{"id":9138,"date":"2024-02-08T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-08T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=9138"},"modified":"2024-02-08T08:34:53","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T15:34:53","slug":"looking-at-the-other-wheels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/08\/looking-at-the-other-wheels\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking at the Other Wheels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Introduction<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;The squeaky wheel gets the grease&#8221; plays a big part in the soft-skills needed to unlock huge velocity in manufactured spend, but it can also blind us. Today, I&#8217;d like to offer a corollary:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>You tend to forget about the quiet wheels.<\/p>\n<cite>&#8211; Some lunatic who goes by MEAB. How do you even pronounce that?<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Squeaky Ones<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Monday, Tuesday, and yesterday brought waves of PayPal shutdowns in the community, and just about every forum loosely related to manufactured spend is talking about it. We&#8217;re seeing shutdowns of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Main accounts with big volume<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Secondary accounts that share targets with shutdown main accounts<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Secondary accounts that share names with shutdown main accounts<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Newly created secondary accounts with even moderate volume<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>If you were affected, that sucks and I&#8217;m sorry. But on the flip side, what use is PayPal in 2024 for things other than manufactured spend anyway? I mean really, literally what use is it? Yes they own Venmo, but a PayPal shutdown doesn&#8217;t equal a Venmo shutdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Not Squeaky Ones<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>There are plenty of users that aren&#8217;t shut down with PayPal yet, but that&#8217;s hard to see because they&#8217;re not jumping up and down in chat rooms and forums saying &#8220;I&#8217;m not shutdown, what do I do next?&#8221; because there&#8217;s no urgency. So, we end up hearing from a much larger proportion of squeaky wheels than silent ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We could leave it there, but a logical question then becomes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What are the non-squeaky wheels doing, and what lessons can we learn from them about not being shutdown? There are a lot of answers to that question, and they probably hover around volume, <a href=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2022\/07\/14\/dodging-the-ban-hammer\/\" class=\"ek-link\">dodging the ban hammer<\/a>, the types of targets they choose, how often they use those targets, and the volume sent to those targets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Bonus: Repercussions<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>One of my P2&#8217;s favorite manufactured spend jokes is to call<em> the app that shouldn&#8217;t be named<\/em> the floosie app (she calls all of its users floosies too, naturally). I know nothing about the current financial state of our collective floosie overlords, but I do know that mass PayPal shutdowns kill a popular liquidation channel for its users, and that means that they&#8217;re going to see a big drop-off in daily volume and probably daily profit in their ledger. Will it matter? I have no idea, but I&#8217;d suggest that now&#8217;s a good time to evaluate your risk profile for your floosie shenanigans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Double Bonus:  Brian M Brings us Back to Reality<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Brian M, possibly the most cited contributor here, let me know that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.southwest.com\/air\/flight-schedules\/\" class=\"ek-link\">Southwest is opening its schedule for travel between October 3 and November 2<\/a> this morning. Booking early is a statistically better than average way to get the lowest fare possible on popular travel days with Southwest, though of course ymmv.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-editorskit-rounded\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"602\" height=\"454\" src=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/image-4.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-9140\" style=\"width:420px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/image-4.png 602w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/image-4-300x226.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 602px) 100vw, 602px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:14px\">Next up: What about donut wheels?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Introduction &#8220;The squeaky wheel gets the grease&#8221; plays a big part in the soft-skills needed to unlock huge velocity in manufactured spend, but it can<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[62,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shenanigans","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9138"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9145,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9138\/revisions\/9145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}