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The following sentence might cause anxiety. As Thanksgiving looms near, its time to begin holiday shopping. The current level of inflation makes that even more stressful. How can you show your love without breaking the bank? It turns out, shoppers are turning to off-price retailers such as Ross, T.J. Maxx, and HomeGoods, according to recent earnings reports and data from location analytics company Placer.ai. Lets break down the numbers. Ross Stores posts rosy earnings Its fair to say that Jim Conroy, CEO of Ross Stores, is very pleased with the third-quarter earnings report released on Thursday, November 20. The company earned $1.58 per share, resulting in a $512 million profit. This is an increase from last years figures of $1.48 per share and $489 million in profit. When you zoom out beyond Q3, the numbers are equally as impressive. Rosss year-to-date sales earnings are $16.1 billion, which is a 3% increase. People are clearly bargain shopping to get through these hard economic times and it’s safe to predict this trend will only continue to grow in the holiday shopping season. Foot traffic is reportedly up at off-price retailers Do you ever feel like you are being watched? Well, your cellphone is collecting data on you, most likely with permission buried deep in the terms and conditions of some of the apps downloaded on your phone. Placer.ai uses mobile-device data that is anonymized and aggregated to analyze customer behavior. It estimates how much foot traffic certain stores get and how long customers linger. According to the analytics platform, things are good for off-price retailers. TJX HomeGoods, which includes both HomeGoods and Homesense stores, saw a 9.6% increase in shopper volume in the third quarter, according to data shared with Fast Company. Similarly, TJX Marmaxx, which includes TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Sierra stores, saw an 8.1% increase in store traffic. And store visits at Ross rose 9.4%. Target cannot say the same. The companys store visitors declined 2.7% year-over-year in Q3, according to Placer.ai. The big-box retailer’s struggles were apparent in its third-quarter earnings report, which saw $25.3 billion in sales, around 1.5% lower than the same quarter last year. Ross has been opening new stores in 2025 Because of its overwhelming success, Ross is doubling down to keep this momentum going. In October, the retailer announced that it had opened 36 Ross Dress for Less and four Dd’s Discounts stores in October and September. These store locations span 17 states. In an economy where many brick-and-mortar retail chains are closing stores, this is no small accomplishment. Shares of Ross Stores (NYSE: ROST) are up 6.64% this week. TJX Companies stock (NYSE: TJX) is up 3.67%.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump has called New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic” and a total nut job. Mamdani has called Trumps administration authoritarian” and described himself as Donald Trumps worst nightmare. So their first-ever meeting, scheduled for Friday at 3 p.m. EST at the White House, could be a curious and combustible affair. Despite months of casting each other as prime adversaries, the Republican president and new Democratic star have also indicated an openness to finding areas of agreement that help the city theyve both called home. Mamdani, a democratic socialist who takes office in January, said he sought the meeting with Trump to talk about ways to make New York City more affordable. Trump has said he may want to help him out although he has also falsely labeled Mamdani as a communist and threatened to yank federal funds from his hometown. But for both men, the meeting offers opportunities beyond any areas of potential bipartisan agreement. The two men are convenient political foils for each other, and taking the other one on can galvanize their supporters. Trump loomed large over the mayoral race this year, and on the eve of the election, endorsed independent candidate and former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, predicting the city has ZERO chance of success, or even survival if Mamdani won. He also questioned the citizenship of Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a naturalized American citizen after graduating from college, and said he’d have him arrested if he followed through on threats not to cooperate with immigration agents in the city. Mamdani beat back a challenge from Cuomo, painting him as a puppet for the president, and said he would be a mayor who can stand up to Donald Trump and actually deliver. He declared during one primary debate, “I am Donald Trumps worst nightmare, as a progressive Muslim immigrant who actually fights for the things that I believe in. The president, who has long used political opponents to fire up his backers, predicted Mamdani will prove to be one of the best things to ever happen to our great Republican Party. As Mamdani upended the Democratic establishment by defeating Cuomo and his far-left progressive policies provoked infighting, Trump repeatedly has cast Mamdani as the face of Democratic Party. For Mamdani, a sit-down with the president of the United States offers the state lawmaker who until recently was relatively unknown the chance to go head-to-head with the most powerful person in the world. The meeting gives Trump a high-profile chance to talk about affordability at a time when hes under increasing political pressure to show hes addressing voter concerns about the cost of living. But thats if the meeting doesnt turn rocky. A chance for some Oval Office drama It was not immediately clear whether cameras will be allowed into the meeting. Trump’s daily schedule said it will be private, but the president often invites in a small pool of reporters at the last minute. The president has had some dramatic public Oval Office faceoffs this year, including an infamously heated exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in March. In May, Trump dimmed the lights while meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and played a four-minute video making widely rejected claims that South Africa is violently persecuting the countrys white Afrikaner minority farmers. A senior Trump administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions said Trump had not put a lot of thought into planning the meeting with the incoming mayor but said Trumps threats to block federal dollars from flowing to New York remained on the table. Mamdani said Thursday that he was not concerned about the president potentially trying to use the meeting to publicly embarrass him and said he saw it as a chance to make his case, even while acknowledging many disagreements with the president. If the president does use the meeting as a public confrontation, Mamdani may be uniquely ready for it. He, like Trump, was a relative political outsider who rose to victory with a populist message that promised a break from the establishment, known for his savvy navigation of the spotlight and a distinctive use of social media. Mamdani, who lives in Queens where Trump was raised also has shown a cutthroat streak. During his campaign, he appeared to borrow from Trump’s playbook when he noted during a televised debate with Cuomo that one of the women who had accused the former governor of sexual harassment was in the audience. Cuomo has denied wrongdoing. The moment evoked Trump’s tactics before a debate with Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, when he appeared with accusers of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, who denied the accusations against him. Michelle L. Price, Associated Press Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
A creepy account thats almost certainly using AI to generate videos of imaginary New Yorkers criticizing mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani raises a frightening prospect: that deepfakes could be used not just to impersonate politicians, but also constituents. Accounts on several social media platformswhich are using similar profile pictures and appear to be linkedare calling themselves the Citizens Against Mamdani. In recent days, these accounts have posted confessionals and rants from New Yorkers slamming Mamdani for hisallegedanti-Americanism, plans to hike taxes, and false promises on rent and transportation. They appear to be trying to imitate the diversity of New York, and many of the videos feature some of the citys classic accents. While none of the videos have gone viral, they have shown up on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, with some racking up tens of thousands of views. The TikTok account itself has about 30,000 likes. Fast Company reached out to the Instagram and TikTok pages but had not heard back at the time of publication.In the last election cycle, hiring human influencers to spread a particular message was all the rage. Now, teams don’t even need those personalities, explains Emmanuelle Saliba, the chief investigative officer at GetReal Security, a cybersecurity firm that analyzes deepfakes. GenAI has made such significant progress that campaigns and activists can use text-to-video to create hyperrealistic videos of supporters or detractors, and online consumers will be none the wiser, she adds. The online campaign shows how generative AI has, in essence, democratized astroturfing. Astroturfing has been automated, and it’s pretty much undetectable without technology, Saliba saysa notable evolution from the last election cycle, when it was more common for political operatives to hire influencers, she adds. Using online tools to create a false impression of support or opposition to a movement or candidate isnt new. In 2017, for example, bots were deployed to submit comments to the Federal Communications Commission, which was, at the time, considering new rules on net neutrality. But those types of campaigns have typically required at least some significant human effort, like operating a network of social media accounts or hiring influencers. The rise of generative AI makes it far easier to create the mirage of political popularity online: Now, with just a few prompts and access to the right platform, you can simply generate videos of a bevy of real-ish seeming people. A mirage Of course, one of the challenges of deepfake detection is that theres no absolutely surefire way to confirm that theyre generated by AI. With the anti-Mamdani videos, however, the evidence is overwhelming. Beyond the visible Sora watermarka label created by OpenAI to denote content created with the companys technologyon some of the videos, the accounts have published numerous, similar videos at around the same time. Another major hint is the objects in the background of the images, noted Siwei Lyu, a computer science professor who studies deepfakes at University of Buffalo. Reality Defender, another firm that investigates AI-generated content, analyzed several of the videos using a platform it offers called RealScan and found that the odds they were manipulated were extremely high. The firm assessed that one video featuring a man in a blue hat, screaming You all got fooled by Mamdani had a 99 percent likelihood of being a deepfake. (It is impossible to score 100 percent: Theres no way to truly verify the ground truth of the contents creation). While it’s unclear the extent to which people have been actually convinced by the videos, the comments on them suggest at least some online users seem to be taking them seriously. They show the illusion of broad support for or against an issue, and the people depicted in the videos are ordinary citizens. So its harder to verify their existence, says Lyu. This is yet another dangerous form of an AI-driven disinformation campaign. Astroturfing at scale The accounts are a reminder that the cost of producing disinformation is lower than ever. It used to be that social engineering support for a particular cause would require real effort for instance investing in creating believable and realistic content, explains Alex Lisle, the chief technology officer of Reality Defender. Now I can define an LLM with a sentiment and a message I’m trying to give it, and then ask it to come up with what to say, Lisle says. And I can do that at a scale which before would require hours and hours of work,manufacturing hundreds of different quotes, thousands of different quotes, very, very quickly, he adds. Combining deepfakes with large language models allows political operatives to not only generate myriad scripts for what a deepfake can say, but also videos of people with convincing voices to actually spread those narratives. You are now having a force multiplier, Lisle continued. In order to do this required multiple people and hours of effort. Now it just costs me computing. The problem expands beyond politics, emphasized Saliba, from GetReal. While Mamdani might be one example of a target, the low cost of creating this kind of content means that a business or a loved one could be the future subject of these kinds of disinformation campaigns.
Category:
E-Commerce
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