I saw on Twitter he apparently spent like an hour defending Pokimane’s calling people who didn’t want to buy her overpriced mini-cookies “broke bois” and mocking them. He’s getting pretty mocked for it.
I caught that. He even plugged his own product line during it, and
that looked sketchy as hell just based on a first glance. Whole thing made me wonder if he's engaging in similar shitty practices.
Currently his entire shop is 50% off, and it simultaneously claims a portion of the proceeds go to Palestinian children. 50% off + a portion going to charity seems...odd. At the very least it's worth noting this would effectively be running many businesses at a loss.
What also stood out to me is the juxtaposition between that allegedly generous 50% discount + charity effort with
how brutal and anti-consumer the company is otherwise.
Brief overview of the return policy:
-3 days to file a ticket for damaged goods starting at date of delivery or refund will be rejected
-Rather unclear wording on if there's a 3 day limit for reporting false deliveries. There shouldn't be, or this is illegal in some countries
-No cash refunds, only store credits
-You pay shipping in full
-If your return is rejected,
you do not even get the product you attempted to return back
Yet allegedly, there's this highly generous 50% discount on the products.
Whole thing makes me wonder if either:
A) It's a fake discount, which is illegal in some countries.
B) Best case, an admittance that his product line is usually so horrendously overpriced that they can afford a 50% discount + putting proceeds towards a charity group and still make a profit/break even.
C) They're conveniently leaving out what proceeds go to charity because it's ridiculously small, or something shadier. There's nowhere on the website explaining what exactly allegedly goes to the charity or anything, and it's legit just a mention on the opening screen that's never expanded upon. Only possibility I missed is perhaps they spring the percent that goes to charity on you directly before a purchase, just like they do with shipping, but I doubt it.
or
D) His product line is selling so poorly that even a 50% discount is an attempt to make back whatever money they can. This seems unlikely to be the full story though because a company or product-line that has flopped has no business donating a portion of their proceeds to charity.
I can't prove anything, of course, it all just looks very unorthodox from a business perspective, to the point I think one of the above must be true.
Out of curiosity I tried to find more about the charity portion, and ended up finding
this report about his campaign to donate to Palestinian causes. Just Ctrl + F for HASANABI.
Am I understanding this wrong, or does the very website he ran that charity through allege that he only donated 35k of the 50k he promised to match...? I'm uncertain because
here it claims he donated 50k, but without knowledge of how the website runs things and displays info, we could be looking at anything from a separate 50k donation
or the very same 50k match pledge that was never fulfilled completely.
Dude just seems like an obvious grifter to me, and I can't help but wonder if people are supporting Poki's stupid fucking cookies because they're guilty of similar practices. A shame nothing can really be proven though; it just looks like a situation where the guy has
something sketchy going on with his product line, and he may have failed to fulfill his promise to match donations up to $50,000.