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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

I had coffee last year with a guy - I won't use his real name - who told me he was "building a business." I asked what it did. Dropshipping jade face rollers.

I made him say it twice.

Jade face rollers.

He'd found them on Alibaba for $1.20 each, and started selling them through Shopify for $29.99. Never used one himself. Didn't really know what they were for - something about lymphatic drainage? Reducing puffiness? He said "lymphatic" the way you say a word you've only ever read and never heard out loud.

Some guy on YouTube said jade rollers were "trending," the margins looked insane on paper, so he'd "built" a website with stock photos of a dewy-skinned woman rolling a green rock across her cheekbone and started running Facebook ads at $50 a day. Customers would email asking where their stuff was - shipping from Guangzhou, three to six weeks, sometimes way longer - and he'd copy-paste a response he found on a dropshipping subreddit. He had a Google Doc full of pre-written customer service replies.

...

Jade Roller Guy has become my go-to example of something that went drastically, terribly wrong with how a whole generation of would-be entrepreneurs thought about work and money. A specific ideology - I've been calling it Passive Income Brain - grabbed a huge chunk of the people who were, by temperament and ability, most likely to start real businesses, and it gave them a completely fucked set of priorities.

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