Last fall, New Yorker Frank Siragusa ordered a Mexican Pizza from a Taco Bell he found light on beef and beans, so he walked away feeling not just disappointed and hungry, but very, very litigious.
This week he filed a class-action lawsuit against the fast food chain for false advertising. In the suit, he says other menu items such as the Crunchwrap Supreme, Grande Crunchwrap, and Veggie Mexican Pizza also are missing the correct amount of filling, calling the practices “unfair and deceptive.” He’s seeking $5 million for customers who ate at Taco Bell. Where’s the beef, indeed, Frank?
Morning Brief
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Meta’s AI play involves Honest Abe.
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Tupperware scores the GameStop treatment.
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Even rich foreigners retreat from US housing market.
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Tech
Meta Working on Generative AI Chatbots With Personalities
How would you like to ask Abraham Lincoln about good lunch spots?
It looks like Meta’s first big generative AI-powered addition to its platforms will be a collection of chatbots that users can talk to, as reported by the Financial Times on Tuesday. Company sources told the FT the chatbots could be ready to debut as early as September, and will offer some search functionality besides just being fun. The idea is to engage more users, but if Meta has been watching semi-rival Snapchat closely, it knows chatbots hold a trove of user data for targeted ads.
A New Seam
Meta already leaned into the generative AI bonanza two weeks ago when it released Llama 2, an open-source large language model which other businesses can use to build chatbots of their own. The chatbots in the works are aimed squarely at the billions of people already on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram social media platforms.
Sources told the FT that Meta is working on a clutch of chatbots with different personas, a twist that would give them a quirky selling point compared with rivals like Chat-GPT. The choice of personalities seems random at first, but on second glance they look geared toward keeping users reassured:
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One persona the company has experimented with is a chatbot that sounds like Abraham Lincoln, while another that makes recommendations about travel is meant to sound more like a surfer dude. Why not combine the two — we’ve already had Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, is Abraham Lincoln: Point Break such a stretch?
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Nice, affable personas like Honest Abe could be key in getting users to open up to chatbots run by a company that’s constantly trying to shake the image of siphoning your data, but the likelihood is that’ll be a big part of the product.
When Snap introduced a similar AI chatbot to its platform in February, it found a new trove of opportunities for targeted advertising. The advantages were twofold: Advertisers could pay to place sponsored links into conversations with users (basically the chat equivalent of sponsored ads at the top of Google searches) and the conversations themselves could be added to the pile of personalized user data. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the FT’s report when contacted by The Daily Upside.
Metaversal: Generative AI may have dimmed the metaverse’s limelight, but one source told the FT that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is considering ways to combine the two, specifically mentioning an idea that a chatbot could be given an avatar in the metaverse. “Zuckerberg is spending all his energy and time on ideating about this,” the source said. If at first you don’t succeed… throw AI at it.
– Isobel Asher Hamilton
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Consumer
Tupperware Turns into a Memestock Favorite
(Photo by Connor Lin/The Daily Upside)
Tupperware containers can keep food fresh for days here on Earth. But not even they can keep the company’s stock price from perishing in the cold, harsh atmosphere of outer space.
That far-out question is somehow relevant this week, thanks to so-called memestock traders — those infamous online amateurs famous for betting big on failing companies like AMC Theaters and GameStop. Now, the group has decided to send the eponymous food storage company’s long-dismal share price, in memestock parlance, to the moon.
The Leftovers
In this instance, to the moon means a mouthwatering 800% pop in share price in the past two weeks. Online day-traders chattering on message board Stocktwits and Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets have rallied to purchase over $15 million worth of Tupperware shares since July 21, sending its market value to nearly $225 million from $40 million, according to Vanda Securities data, while its share price has jumped from under a dollar to around $5.40 on Tuesday.
For Tupperware, the bizarre digital affection couldn’t have come at a better time:
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Aside from a brief pandemic-era spike, Tupperware has been less than fresh over the past two years. Times have been so tough, the company ditched its long-held direct-to-consumer sales strategy and forged retail partnerships last year.
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But the pivot didn’t help much. In March, it was forced to restate prior results after finding material weakness in its internal controls, by April it announced “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue,” and at the end of June it was forced to negotiate a waiver agreement with some of its creditors, while still forecasting an inability to fully service its July interest payments.
Short-Sighted: As per usual when it comes to memestocks, short-sellers were caught holding the short end of the stick. Tupperware’s gains have cost short-sellers some $27 million in paper losses in the past few weeks, according to data from analytics firm S3 Partners reported by Bloomberg. Tupperware reports earnings on Wednesday, and, prior to the surge, many investors thought it was headed for bankruptcy. On Tuesday, roughly 30% of tradable shares were currently sold short, marking a slight uptick in bets against the company since the stock’s lowest point in July — meaning that Wall Street is betting that what goes up must come down, and, this time, the memestock short-squeezers could become the squeezed.
– Brian Boyle
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Together with Patent Drop
Behind Every Big Tech Rollout…
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Foreign Buyers are Cooling on the US Housing Market
Foreigners are falling out of love with American real estate, but that can’t be good for the neighborhood.
A new report from the National Association of Realtors found that foreign purchases of existing US homes fell to a record low in the 12-month period between April 2022 and March 2023. And while international buyers make up a small portion of US home sales, the drop-off is a big indicator of an uncertain market.
No Crash, But Problems Linger
The Fed has raised interest rates 11 times in the last year — and mortgage rates have joined the runup. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is near 7%, up from a record low of 3% just three years earlier. Higher loan rates can often drive housing sales and ultimately prices lower, but not always. According to the NAR, the median price of a single-family home was falling in 2022, but by the start of this year, prices began going back up.
International buyers tend to more often pay for US homes in cash, so they avoid mortgage woes but still face record-high housing costs and a limited inventory:
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The US is short roughly 4.3 million homes, according to Zillow. Plus, the strong dollar means most foreign currencies aren’t going as far as they had been.
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Both the number of homes foreigners purchased and the cumulative dollar volume for the properties sold fell in the past year. Purchases fell 14% to 84,600; their combined costs were $53.3 billion, down nearly 10%.
Could Come Back Around: With China now relaxing its pandemic restrictions, NAR did notice more buyers from that country over the past year. Also, healthy GDP growth in India and a strong Mexican peso will likely result in more buyers from those nations. “Sharply lower housing inventory in the US and higher borrowing costs across the world have dented international buyers for two straight years,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said. “However, recovering international travel following the end of the pandemic will bring more foreign transactions in coming months and years.”
– Griffin Kelly
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Extra Upside
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BB&B is back, baby: Bed Bath & Beyond returns from bankruptcy with a new website from Overtstock.com.
