Then you should visit south europe. Europe is divided by the alps in a lot of things, like potato or tomato as main ingredient in meals. But also in culture itself. Everything north of the alps is kinda cold and seems unhappy/angry and stressed all the time and south of it people seem chill, happy and friendly.

As others said Switzerland. It’s beautiful and all but really expensive. It really took away a big part of fun when I went there. But not only that, I thought the swiss people seemed sometimes kinda "rude"or maybe a better word for it “cold” and a little annoyed if it came to tourists. I get it, it’s a small county and a lot of people are visiting each year, but it still wasn’t fun for me to be there and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone to go there.

And North France near the German border like Strasbourg. The city and the region is beautiful as well, but the people are often like the cliché everybody knows and that sucks if you’re a tourist. But the south of France like Marseille and the Provence is always worth a visit. The people are chill, enjoying life in the typical mediterranean way and are often friendlier (and often speak English at least in the bigger cities/tourist areas).

As mentioned by other commentators, negative, emotional news sell the best and the news nearly perfected this method during the last couple of years. Yes, it isn’t as good as pre pandemic times, but it’s not the worst. For me it really helped to limit my news time to max. once a day (like in the past with the newspaper in the morning or a news show in the evening) and watching things called “good news”. In Germany some TV shows have this category so I never searched it on social media or YouTube, but I bet there are some channels/pages dedicated to good news (like there is a new treatment for disease XY or here is a good step in the fight against climate change, but sometimes just news like “the big panda isn’t as endangered as it was”.

If you don’t have much time to spare I would recommend to wait a little more. It would still be a big support if you buy it at full price in fall.

Schneesturm (snow storm) or Ameisenkrieg (ant war) in German.

Cause they look cool, bands sell the rights to big clothing companies so it’s available, labeled as fashion and often cheap. If you walk into a Walmart and see a cool looking Metallica shirt for 10 bucks, why do you have to know the band or songs of it?

I myself also only buy band merch from bands I really like. But I buy it on festivals, concerts or on the internet after I looked for a specific shirt. So my ways of buying this stuff is completely different from fashion oriented people.

Oh I feel you! I ate spaghetti Bolognese ice cream a couple of years ago and I couldn’t stand it. Ice cream is great and Bolognese is great but not mixed together.

I just wanted to buy safety pins. I couldn’t find any. Looked at the supermarket, dm even mall like stuff like Galaria Kaufhof, nothing. The only place at that time I could buy some was amazon or as you said, another soulless online retailer with the worst shipping companies.

I hope so and I’m the same when it comes to buying games, but e.g. the steam charts telling another story. Most people seem to not care about negative reviews especially if it’s a game they heard about before.

Money. Even if 5 people scream and get a refund or don’t buy it there will be 100 that don’t care and just pay. It’s the same with every bad thing like preorder, dlc after dlc, microtransactions for cosmetics more expensive than an full title indie game or pay to win in a full price triple a game (like star wars battlefront 2). In the end the group of people just buying is bigger.

Or both.

Interesting, cause I stopped giving things away for free or at least I don’t write it into the offer, cause in Germany it happend quite a lot that people didn’t show up, when I wanted to just give it away. I don’t know why, maybe if it’s free it’s not that important I guess? So I started to offer things for a few bucks but still I want some money (at least I write that I want money). When someone arrives and wants to pick something up I just tell them to just take it. That way I get rid of so much more stuff and the people collecting stuff are always so happy as well.