At one time teens might have mourned the potential closure of the Claire’s store in their local mall. Today they’re more likely to be distracted looking for a new phone case on TikTok Shop. Bloomberg Businessweek senior reporter Amanda Mull writes about the changing retail landscape for cheap jewelry and other accessories. Plus: How a restraining order against warrantless detentions in one district is holding up, and why the integrity of sports is at risk from some of the smallest bets.

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The accessories retailer Claire’s filed for bankruptcy protection this week, marking the second such filing in less than a decade for what was once a titan of the teen economy. The company, which began in the 1960s as a chain of wig shops, hit its stride in the 1990s, having transformed itself into a trinket emporium with thousands of locations around the world. The stores specialized in a variety of cheap, enticing tchotchkes for middle- and high-school students looking to spend their babysitting money—jewelry that may or may not turn your skin green, decorative pens and notebooks, every manner of hair clip. They also became destinations for girls looking to get their first real earrings from a slightly older teenager armed with a piercing gun at the mall; the company claims to have pierced more ears than any other.

But Claire’s, like many of its contemporaries from the heyday of the American mall, has long since fallen on hard times. The company’s suite of problems is familiar: falling foot traffic at aging shopping centers, ballooning debt, too many bad leases, more nimble competition online. Add in an initial public offering effort that was abandoned in 2023 and this year’s tariff chaos—the cheap accessories business is heavily import-dependent—and the pressure was apparently too much. There were bright spots, including a Walmart partnership that got Claire’s products into more than 200 of the megaretailer’s stores. According to the filing, the company has marked more than 1,000 of its roughly 2,700 current stores for possible closure if it’s able to survive this round of bankruptcy proceedings.

A store at Claire’s headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, in 2015. Photographer: Michael Noble Jr./Chicago Tribune/Getty Images

It isn’t surprising to hear of a ’90s mall favorite teetering on the edge of oblivion, but it is a little strange to think that any retailer might be having a hard time selling trinkets to teenagers right now. So many of today’s viral products involve cheap little objects to seek out or collect—Labubu, Sonny Angel, bag charms, friendship bracelets—on top of all of the decorative little bits of vinyl and plastic that adolescents have been seeking out for as long as they’ve existed, like phone cases, sunglasses and cosmetic bags. What is TikTok Shop, with its array of bright, sparkly novelties all available for little more than a nominal fee, if not Cyberspace Claire’s?

That, of course, is sort of the problem. Before the internet existed, Claire’s knew teen girls could be enticed by inexpensive versions of grown-up luxuries to experiment with, even as most other teen-focused retailers focused on bigger purchases like clothes and shoes. Now, inexpensive versions of grown-up luxuries can seem like they’re more or less the entirety of what the consumer economy has to offer, no matter your age or demographic. Amazon, Shein, Temu and TikTok Shop are overflowing with bargain-basement versions of every bauble, tchotchke, trinket and knicknack you can imagine, and at the mall, fast-fashion retailers like Zara and H&M offer huge arrays of jewelry and accessories. When everything’s cheap and novel, cheap and novel aren’t as much of a selling point as they used to be, even if none of these retailers will pierce your ears (with parental approval) for your 13th birthday. Amazon and Temu, though, will both sell you a piercing gun of your very own for less than 10 bucks.

In Brief

• A US move to put tariffs on imports of gold bars is unleashing fresh turmoil in the bullion market, with prices spiking in New York as dealers brace for a major reordering of global trade flows.
• Lip-Bu Tan was hired to turn Intel around. But just five months into his tenure as CEO, he’s drawing the ire of President Donald Trump.
• US and Russia are planning for a truce that would cement Putin’s gains in Ukraine.
• This week the Everybody’s Business podcast explores why presidents—at least since Richard Nixon—have left the Bureau of Labor Statistics alone, until Trump fired the commissioner last week. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal or click below.

A Tactic to Protect Farmworkers

Illustration: Daniel Barreto for Bloomberg Businessweek

When the American Civil Liberties Union mounted a lawsuit in February on behalf of a farmworkers’ labor group, accusing federal agents of arresting workers in California’s Kern County based on little more than appearance, it looked like a standard procedural move in a quickly overheating legal climate. A federal judge in April imposed a temporary restraining order on racial and other forms of profiling for the state’s rural Eastern District, which stretches from Kern’s county seat, Bakersfield, all the way to the Oregon border—but no one knew whether it would make much difference.

To even the plaintiffs’ surprise, it did. A three-month review shows that in the aftermath of the ruling, warrantless detentions in the district have screeched to a halt.

Under the terms of the injunction, Border Patrol, part of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has to disclose its warrantless arrests in the district to the ACLU—and it didn’t report a single one from April 29 to June 21. The United Farm Workers union, on whose behalf the suit was filed, says its members in the area anecdotally describe the same results. And both the UFW and the ACLU say they now regard the strategy as one to replicate nationwide. “We were very pleased to see during the first compliance period, they appeared to obey,” says ACLU’s Bree Bernwanger, lead counsel on the suit.

As Michael Scott Moore writes, labor groups now see the legal strategy they put to work in California’s Kern County as one to replicate nationwide: How to Get Border Patrol to Stop Making Warrantless Arrests

The Rising Cost of Prop Bets

Illustration: Alex Gamsu Jenkins for Bloomberg Businessweek

On June 15, in the bottom of the second inning of a game against the Seattle Mariners, Luis Ortiz, a right-handed pitcher for the Cleveland Guardians, threw a first-pitch slider to Randy Arozarena that missed low and away, bouncing in the dirt for ball 1. Less than two weeks later, in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals, Ortiz threw another first-pitch slider that missed well outside. Neither pitch seemed remarkable at the time. Major league starters routinely miss the strike zone dozens of times a game. Yet these two misses are now being scrutinized online because of their part in an MLB investigation into suspicious betting.

In July the league announced it had placed Ortiz on nondisciplinary paid leave because of an unspecified investigation. ESPN reported that gambling integrity monitor IC360 had flagged unusual betting activity on those two pitches. The wagers in question, it said, were so-called in-game propositions, or props, on whether the first pitch of the inning would be a ball. (IC360 declined to comment on ESPN’s reporting.) A few weeks later, MLB announced it had also put Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase on leave while it continued its “sports betting investigation.” (The MLB Players Association agreed to the leaves. The Guardians, who’ve since cleared out the lockers of both players, released statements that said the team isn’t permitted to comment on ongoing investigations.)

There’s no indication yet of how Clase might be involved, but that hasn’t stopped amateur sleuths from searching his statistics for abnormalities.

In a new Field Day column, Ira Boudway writes about how wagers on a single pitch have become a problem for baseball, and it may just be the tip of the spear: Leagues Are Struggling to Deal With a Certain Type of Sports Bet

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