Summary
➡ The speaker discusses the retail business, stating that despite increasing holiday sales each year, many goods are returned or gift cards go unused. He also talks about changing trends in the real estate market, noting that some homeowners feel they overpaid their agents and foreseeing a shift in how agents will be paid in future. Furthermore, the speaker warns of rising postage rates and privacy concerns due to hacking groups accessing private security cameras. Finally, he comments on extravagant New Year’s Eve prices such as $650 tickets for an Applebee’s dinner.
➡ The Marriott Marquis in Times Square offers a pricey New Year’s experience at $12,500 per person including fine dining and a room, despite the freezing weather. Additionally, free returns, which used to encourage shopping, will now cost $10.
Transcript
And today we have a sponsor, belly trim, and I’ll talk about them later. First things first. One up is Pizza Hut. Here in Southern California, they raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour for fast food workers. Okay, well, that’s just great. Okay. It’s going to make your burgers go through the roof. Now, one thing that happened with Pizza Hut, with the largest pizza Hut retailer, okay, pack pizza here in California, southern California, all the way up to Santa Barbara area, they have over 1200 in house delivery drivers.
Not anymore, because they’re firing everybody, getting rid of them because of the minimum wage and what they’re going to do to determine delivery, probably uber eats and different things like that. But they’re not going to have these people as employees now because it’ll make your pizza $35 a pizza. So this is great. It’s going to give everybody a living wage. No, it’s not, guys. It’s going to destroy businesses.
Everything has gone up this year. Everything. Inflation is under control. But you have food prices gone through the roof, labor prices going through the roof, rent going through the roof, energy, everything that it takes to run a restaurant. You think Pizza Hut is any different? They are not. And they’re getting rid of these people. So what’s their solution? Oh, it’s real simple. We’ll just fire everybody. Chipotle’s done this.
McDonald’s has done this. Everybody’s done it. Now you’re just going to sit there and be lucky if you can get anybody to deliver your pizza and work there. So it’s getting bad, guys, we’re seeing real problems right now with banking. And the Banking problem are twofold. You’re getting people that are having their credit lines cut. And again, you guys sit there, and I’m telling you, for all the people that are sitting there that write me and say, well, you don’t understand, everybody should have digital correspondence with their banks.
They shouldn’t have paper statements. How about this one? Chase bank is closing people’s accounts because they didn’t agree to verification. So people are losing their credit lines. And they said, well, we sent you a notice sent you an email on this and of course it was sent via email. And people are losing their $35,000 credit lines. They’re getting completely cut right now. Okay, so one thing to look at, which was great, great story below about when you go to online banking and you look at your account, look for anything different in your account, any notification.
This one guy found an orange circle under his account name. That’s kind of weird. Never seen that at Chase bank before. Totally didn’t match the colors of Chase, just an orange circle. Well, wakes up and they shut down his $35,000 line of credit. Took another guy from 25,000 down to 1200. And again, guess what? He opened the account. One $200. So you’re going to see this more and more.
Now be careful of the scammers reaching out and acting like there’s somebody else. In the last two days, I’ve had people text me and act like it was a wrong number and they wanted me to respond. And the idea with this is that if you’re lonely or you’re stupid, you will go out and you’ll communicate with these people and start up a conversation. It’s horrible. And it really does catches people.
Hey, it’s windy. Are we going to play golf? Things like that. So want to just see if I can find these and read these to you? Oh, yeah. Here’s the last one. Do you have time to visit Napa Valley winery this weekend? Oh, okay, babe. Yeah, I do. Let’s go to the Napa Valley winery. The next one. Hey, how did you enjoy know I ate Burger King for lunch? I didn’t really enjoy it much at all.
What’d you do for lunch? Oh, I was lonely at the beach. Do you know what I mean? Okay. Idiot. So where this leads to is USAA Federal credit union. Great insurance company. They have a bank, a federal credit union. One thing that has been set up is they have a spoofing site that’s been done where people go out and they act like they’re the bank. So hey, communicate with us here and go to this website.
And it’s not USAA, it’s another website. Now the problem with it is it looks real official and people punch in their information and the thieves are stealing it. So once again, make sure you know where you’re logging into. Once again, make sure if you get correspondence from the bank, you answer it. But again, all you people that don’t have written correspondence, everybody that had it mailed to them, they had to get an envelope.
You need to agree to these terms or we’re going to lower your credit line. Oh, okay. The ods of them lowering the credit line are nil when they do this. But USAA read the horror stories below because it’s awful. These poor people. Go to a spoofed website that looks official. It looks like it has the logos. It’s got the wrong information. It won’t be their website. It’ll be USAA.
USAA. You know what I mean? They’ll change the name of the domain enough to where people will log into it. It’s terrible. Absolutely terrible. Now, I got caught up in this about a year ago when I needed to call AAA and my car had broken down. So I’m trying to find AA and get the 800 number for emergency roadside assistance. But I wasn’t in any danger. The car was at the house.
But I’m sitting there and I call this place and this guy goes, hey, how’s it going? I’m like, was this AA? Yeah. You need a tow? What did I call? Didn’t ask for my id number. What’s your name? None of that stuff. Didn’t ask for any of that stuff because they were just spoofing everything. So be careful where you go on what websites you click on, okay? It’s becoming a problem more and more and the thieves are getting more and more sophisticated and stealing people’s money like you wouldn’t believe.
So read the stories below because they’re awful. Let’s talk about our sponsor, belly Trim XP. Let’s face it, guys. New Year’s resolutions. You need a new you. What’s the number one thing that people work on? Weight loss. It’s time to get healthy, guys. One thing that you can do is you can take belly Trim XP which is loaded with all natural ingredients, conjugate a linoleic acid which has been proven to reduce belly fat.
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Shopping is finished the way that it used to be is all but a memory right now. Think about this. 81% of all the retailers are going to charge you to return items now. Yeah, 81%. And this is staggering, guys. It’s just the number of retailers and what they’re charging Amazon a dollar. And think about this. This will deter people from going out and returning things now. Free returns.
This started, basically, the main company was a company called zappos. They sold shoes and what they encouraged. Ladies, listen, if you think you’re a seven, seven and a half order, both, send them back. We don’t care. And the CEO, that guy was just, he was so gung ho on this and didn’t care because people loved the service and would spend so much money just to buy shoes and send them back.
Well, those days are done. Amazon’s charging a buck to do it. And you’re seeing all these different retailers. And there’s a list here in this story that’s great. You’ve got Azara, Macy’s, Abercrombie and Abercrombie. Crombie and Fitch. Say that fast. J. Crew, H and M, Abercrombie, $7 fee to return something. $7. Wait a second. It doesn’t fit right. Okay, we’re going to charge you $7. Okay? American eagle outfitters, $5 to return an item by mail.
Dillard’s 995. That’s $10 to return something. Okay? H and M, 599. Crazy. Guys. It’s a lot. It adds up. JCPenney’s $8 and J. Crew is 750. I mean, the list goes on, guys. So customers sent back on an average of 17% of their purchases. So how do we combat this? Again, no one’s making money, okay? They’re just trading money. Okay? It’s that simple. How do we make money? How do we make more money? That’s what they want to do.
Think about this. It is anticipated that $31 billion was spent on gift cards this holiday season. That’s a lot, right? Well, of the gift cards, how many never get used? Okay, 30%. Isn’t that crazy? 70% of the gift cards on an average, get used within the first six months. Now, there was a law passed in 2010 that made it so that if you bought a gift card, they can’t say, this expires in 60 days.
You can’t say that they have to give you five years on that. But people lose them. People say, oh, I don’t go to Dillard’s very often. I’ll just put it in that drawer. My late girlfriend, she had a few of those guys that we went and used and found and you know, but again, people forget about things time and again. It happens all the time. So this retail season, oh, gosh, it was so great.
I have had dozens of you write me to tell me, Dan, there were no after Christmas sales. Dan, there were no good deals for, you know, Home Depot got rid of everything. Lowe’s got rid of everything. Walmart, well, they got rid of it all. Guys, I saw them doing it on the 20 December this year. They don’t want to have these sales after the fact. This was a couple of years ago.
We used to go out, remember, you just would wait till after Christmas because things would be 50% off. Where are those deals at now? They’re not out there right now. They’re just not out there. So all these places that sold different Christmas items, man, I am telling you, people have written me time and again, dollar tree. Laura from Connecticut wrote me and she has an area inside one store that looks like there’s no merchandise where they’re going to turn this into the dollar tree plus, and it’s going to be the $5 items.
So dollar tree, which is not dollar tree because it’s dollar 25 tree, is going to have those $5 items. I can’t wait to see that local. I just want to see what is worth $5 in dollar tree. So you’re going to see this time and again, that’s the golf course there. But this is Cedar Hill park and this is right above the golf course. And it’s loaded with orange trees up here, which is what Orange county was built on.
And we had all these orange groves and all this different fruit trees up here when we were kids. And they kept some of these, which is kind of cool, but they don’t mind if you come up here and pick them. And all these people are up here picking free oranges today. So it’s nice, good weather and it’s orange picking season. But we were supposed to do $7. 6 billion in holiday sales, which would have been right on pace for last year or for this dream of going up 5%.
We did 3. 1 billion in sales this year. And guys, it’s off. It’s off, it’s off. It’s off. It’s still good. I’m telling you, the building can be on fire. And they’re going to say it’s a great place. Now, this is, the other thing that was sent to me was things to never say in your real estate listings. And these are crazy. Don’t say that the house is huge.
Don’t say it’s a rad bachelor pad and it’s crazy. What’s happening right now is things are getting more precarious and people are getting more desperate to sell houses. I don’t care how much you tell me, everything is great. I am telling you. When you have foreclosure companies that are working overtime right now. Okay? And, wow, can’t wait to the first of the year, it’s going to be really busy.
I mean, why guys, you think they’re doing that because it’s going to be slow? No, it’s going to be super duper busy right now. But real estate agents, there are all these lawsuits right now where people sat down and thought about this and said, I paid that guy way too much for the work he did. Another article that came out on Christmas day that was sent to me by five people talking about how people really think they got ripped off by their real estate agent.
Well, you just don’t understand. Putting that sign in front of the house is a lot of work, okay? I am telling you, you’re going to see in the calendar year of 2024, you’re going to see the real estate industry completely change. And you’re going to see these agents get paid much differently. There’s going to be a shift in this. Now, when you talk to good agents, like, you know, from Santa Barbara, this guy is.
I have a client, and I was given an assignment. The house. He should find the price range. This is what we want. We want to be in this school district. So basically, this range, this area, this price, you do that, Scott, you got our business. Okay? Well, that’s worth paying for, don’t you think? Because this guy knows people. This guy knows the neighborhoods. Know if you. Hey, Dan, what’s Santa Barbara like? I don’t know.
I’d call Scott. That’s what I would do. But the point is that when you think of people that have made huge mistakes buying property, one thing I always tell you is go and investigate the properties. Go look, go see what the neighborhood’s like. See what it’s like when it rains, what it’s like on the weekends, what it’s like on holidays and parties and Super bowl, anything you can see like that, because you’re going to know the lunacy of people.
Wow, those guys, they’re barbecuing in the street right now. Yeah, that’s a Thursday, guys. Okay. Do you know what I mean? You’re going to see crazy because you can’t hide crazy for a couple days. They can hide it during an open house. I know somebody that lived in, they lived in Venice beach. And the homeless people were so bad that they had to pay the homeless people to leave during showings and during open houses.
And the homeless people gave notice to everybody like, hey, do you want to make $50? You go buy this house and camp out. And then she’s going to pay you. And she did this. Okay. Laura is a great woman. She spoke at my events. But man, they had to pay people to leave to stay away from the open houses. Okay, so again, the people that bought their house, I to this still feel sorry for them because they’re in hell or as Venice beach.
Okay, let me know what you think about this so far. I’m going to finish this video with these last few stories. First things first, postage is going up from $66 to. People are freaking out. You can go buy some forever stamps right now, guys. And guess what? They’ll work when they raise postage rates. Oh, thank you. Okay, this has got a nice area that they walk to. There’s a summit up here, like kind of a house up here at the top of the hill.
And you get a nice view. And once it gets dark, the lights go on up there. There’s no lights on the few lights in the trail, but not that much, but kind of a cool spot to walk around. Hacking groups, think about this. There’s a vietnamese hacking group that is selling bedra cams now, bedroom cams. Okay, so if you have a camera in your bedroom and it’s tied to the Internet, you’re an idiot if you don’t have a VPN.
So I’m telling you that right now because there’s some degenerate out there probably watching you and your wife or your girlfriend change inside that room. So there’s a degenerate group. Read it because it’s below. So watch where your cameras are at, guys in the house. Now, strategically, you have to have these things, but who has access to it? Who can get it? And when you hear about stories like this, it makes you realize that there’s really, again, degenerates in the world out there.
Okay, so what would you pay for New Year’s Eve revelry? God, man, I have not been able to talk today. Revelry. Okay, I was floored with the Formula one race in Las Vegas and what people were paying for. I got all that stuff for free. It was fantastic. Okay, but New Year’s Eve, is that a big deal for anybody? Do you want to go to Times Square? Do you want to freeze and be around all those people? Well, hey, I got a deal for you.
You can go to Applebee’s for $650 per ticket. 650. Now, I’m not kidding you. This story out of the New York Post, okay, you can go to Applebee’s and you’ll get unlimited salad and unlimited breadsticks for your 650 per person. Okay, man, just sounds so good. Imagine that. No, it’s right in Times Square. You’re going to see the ball drop. But $650 a person. Now, the Marriott marquee, their experience is a little bit more expensive, a little pricier.
It’s $12,500 for the Marriott Marquis experience. And you get fine dining, you get a nice room, and it’s going to cost you $12,500. And again, it’s freezing in New York City right now, guys, so it’s not like you’re going on vacation. You’re going to be bundled up cold and you’re going to see the ball drop. And, you know, so am I. I’m going to see the ball drop, too, but only I’m going to get to see it on tv 3 hours later.
Okay? Isn’t that great? Share your thoughts and all this stuff, guys, because it’s just crazy. The free returns being gone is, I’m telling you, want to deter people from buying things. Well, wait a second. If I don’t like it, what if it doesn’t fit? Well, we’re going to charge you $10. Pass. Please don’t forget to like button. Please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. We sent out our Christmas card.
Check your spam filter if you were on the list and look for those blue folders because they will start arriving your postmark post office box today. Man, oh, man. Okay. Share your thoughts. Okay, so you want to get a hold of me? Hello@iallegedly. com? And onward and upward, guys. I will see you very soon. .
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