Axios PM

October 26, 2021
Good afternoon: Today's PM — edited by Justin Green — is 389 words, a 1.5-minute read.
- 🚨Breaking: The White House is telling lawmakers that the climate portion of President Biden's roughly $2 trillion social spending plan will likely cost more than $500 billion, Axios' Alayna Treene scoops.
📲 Join Axios' Erica Pandey tomorrow at 12:30pm ET for a virtual event on the keys to breaking down traditional barriers in education. Register here.
1 big thing: New sticker shock
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Expect holiday bargains to be sparse this year, as retailers revel in the "pricing power" of short supply and heavy demand.
- Supply: "The number of out-of-stock messages online is up 172% compared with January 2020," The Wall Street Journal reports.
- Demand: U.S. consumers hoarded $2.3 trillion in pandemic-era savings, reports Axios' Hope King.
The big picture: "For retailers, the newfound pricing power — after years of rampant discounting and deflation — is boosting profits at a time when sales are still recovering from the pandemic," The Journal notes.
- "[C]onsumers should expect to pay closer to full price on a range of products this holiday season, including on Nike sneakers, Coach handbags and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts."
Reality check: Smaller retailers — who can't manage their own shipping networks and logistics — aren't reaping the same rewards, AP notes.
The small-business horror show includes:
- Vendors not honoring delivery guarantees.
- Shipping prices from China up 400% since last year.
- Wait times for ocean freight up 45%.
2. La Niña winter looms


A second consecutive year of La Niña conditions favors a drier-than-average winter for much of the Southwest.
- Foreshadowing: The ongoing atmospheric river event is delivering far less rain to Los Angeles and San Diego compared to San Francisco, Axios' Andrew Freedman reports.
3. Too big to cover alone
Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
News outlets are increasingly willing to work together on big stories, Axios' Sara Fischer and Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian report.
- That includes the Facebook Consortium — the roughly two dozen news outlets who agreed to hold stories based on leaked materials from whistleblower Frances Haugen.
- The group was formed quickly and had to set its own publishing terms, which were hard to manage in real time.
This results in a blizzard of different headlines from the same raw material.
4. Top 10 Halloween costumes

10 most popular Halloween costumes this year, via Google's fun FrightGeist tracker (tip of the cape to USA Today):
- Witch
- Rabbit
- Dinosaur
- Spider-Man
- Cruella de Vil
- Fairy
- Harley Quinn
- Cowboy
- Clown
- Chucky
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