📦 Amazon’s “frequently returned” items

Watching paint gets a bad rap, but everything about this new paint is cool — in more ways than one.

A team at University of Central Florida has developed a potentially game-changing coating based on “structural” color, per Wired.

• That is, the use of light diffraction — think peacock feathers and butterfly wings — rather than pigments, the current standard in paint.

The result: a durable, ultralight, non-heat-trapping colorant bringing huge climate-friendly possibilities.

If production can scale, usage may go sky-high

We’re in early days — the plasmonic paint is still expensive to produce and restricted to academia for now — but the applications are tantalizing if it reaches mass production.

The UCF team’s research lead, Debashis Chanda, identified airlines as an ideal partner. Currently, Boeing 747s require ~500 kg of paint; Chanda estimates ~1.3 kg of the new aluminum-based substance could get the job done, producing a fuel-saving ~1k-lb weight reduction.

By reflecting rather than absorbing infrared radiation, structural paint could also keep buildings and cars cooler: Experiments show surface temps ~20-30 degrees Fahrenheit lower compared to traditional pigment-based paints.

• That kind of temperature differential could reduce reliance on energy-consuming HVAC systems and slash increasing utility costs.

There’s no one magic answer to living cooler

Material innovations like structural paint are just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Efforts to weather increasing temperatures include:

• China turning Zhuhai into a “sponge city,” converting roads into cooler, permeable surfaces that can absorb and store water
• Los Angeles experimenting with cool roofs, pavement coating, and more shade trees on its streets
• Startup BioShade fighting urban heat islands with vertical hydroponic shade structures

One last thing: If UCF needs to test body paint soon, our summers are wide open.

As millions of Americans stream “Sex and the City” and other old sitcoms, warm nostalgia has been accompanied by a cold dose of skepticism about the characters’ apartments and houses.

Were they paying far beyond their means, or are we judging with a 2020s perspective?

As it turns out, Carrie Bradshaw’s life on “Sex and the City” wasn’t quite as unrealistic as you might think.

Sure, there’s no way she could have afforded routine purchases of Manolo Blahnik shoes and designer dresses on her estimated ~$60k-$70k salary as a freelance New York City magazine columnist.

But her ability to afford her apartment, a West Village alcove studio, wasn’t so far-fetched in the late ‘90s.

For our latest feature, we analyzed the salaries and living situations of several famous sitcom characters over the past few decades as a lens on today’s housing market.

What we found is that not every sitcom was a fantasy. But with many young people priced out of cities, and average families unable to buy homes, it just feels that way today.

We’ve probably all made an online purchase only to receive something unexpected — like these people who accidentally bought doll-sized furniture off Amazon.

Luckily, Amazon makes most returns free and relatively easy for new, unused items within 30 days of delivery. Except they’re annoying for:

• Customers who really don’t need an extra errand
• Sellers, who must pay a fee for items that can’t be resold
• Amazon, which has to process — and pay for — all those returns

It’s also not great for a low carbon footprint, considering the extra transit involved, plus whatever ends up in the landfill.

Buyer beware

To curb returns, Amazon recently added warning labels on “frequently returned” items, suggesting customers read product details and reviews first, per The Information. For example:

• This ~$31 wrap dress has 50%+ positive reviews, but others mention poor-quality fabric and stitching and a slit too high for anyone who isn’t Angelina Jolie at the 2012 Oscars.

Reading measurements carefully when you can’t try something on is probably a good idea; a 2021 Statista survey found that apparel is by far the most returned retail category.

Another problem?

Amazon is flooded with bogus reviews, enough that Amazon sued the admins of 10k+ Facebook groups for allegedly soliciting them, and filed a claim against several fake review companies in February.

By encouraging buyers to read reviews carefully, versus trusting the star rating, it could nip some returns in the bud — and encourage sellers to be more transparent.

BTW: The Hustle’s own Zachary Crockett once spent two weird weeks investigating the fake review economy.