> Wells Fargo just shut down 13 bank branches in a single week… Banks have been quietly closing branches for the past 4 decades. This probably has little or nothing to do with bad consumerism, and more to do with banks being greedy and more people using mobile services to bank. > Due to a lack of consumer demand, three different major Burger King franchisees have recently declared bankruptcy… Burger King has always been the #2 clown in clownworld, and they barely made it into a franchised chain. They've kind of always been right on the brink of insolvency, it's no surprising that a bad economy is doing in big franchisees, especially as prices rise. It wouldn't have taken much. > Vice Media has announced that it will be laying off dozens of staffers… You can only spew toxic sludge for so long before even your core audience of toxic avengers gets tired of you. Advertising downturns may have helped, but this was going to happen sooner or later. > According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, almost 20,000 media jobs have already been eliminated this year… See above. See also AI writing stories. > Amazon is laying off hundreds of workers in its Alexa division… That's because Alexa was a cool idea, but it was ultimately a solution in search of a problem. It was supposed to be a conduit to purchase Amazon products, but turns out people like to look at things beforehand, among other issues. You can't make money checking the weather and setting timers, and all the promised integration has done little more than allow you to set timers in a different way. These are all symptoms of a bad economy, but they probably would have happened regardless - it's just the overheated economy propped them up longer than they should have been propped.