They Took Your Money and Told You to Call Your Bank

It's bloody freezing, we're one week out from Online Retailer in Sydney (expect an impromptu Qantas Lounge recording), and before the conference chaos kicks off we've got a genuinely grim week of retail to unpack — three collapses, a national outage and a $40m loss.

The Stax saga got worse, and it's the one to read twice: customers who "bought" during the late-June pre-sale weren't paying for stock on a shelf — they were funding product that was never made, and now they're getting neither the goods nor a refund, with founders Don and Matilda pointing them to their banks for a chargeback. It's a masterclass in torching a brand on the way out. We get into that, plus who (if anyone) buys what's left.

• Prime's Australian distributor collapses with ~$85k in the bank and millions owed — the inevitable end of a hype brand that never converted the queues into a repeat purchase.
• Stax's pre-sale buyers are left with no product, no refund and a "talk to your bank" — and that trust doesn't come back under new ownership.
• A four-hour Telstra outage knocked out payments nationwide, and the real lesson is single-vendor reliance plus a crisis-comms scorecard (Telstra fronted it fast; Optus's ghost still lingers).
• Retail spending is actually up — but only because over-65s lifted spend 14% year-on-year while younger cohorts contract, and most brands are still aiming at the shrinking half.
• Adairs is prepping investors for a $40m loss that's really a Focus on Furniture write-down, not an operating collapse — the core brand's EBIT still grew 15%, and the squeezed middle of furniture is where the pain sits.
• City Chic retreats from the US as unit economics and tariffs bite, while Uniqlo books a fifth straight record year — two opposite answers to "should you go global?".