How some influencers are reacting to followers’ economic woes
(Getty Images stock photo/Keeproll)
(NEW YORK) — If you’re a millennial, you may remember the beauty and lifestyle influencers of the 2000s and 2010s. Back then, influencers were maximalists, competing to out-consume one another with walk-in closets filled with designer bags and shoes, and entire rooms dedicated to their makeup collections.
But in 2020, the economy began rapidly changing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the culture around influencers has followed suit.
According to recent Pew Research Center polling, only 24% of Americans rate the economy as excellent or good, and 66% are worried about the price of food and consumer goods. As their economic realities change and everyday necessities become harder to afford, people are moving away from content centered on over-consumption at a luxury price point.
A new generation of influencers is adapting to this perceived economic downturn and the growing number of viewers with a lot less cash to spare.
One of these creators is trend analyst and fashion expert Mandy Lee. She has amassed over 900,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok with content focused on trend predictions, runway reviews and her own funky, luxe style. In 2024, Lee designed the 75 Hard Style challenge based on a popular diet and fitness program. She challenges her audience to create 75 unique outfits over 75 days without purchasing anything new.
Over 70,000 people have participated in the challenge since its launch, according to Lee’s Instagram. It has inspired Lee’s followers to get creative with their wardrobes, while making them more mindful shoppers.
Influencers in the beauty space are also helping their followers find ways to get glam on a budget.
Shelby Ann Bell, an Atlanta-based bridal makeup artist, has built a platform of over 2.5 million followers on TikTok by posting viral makeup routines using affordable products. Bell’s techniques have inspired her followers on a budget to save money by using products easily found at the drugstore.
Growing up in Aiken, South Carolina, Bell became interested in makeup at a young age, but she did not have the budget for expensive beauty products.
“I really can resonate with the person who is sitting on the other side of the screen, and feeling like times are tough, and they just want to escape, feel confident, or feel beautiful,” she told ABC News. “Being able to do that at an affordable price point or on a budget is really important to me.”
Another popular creator encouraging her followers to save is Pooja Jain. With a master’s degree in biomedical and bioengineering and experience in pharmaceutical sciences, she uses her background to help TikTok followers find beauty and skincare routines on a budget.
Jain finds affordable substitutes by studying ingredient lists in luxury beauty products, identifying cheaper products with similar key ingredients and explaining in layman’s terms what each ingredient’s purpose is.
Her audience has grown exponentially over the past year, as skincare and makeup lovers seek ways to cut back on unnecessary spending by replacing high end products with affordable alternatives.
These are just a few examples of a growing trend. A new generation of influencers are gaining large platforms by meeting their audiences where they’re at financially. And as the economy continues to change, this will surely not be the last era of influencers to help audiences on a budget.
Nvidia’s logo is displayed at their headquarters on Aug. 26, 2026, in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia’s second-quarter earnings are expected to be released after markets close on Wednesday. (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Nvidia is set to report earnings on Wednesday as a data center boom drives demand for the company’s advanced artificial intelligence chips, despite political backlash and looming concern about a financial bubble.
In recent years, the California-based behemoth has defied skeptics with blockbuster revenue quarter after quarter.
Rip-roaring growth transformed Nvidia from an ascendant AI player into the world’s most valuable company. Investors will be eager to see whether the firm continued to deliver staggering revenue gains over the three months ending in July.
The results hold implications well beyond Nvidia. Many analysts view the company as a bellwether for the stock market and the overall economy, which have both come to rely in part on massive spending on AI.
Nvidia is expected to report second quarter revenue of $92 billion, which would amount to a 96% jump from the same period a year earlier, Bloomberg estimates showed.
As big-tech names spend hundreds of billions on chips and data centers necessary for the energy-intensive technology, however, the financial benefits remain uncertain.
The earnings reported by Nvidia will gauge demand for a key building block of AI, showing whether appetite for the technology remains at a fever pitch.
Before the earnings report, Karan Girotra, a professor of operations, technology and innovation at Cornell Tech, said investors would watch whether the company has retained its dominance in chip manufacturing.
As opposed to the highly competitive markets for AI models and enterprise products, the chip sector has given way to a clear winner.
Nvidia “does not face a serious challenger at its layer of the stack and is probably the best chance for public market investors to profit from the AI boom,” Girotra said.
Fears of an AI bubble persisted ahead of Nvidia’s previous earnings report, but the company rebuked naysayers. Nvidia recorded $81.6 billion in sales over three months ending in April, which beat analyst expectations of $79.2 billion. The jump in revenue marked 85% growth compared to the same quarter a year earlier.
Despite Nvidia’s continued expansion, investors have proven jittery in recent months. Shares have climbed 13% so far this year after soaring nearly 39% in 2025.
The company boasts a market cap of $5.1 trillion, making it roughly equivalent to the GDP of Japan or Germany. Nvidia expanded at a breakneck pace after an AI craze set off by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, soaring nearly 700% over the ensuing two years.
A sign displays the prices of unleaded gasoline and diesel fuel at a Chevron gas station in Los Angeles on Monday, May 4, 2026. (Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(LOS ANGELES) — A Chevron gas station in Los Angeles elicited headlines in recent weeks for charging an eye-popping $8.71 a gallon, becoming an emblem for the spike in fuel costs set off by the Iran war.
Sky-high gas prices nationwide owe primarily to a historic oil shock that followed Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But a lesser-known contributor helps account for just how high prices have gotten, at least at some name-brand stations selling fuel from the likes of Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil.
Branded stations, which make up almost half of gas stations nationwide, charge about 6 cents more per gallon on average than their unbranded counterparts, according to data from the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS), a Dow Jones company, for the week ending on May 2. That price gap marks little change from where it stood before the war, OPIS data showed.
In at least one state, the price disparity runs significantly higher. Gas at a Chevron station in California costs an average of 48 cents more per gallon than the price at an unbranded station, the California Energy Commission (CEC) found in 2024. After Chevron, the most expensive average gas prices in California were found at Shell, 76 and Arco-branded stations, the CEC said.
Some analysts said the higher price of branded gas is due to additional costs, such as proprietary additives in the fuel, as well as a producer’s marketing budget and the payment forked over by stations for guaranteed access to its gas – costs that are passed on to consumers.
Other analysts and a California state watchdog, however, have said that the price disparity may stem from the market dominance of a handful of companies, allowing them to drive up the retail price.
The scrutiny comes as some large oil companies like British Petroleum, Valero and Marathon Petroleum report soaring profits amid the Iran war, though Chevron and Exxon saw profits decline due in part to one-time paper losses stemming from financial hedges meant to protect them against a possible price drop.
The price of an average gallon of gas currently stands at $4.52, an increase of $1.54 per gallon since the war began on Feb. 28, AAA data showed. That amounts to a nearly 52% jump in about two-and-a-half months.
Patrick Penfield, a professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University, said the recent surge in prices could prompt a reexamination of the costs baked into the price at the pump, including the added charge for branded gas.
“When you see such big price increases for gasoline, everything should be looked at,” Penfield said.
Chevron did not directly respond to an ABC News request for comment. However, Jim Stanley, director of media relations at the Western States Petroleum Association, a industry trade group, contacted ABC News at Chevron’s request.
Drivers choose branded gas stations as a matter of customer preference centered on issues like lighting, bathroom cleanliness or location, Stanley said.
“Any branded product – whether it’s medication or groceries or clothing – is going to generally cost more than a generic alternative,” he added.
Stanley further said roughly 95% of branded gas stations operate as franchises, meaning they enter into agreements with big-name companies but retain self-ownership.
“Branded gas stations can have these brand standards that they hold their franchisees to: a higher standard than an independently owned store,” Stanley added.
Kelly Davila, a spokesperson for Exxon, said the company doesn’t “own or operate our retail stations.”
Shell declined to respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Phillips 66, the parent company of 76, did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment. Neither did Marathon Petroleum, the parent company of Arco.
Branded gas stations account for about 45% of stations nationwide, selling gas under the name of a major fuel company, OPIS data shows. Each of the brands touts a unique blend of additives that it says improves the gasoline and eases its effect on car engines. The extra ingredients go beyond the minimum standards mandated by federal and some state regulators, Denton Cinquegrana, chief oil analyst at Dow Jones Energy, told ABC News.
“At the end of the day, all gasoline has to meet a federal standard,” Cinquegrana said. “The branded gasoline goes above and beyond that minimum requirement.”
Higher prices charged by name-brand stations – a dynamic that stretches back decades – can be traced in part to spending on the development and production of the additives, Cinquegrana added: “They’re trying to recoup some of that investment.”
Some analysts, however, said it remains unclear whether the added ingredients deliver a meaningfully improved product.
“Regardless of each company’s claim, there is not sound evidence supporting the fact that additives do indeed improve the quality of gasoline, at least to the extent that the consumers perceive it to,” a study issued by the non-profit RAND corporation found in 2010.
The California Division of Petroleum Market Oversight (DPMO), a state watchdog agency, last year said it was “unable to independently verify claims that branded gasoline is superior to unbranded gasoline.”
When asked about studies disputing the value of additives, Stanley, of the Western States Petroleum Association, declined to comment.
The higher price of branded gas also owes to marketing budgets borne by the big-name companies as well as elevated costs paid by retailers as part of agreements with the brands that guarantee them priority access in the event of a supply shortage, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a study of the issue published in 2005.
“Gas stations pay more for a contract for branded gasoline because they have a guarantee of supply. And they have a major global brand backing them up,” Cinquegrana said.
Some analysts and a California watchdog disputed those explanations. Rather, they said, the higher prices may reflect market power enjoyed by the large firms, giving them leeway to raise prices without fear of competition.
“My own reading of the data is that the branded companies are able to take advantage of a lack of a competitive market and are acting almost like an oligopoly,” Paasha Mahdavi, a professor of energy governance and political economy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told ABC News, using a term that describes an industry dominated by a small number of companies.
Mahdavi focused on the relatively large price gap in California between branded and unbranded gas, which has widened in recent years.
In 2019, branded gas from companies like ExxonMobil, Arco, Valero and Chevron cost an average of 20 cents more per gallon in California; within five years, that price disparity had climbed to 31 cents, according to a DPMO study issued last year. Over that same period, the profitability of oil refiners in California has increased, DPMO said.
The rise in refinery profitability may be traced to the “exercise of market power by gasoline suppliers,” DPMO added, saying 90% of in-state refining capacity is controlled by four companies. As a result, elevated wholesale prices could be passed along the supply chain, DPMO said.
The largest companies appear to have “pretty strong control of not only upstream assets like oil and gas, but also control of the gas stations that are preferred by consumers based on location,” Mahdavi said. “They’re able to charge a higher premium.”
Valero did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Stanley, of the Western States Petroleum Association, said he is unsure why California features a larger gap in price between branded and unbranded gas than other states. One contributor, he said, could be the relatively low density of gas stations in the state.
“Competition brings down costs. When a retailer doesn’t see that same level of competition, you can see that reflected in higher prices.”
Stanley faulted environmental regulations in California for high overall gas prices.
“Branded or unbranded, gas in California is the most expensive in the country. That’s because of supply constraints that have been created by state policies.”
Mahdavi further said that the locations of branded gas stations may carry additional costs due to higher rents, accounting for some of the price gap.
The rise in prices during the Iran war offers an opportunity to revisit the factors that contribute to the price at the pump, according to Mahdavi.
“We can shine more light on what is driving these higher prices,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — A court ruled in favor of OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk over alleged misconduct in the company’s evolution from a non-profit upstart to a for-profit corporation.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
