They Took Your Money and Told You to Call Your Bank

<p>It&#39;s bloody freezing, we&#39;re one week out from Online Retailer in Sydney (expect an impromptu Qantas Lounge recording), and before the conference chaos kicks off we&#39;ve got a genuinely grim week of retail to unpack — three collapses, a national outage and a $40m loss.</p><p>The Stax saga got worse, and it&#39;s the one to read twice: customers who &quot;bought&quot; during the late-June pre-sale weren&#39;t paying for stock on a shelf — they were funding product that was never made, and now they&#39;re getting neither the goods nor a refund, with founders Don and Matilda pointing them to their banks for a chargeback. It&#39;s a masterclass in torching a brand on the way out. We get into that, plus who (if anyone) buys what&#39;s left.</p><ul><li>Prime&#39;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.</li><li>Stax&#39;s pre-sale buyers are left with no product, no refund and a &quot;talk to your bank&quot; — and that trust doesn&#39;t come back under new ownership.</li><li>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&#39;s ghost still lingers).</li><li>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.</li><li>Adairs is prepping investors for a $40m loss that&#39;s really a Focus on Furniture write-down, not an operating collapse — the core brand&#39;s EBIT still grew 15%, and the squeezed middle of furniture is where the pain sits.</li><li>City Chic retreats from the US as unit economics and tariffs bite, while Uniqlo books a fifth straight record year — two opposite answers to &quot;should you go global?&quot;.</li></ul>