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Christmas is coming, and our bank accounts are getting, well, obliterated. But luckily, it’s no longer just your quirky aunt who appreciates a good secondhand store: Shopping for gently used items, especially during the holidays, is now on trend. And if you get on board, you might be able to save a bundle by swapping your mall run for a day of thrifting. In recent years, “Thriftmas”or shopping for Christmas gifts at stores like Good Will, The Salvation Army, Savers, and online platforms that sell used itemshas been creeping into the mainstream. And this year is no different. According to global data from online store ThredUp, in 2025, shoppers plan to dedicate nearly 40% of their holiday budgets to secondhand giftsa pretty significant jump, even from last year alone. And in 2025, the U.S. secondhand market is worth an estimated $56 billion, up 14.3% from in 2024. Why the trend? For starters, Gen Z loves all things vintage, whether it’s Polaroid cameras, a pair of flares, or iPods. So it makes sense that thrifting is gaining traction, especially among younger generations. A new survey from Affirm found that 24% of Gen Zers chose to thrift or DIY their home decor, while 40% blend new with secondhand; and 23% shopped for secondhand clothes while 35% mixed thrifted with new clothing. Of course, it’s not just vintage-loving young people, but escalating financial worries that are driving the trend, too: 85% of shoppers say they expect gifts and other holiday-related items to cost more this year due to Trump’s tariffs, per the National Retail Federation. Likewise, 84% of consumers expect to cut back on overall spending due to rising prices and economic pressure, per PwC Holiday Outlook. However, Americans are hooked on gifts. While nearly two-thirds (63%) say they wish their family traditions were less focused on gifts, only one in five are considering giving less. The art of Thriftmas Enter: Thriftmas, which looks a bit different from hitting up Target, Hollister, and Home Goods. And it might take some warming up to, if you’ve never been big on shopping secondhand. However, your wallet will thank you. And popular influencers, who are pretty skilled at breathing new life into old things, are driving the movement with content about how to do Thriftmas right. They make choosing items at the thrift store to givesometimes along with something homemade like butter or baked goods, or with something newlook like an absolute art. Rebecca Miller, an expert secondhand shopper based in Northeast Ohio, runs the popular Instagram account My Thrifted Abode. Miller tells Fast Company that even though thrifting is majorly on trend in modern times, it’s not new to her. “Thrifting has always been a part of my life,” says Miller. “I grew up in a family where money was tight at times. I remember going to auctions and thrift stores with my mom as a little girl. Its been a way of life for me for as long as I can remember.” Miller has only been sharing her thrift store finds for two years, but her Instagram already has over 114,000 followers, and there’s a reason why: She’s a talented thrifter who is skilled at teaching her audience how to thrift and gift. And according to her, people are more interested in thrifting because they are fed up with the holiday gift-giving craze and are seeking more sustainable options. “Theres been more of a light shed on the massive overconsumption issue we have,” she says, adding that the sheer amount of items that are bought new, then quickly disposed of is “truly concerning.” She’s not wrong: 11.3 million tons of textile waste end up in landfills yearly in the U.S., accounting for 7.7% of all landfill waste. During the holidays, the waste multiplies exponentially. Retailers say that 25% of returns end up being tossed out, leading to an extra 5.8 billion pounds of landfill wastemerely from returned items, not to mention all of the other holiday trash. A more personal (and very vintage) touch Miller says thrifting can contribute to a holiday season that’s more environmentally friendly, sustainable, and cheaper. But it’s not just about affordability. It’s about a more personal touch that puts genuine thought back into the holidays. “I love giving old things a new life and being a part of that items history,” she explains, noting that reimagining how to use old items scratches her “creative itch.” Taking a look at some of the fun and eclectic ways that Miller has styled items, it’s clear that it requires a bit more effort than clicking the “Buy Now” button on Amazon and slapping a bow on it the next day. In a recent video, Miller showed off adorable baskets for kids, with secondhand puzzles, books, and more. “I always thrift gifts for my kids for their birthday and Christmas, and let me tell you, it does not make a difference to them whether they are new items or not!” she wrote in the caption. But it’s likely not just kids who wouldn’t mind a thrifted giftespecially because the items don’t look like the things everyone else has. They’re vintage, unique, and require searching. “Its such a thrill to walk into a thrift store, full of junk, and never knowing what treasures youll find,” says Miller. “Theres nothing like the thrill of the hunt.” While many Americans will still flock to shop the big brands this season, it’s tough to miss that Thriftmas is about to show up in more homes than ever. And with influencers and Gen Z driving the trend, it feels about as welcomed as Santa sliding down the chimney with his bag of tricks. This year, it’s all about Thriftmasand it’s just as merry.
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One hot new phone of 2025 has no screen, cant send a text, and needs to be plugged into the wall. But to buyers of the Tin Can, thats a definite plus. The Tin Can, from a Seattle startup of the same name, grew out of conversations cofounder and CEO Chet Kittleson had with fellow parents about the challenges of enabling kids to connect with friends and relatives without giving them full-fledged cellphones. While children of the 20th century could pick up the house landline to call a grandparent or schedule a sleepover, todays kids are often left dependent on parents for scheduling playdates and connecting with family until theyre old enough to carry their own smartphones. Our first social network was a landline, and our kids don’t have that, Kittleson says. We’re trying hard to keep them away from cellphones for as long as we can, but were not giving them anything in return, and so they’re sort of left in the lurch. Starting in 2024, Kittleson and his Tin Can cofounders started working on a prototype that would deliver some of the same features of the old-school house phone without actually requiring landline service from the local phone or cable company. The result, which quickly proved a viral hit among Kittlesons network of parents and kids, is a phone complete with handheld receiver and curly cord that lets kids call, and receive calls and voicemails from, parent-approved numbers. Chet Kittleson (center) with cofounders Graeme Davies (left) and Max Blumen (right) [Photo: Tin Can] It gives them the opportunity to be social and work out play dates without having to come to us and use our phone, says Chelsea Miller, a Seattle parent of two whose family was quick to adopt the device. Her two childrena 10-year-old daughter and a son about to turn 8also use the phone to connect with their grandparents, she says. The phones now come in two models. A white model called the Flashback is described by the company as the phone of 80s childhood, though it plugs via ethernet cable into a router instead of a wall-mounted phone jack. A second model, simply called the Tin Can, has an appropriately playful cylindrical design, and it only needs Wi-Fi to connect. But as a deliberate design choice backed by early user input, the phone lacks a battery and must be plugged into a power socket, meaning kids can only roam as far as the cord can reach. A majority of people felt strongly that it should not have a battery, Kittleson says. That it needed to be a stationary, plug-in-the-wall phone where a kid was actually focused on their conversation and not running around the house while they were talking. [Photo: Tin Can] Kittleson declined to disclose how many phones the company has sold, though he says theyve shipped the devices to all 50 states and all across Canada. The Flashback model is available for $75, and the Tin Can unit is available for preorder at the same price after a $25 discount, though the next batch wont ship until around early February. Previous batches of the Tin Can phones quickly sold out. The company this week announced a $12-million round of seed funding led by Greylock Partners and including participation from Lateralus Holdings, as well as existing backers. A previous pre-seed round raised another $3.5 million. In an age defined by digital noise, theyve created a joyful alternative that redefines how we view modern connection, says Mike Duboe, general partner at Greylock, in a statement. Were excited to support the team during this phase of incredible growth. Kittleson says the new funds will help the company scale up distribution of the phone and the VoIP network that enables the devices to connect. Currently, calls between Tin Can-powered phones are freeand other Tin Cans can be reached by dialing a special short code in lieu of a full phone numberwhile calls to other numbers in the U.S. and Canada are included in an optional $9.99 per month plan. The phones have proven hits with kids as well as parents, with new users often making dozens of calls in their first weeks with the devices before tapering off to a more typical calling cadence. Typically, over the course of a month or so, it starts to level out, Kittleson says. And then it becomes a utility where they use it a couple times a day or even a few times a week, and that’s kind of the behavior we want. Of course, while the phones evoke the landline phones of the late 20th century, todays kids are still growing up in a world of digital technology, so its likely many Tin Can kids will still want access to internet-enabled devices, video games, and social media as they get older. But Tin Can enables parents to limit screen time and internet access without leaving their children entirely unable to speak to friends and family. [Photo: Tin Can] I don’t want them to have internet or social media, Miller says. But I do want them to be socially connected.” Even some adults have started using the Tin Can, enamored with the devices simplicity and the fact that it doesnt receive spam calls, since callers from nonapproved numbers simply get a recorded message saying theyre not authorized to connect. And parents like Kittleson say they also appreciate being able to call a house phone to reach the family when theyre away from the house. While other companies offer kid-friendly cellphones, Kittleson says his company is essentially unique so far in offering a modern take on the house phone. And general-purpose VoIP phones are often more expensive and dont have kid-friendly features built-in and easy to set up, he says. Of course, most adults cant ditch their smartphones entirely. Even for getting the Tin Can connected to Wi-Fi and updating the list of permitted numbers and hours where the phone enters do-not-disturb mode, parents use a smartphone app to access their accounts, much like with other connected home electronics. It beats an early system, Kittleson says, where users of the first prototypes texted him personally to add authorized numbers to the companys database. The devices and features may continue to evolve a bit in the future, but since Tin Can exists to encourage real-world communications and childhood hangouts unmediated by screens or digital games, Kittleson says customers shouldnt expect a burst of new functionality. We don’t think this is going to be a feature factory where we’re launching new things all the time, he says. That’s sort of by design not what we’re trying to do.
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E-Commerce
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on Big AIs biggest sales pitchthe quest for AGIand the idea that the industry should focus on more modest and achievable tasks for AI. I also look at Databrickss new $4 billion-plus funding raise, and at Googles new Gemini 3 Flash model. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. Yann LeCun calls BS on artificial general intelligence Big AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic like to talk about their bold quest for AGI, or artificial general intelligence. The definition of that grail has proved to be somewhat flexible, but in general it refers to AI systems that are as smart as human beings at a wide array of tasks. AI companies have used this quest narrative to win investment, fascinate the tech press, and charm policymakers. Now one of AIs most important pioneers, Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, is calling the whole concept into question. LeCun, outgoing Metas chief AI scientist, argues that even human beings arent really generalists. Theyre good at some physical tasks, and very good at social interactions, but can easily be defeated at chess by a computer and cant perform math as fast and accurately as a calculator can. There are tasks where many other animals are better than we are, LeCun said on a recent Information Bottleneck webcast. We think of ourselves as being general, but its simply an illusion because all of the problems that we can apprehend are the ones that we can think ofand vice versa, LeCun said. So were general in all of the problems that we can imagine, but theres a lot of problems that we cannot imagine. And there are lots of mathematical arguments for this. So this concept of general intelligence is complete BS. Lots of people in AI and neuroscience disagree with LeCun. Just because humans arent the best at all tasks, or tasks we cant imagine, it doesnt mean were not generalistsespecially in comparison to machine savants like calculators, they argue. I dont know whos right, but LeCun is making a broader point. He believes that AI labs should focus on specific real-world things that AI can dothings that create value or reduce suffering, perhapsand bring those solutions to market. LeCun says the transformer-based large language models of today are useful enough to be applied in some valuable ways, but also believes they arent likely to achieve the general or human-level intelligence needed to do high-value work tasks now reserved for human brains. In order to navigate real-world complexity like humans do, the AI would need a much-higher-bandwidth training regimen than just words, images, and computer code, LeCun argues, and a different architecture to structure all the data. Notably, The Financial Times reports that LeCun is raising $585 million at a $3-billion valuation for a new AI startup that will look to build world modelsAI systems capable of learning from images, video, and spatial data, rather than only from text and large language models. Databricks pulls in another $4B+, evaluation rises to $134 billion Data and AI company Databricks raised more than $4 billion in a new Series L funding round led by Insight Partners, Fidelity, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management, with Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, and Blackstone kicking in. The companys valuation rose to $134 billion with the new round. The valuation reflects Databrickss positioning within the booming market for AI cloud services. For years the companys primary offering was secure cloud storage for sensitive enterprise data, including data owned by companies in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. Over the past five years, Databricks has gone deep on developing the AI side of its business. Its value proposition is allowing customers to run their data through powerful AI models hosted within the same secure cloud. More recently, the company has set up a secure platform for developing and deploying autonomous agents that can, for example, assemble complex business intelligence reports based on diverse datasets stored in the Databricks cloud. The company also enables customers to run their data through third-party models from OpenAI and Anthropic, among others, hosting those models natively within the secure cloud. Now Databricks says both its data-warehousing business and its AI business each have revenue run rates of more than $1 billion. The company reported a revenue run rate of $4.8 billion during the third quarter of 2025, representing growth of about 55% from the same period in 2024. Almost exactly a year ago, Databricks raised a massive $10 billion funding round, one of the largest ever for an AI company, and achieved a $62 billion valuation. (The valuation moved up to $100 billion when the company raised a $1 billion round in August.) The San Francisco-based company says itll use the new capital to develop new AI-driven applications, fund future acquisitions, support R&D, and pay employees (most likely including expensive AI research talent). With hundreds of customers each contributing more than $1 million in annual revenue, and a high customer retention rate, Databricks is considered a strong IPO candidate. The company may be waiting for the optimal market conditions in which to file. Google releases a Gemini 3 model, Flash, for the rest of us Now even people who cant afford a monthly subscription can enjoy the magic of Google DeepMinds new Gemini 3 model. Google released the first Gemini 3 model, Pro, in November, but it was available only to paid subscribers. Its new Gemini 3 Flash variant is now the default in the Gemini app, and is available globally in Google Searchs AI Mode. Flash is said to be three times faster at responding than Gemini 2.5 Pro, and almost as good at reasoning as the Gemini 3 Pro model. Flash is designed to be cost-effective, making it a great option for developers and businesses, according to Google. The new model shows some impressive marks on PhD-level reasoning and knowledge benchmarks such as GPQA Diamond (90.4%) and Humanitys Last Exam (33.7% without tools). Those scores come close to those of larger models including Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAIs GPT-5.2. Flash also achieved the highest score of any model81.2%on the MMMU Pro benchmark, which measures the ability to understand and reason over a mx of text and visual data. When processing at the highest thinking level, Gemini 3 Flash can modulate how much it thinks, Google says. For more complex questions itll spend more time processing the data it collects in its memory to get to an answer. But it also uses 30% fewer tokens (on average) than Gemini 2.5 Pro to complete simpler, everyday tasks. Researchers at Big AI labs have been working hard to make AI models store the (often voluminous) contextual data they collect in memory more efficiently, and use it more effectively. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Every AI founder thinks they want a mega investing round. Trust me, you dont 5 predictions for AIs growing role in the media in 2026 DOGE leader at Treasury is looking to buy thousands of ChatGPT licenses Who should pay for the power grids race to keep up with data centers? 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