Happy Sunday! We hope everyone is enjoying the Memorial Day weekend, and apologies to anyone who may have been caught in the travel rush — though the estimated 39 million people who've taken long road trips might at least appreciate gas prices hitting 4-year lows.
Today we're exploring how Big Tech's AI push has slowed down — or entirely reversed — a post-pandemic hiring spree, and why America has started embracing the lowly meat stick.
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Where the jobs are(n't)
When Big Tech started slashing jobs in late 2022, it felt like a brief (and painful) correction to the pandemic-era hiring binge, when Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet collectively added more than 960,000 jobs during the peak of the digital demand boom.
Nearly three years later, however, the layoffs haven't really stopped.
According to TechCrunch, more than 22,000 US tech workers have been let go just this year — including Intel slashing 20% of its workforce, Meta trimming Reality Labs, Amazon's ~100 job cuts, Google's back-to-back downsizing rounds, and Microsoft laying off 6,000 employees globally just last week.
Across the largest public US tech firms, headcount growth has slowed — or outright reversed — for many in the past two years.
Some notable exceptions? Netflix, which has been remarkably lean for over a decade with just ~14,000 employees, and chip designers and semiconductor companies like Nvidia and Broadcom, who now power much of the AI revolution.
In fact, that divergence has been playing out within companies, too. If you're close to the action in AI, your stock's probably rising internally. But if you're in operations, admin, or even a field of software engineering that's more exposed to AI, you might not be feeling as secure.
And that pressure isn't just about who's being let go — it's also about who's not getting hired, as what some experts are calling the "ChatGPT effect" takes hold.
The US is in the beefy throes of a serious protein renaissance — and, within the contemporary American snackscape, a new totem for the obsession has emerged: the cured meat stick.
In recent years, the meat stickhas become the fastest-growing product of a protein-fueled snack boom that's growing at 3x the rate of an already ascendent snacking category. Last year, US consumers spent$3 billion on meat sticks, roughly the same amount as they did on roses and legal March Madness bets.
But the meat stick being redeemed from its status as lowbrow macho fuel crowding impulse buy bins — and becoming a go-to for keto alt-dieters, craft food enthusiasts, and time-strapped snack seekers — reveals a lot about how shopper habits and preferences have evolved in the last decade.
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