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Shopify Inc. chief executive Tobi Lütke admitted he was probably off on a tangent while talking to analysts on a conference call on Wednesday, after his firm’s quarterly earnings update showed massive sales gains that dwarfed expectations. But if what he was saying was tangential, it was interesting: a secular homily, of sorts, on the ills of consumerism.
“Consumerism,” he said, “is not a thing that exists because people love buying things. It exists because people hate the things that they get to buy.”
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Shopify Inc. chief executive Tobi Lütke admitted he was probably off on a tangent while talking to analysts on a conference call on Wednesday, after his firm’s quarterly earnings update showed massive sales gains that dwarfed expectations. But if what he was saying was tangential, it was interesting: a secular homily, of sorts, on the ills of consumerism.
“Consumerism,” he said, “is not a thing that exists because people love buying things. It exists because people hate the things that they get to buy.”
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Alia Youssef/The Globe and Mail
After the year Shopify Inc. has had, you might expect its co-founder and CEO Tobi Lutke to sound a little…cheerier.
Riding a global surge in pandemic-related e-commerce traffic, Shopify – which makes the software used by more than a million merchants to sell their products online – surpassed Royal Bank of Canada to become Canada’s most valuable company. It now has a market capitalization of US$177-billion, making it only the second Canadian tech company, after Nortel Networks, to reach such heights. It raised billions of dollars from stock sales last year and even posted a rare quarterly profit of US$191-million in October on third quarter on revenues of US$767.4-million –