Naver, South Korea’s biggest search engine as well as an online marketplace, bought the company in a deal valued at $1.6 billion, less than half its IPO price.
Something of a mash-up of Google and Amazon, Naver is betting it can rebuild Poshmark, which has 130 million active users, with the same technology that made Naver dominant in its own country.
It may also help breathe new life into the resale market. Analysts think the resale fashion market still has room to grow in the United States, with revenue expected to increase 26 percent to $36.3 billion by 2028, according to the retail consultancy firm Coresight Research.
New legislation in California could help. The law, passed last year, requires brands and retailers that operate in the state and generate at least $1 million to set up a “producer responsibility organization” to collect and then reuse, repair or recycle its products. Resale platforms like ThredUp and Poshmark could be in a position to help brands carry out that mandate.
At the moment, though, Naver’s focus for Poshmark is more basic: Make it a better place to sell and shop. The company has the “operating know-how” to do that, said Philip Lee, a founder of the media outlet The Pickool, which covers both South Korean and U.S. tech companies.
“They’re trying to renovate Poshmark and then expand the market share,” he said.
A Marriage of Search and Commerce
Poshmark, which is based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in 2011 by Manish Chandra, an entrepreneur and former tech executive, and three others. In trying to expand, Poshmark faced a problem common to resellers: Capturing the excitement of the secondhand-shopping treasure hunt while not frustrating buyers with an endless scroll. The company knew it needed better search, as well as interactive elements that gave people more reasons to come beyond paying $19 for a J. Crew sweater.
For its part, Naver was looking for ways to push beyond South Korea, where its commerce and search businesses were already mature. The growing online resale market in the United States presented an opportunity, and also gave the company access to the largest consumer market in the world.
“Commerce is a big growth engine for us,” Namsun Kim, Naver’s chief financial officer, said. And the peer-to-peer sector, where users sell to one another, was still in its infancy, with room to expand. But, Mr. Kim added, “it’s a more challenging segment, and that’s why it’s harder for a lot of the larger players to enter.”
There are two common business models for resale: peer-to-peer and consignment. With consignment, a platform collects and redistributes physical goods. Poshmark uses the peer-to-peer model, which relies on scores of people — many of them novices — haggling over prices and then mailing items to one another. This decentralization can be a headache for brands, which like to maintain a certain level of control of their products. And platforms like Poshmark must make buyers comfortable with trusting the sellers on their site.
Before the Naver purchase, it was difficult to push through needed technological changes, said Vanessa Wong, the vice president of product at Poshmark.
“I would always talk to my engineers and ask, ‘What if we do this or do that?’ They’re like, ‘That’s hard. The effort’s really high,’” Ms. Wong said.
Naver’s purchase offered both the investment and the expertise to pull off the changes. Founded in 1999, the company is everywhere in South Korea.
“We are not just a simple search technology or A.I. service,” said Soo-yeon Choi, the chief executive of Naver, whose headquarters are near Seoul. The company, she said, “alleviates the frustrations of people, which is what is needed to help growth.”
Search built Naver “into the massive power that they are in Korea,” said Mr. Chandra, who stayed on as chief executive after Naver’s purchase. It was the top priority when the company bought Poshmark.
Several new elements for users and sellers have been introduced. With a tool called Posh Lens, users can take a photo of an item and, using Naver’s machine-learning technology, the site populates listings that are the same or similar to the shoe or tank top that they’re searching for. A paid ad feature for sellers called “Promoted Closet,” pushes listings higher on customer feeds.
Poshmark also introduced live shows, some of which are themed, to draw in the TikTok generation and increase engagement. One party auctioned off clothing previously worn by South Korean celebrities, a connection that was made with the help of Naver.
Still, the resale market is going through growing pains and has not quite found its footing since the height of the pandemic. It’s not clear whether the changes taking place at Poshmark will be enough. In May, Mr. Kim, Naver’s finance chief, said in an earnings call that Poshmark’s profitability was improving, but by November, the company was cautioning that growth had slowed because of weakness in the peer-to-peer resale market in North America.
Missteps and Reinvention
The company has already done some backpedaling on unpopular decisions.
In October, Poshmark introduced a new fee structure, which increased costs for buyers. Sellers, fearing that higher costs would make consumers bolt, revolted. Within weeks, the company scrapped the new fee structure.
And there are still user headaches: tags and keywords that help users find what they’re looking for can be miscategorized. Sellers sometimes tag their products incorrectly to get more eyeballs on their less popular products. (Hard-to-offload Amazon leggings, for example, may be listed as Free People apparel.)
The company is beta testing changes with its frequent sellers — people like Alex Mahl, who sells thousands of dollars in apparel on the site each year. And within dedicated Facebook groups related to Poshmark, there’s a lot of chatter about the changes that sellers and buyers would still like to see.
“The only way for it to do well is there’s going to be constant changes,” Ms. Mahl said about the tweaks on Poshmark. “If you were just on an app that never changed — one, it would be boring, and two, the opportunity to just do better wouldn’t be there.”
One recent morning, Ms. Eager, the seller who joined Poshmark back in college, was pleasantly surprised to find that the app had some new features she actually liked. She snapped a photo of her Aerie gray tank top with Posh Lens. Within seconds, the app populated listings of similar products. It was so much better than conjuring up the adjectives needed to describe it.
“Love it,” Ms. Eager exclaimed.
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