in search of the rae dunn woman: an investigation
A viral TikTok suggests that women are physically fighting to get their hands on a suburban-trendy pottery line. Is the legend true?
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So, here’s the thing: I’m on TikTok and I (more or less) love it. But I also need to admit something: this app was very obviously not built for thirty-somethings.
First, the choreography is always too difficult for those of us with lower back pain and limited brain space outside of our 40 hour-plus-a-week desk jobs. Second, why do 90 percent of the most popular posts use the same dozen songs? It’s a real mystery to us. Finally, not a day goes by that something blows up and leaves me baffled.
This was my experience learning this week via a series of viral posts that apparently that a seemingly unexceptional line of sassy pottery for cool moms — Rae Dunn — is apparently whipping women shopping at stores like Marshall’s, TJMaxx and HomeGoods into a total frenzy. These women — referred to by @itsargongames as Rae Dunn Women — have a reputation among employees of these stores for staking out locations and storming into the shops to snatch up all the Papyrus font-emblazoned mugs, cookie jars and other merch they can get their hands on. Then, the legend goes, they resell it at double the price or more.
“They would literally get into fights, physical fights with other workers and other people that would try to buy Rae Dunn stuff,” @itsargongames, formerly a part-time worker at Marshall’s, says in the video. “It was like turf war over this stuff, I’m not kidding.”
In a second post, another TikToker (@alyssagiulianaa) then provided video evidence of these turf wars. And dozens upon dozens of comments from other users on both videos further confirm the existence of the Rae Dunn Women — also referred to as “Dunners” — in the wild.
Still, I had to wonder if the phenomenon was real or just TikTok-real. So, as though searching for the Mothman, Bigfoot or another cryptid, I launched an investigation of my own.
First, a cursory Google first brought me to a 2018 story in the Houston Chronicle that confirmed the existence of “Dunners” or “Dunnies.” A local news segment in Detroit also reported on this being a thing in 2018. And a micro-influencer’s vlog released the same year addressed the “dark side of Rae Dunn collecting” and featured an interview with a TJ Maxx employee saying.. essentially the same thing as the TikTok claims.
So, it appears this has been going on for at least several years now. But is this just another Beanie Baby bubble in the making? Possibly, but it is also clear that some people are making good coin reselling this stuff. A search of recently-ended eBay auctions confirm that Rae Dunn products — which appear to go for around $5 for mugs or up to $15 or so for larger items — are, indeed, often reselling for $20 or more. Some items don’t have much markup, but select pieces are going for much more than that. All of these eBay Rae Dunn auctions were completed within the past day:
I had to see this with my own eyes, so my partner and I drove over to the nearest HomeGoods to see if we could catch a glimpse of “the Comic Sans of interior design” and its devotees for ourselves.
Once there, we confirmed the existence of the Rae Dunn product line and saw quite a lot of it in stock, much of it Easter-themed at the moment and scattered throughout the store.
What we didn’t see with our own eyes was much clamoring over any of the products themselves, nor any indication that the displays had been aggressively pillaged, so maybe the buzz is specific to certain products? Maybe it’s a regional thing? Or, very possibly, it had just been restocked.
At any rate, we were not able to debunk the existence of the Rae Dunn Woman and her legend shall live, laugh and love on. Now, godspeed to the retail employees working through a pandemic and having to deal with Dunnies brawling and digging through dumpsters trying to get their claws on a little piece of farmhouse-chic toxic positivity.
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I took last week off from writing here, so how about another link dump?
Growing up, I was an obsessive fan of the television series Fairie Tale Theatre (I know, I know), and remember being captivated even then by its host and producer, Shelley Duvall. Of course, most people know Duvall has had a rough go of it in recent years, but this new Hollywood Reporter profile of the icon by Seth Abramovitch is a great read.
The wildly popular podcast Reply All, you might already know, launched a miniseries last month titled “The Test Kitchen” which was exploring in depth the racism and toxic workplace environment exposed at Bon Appétit last year. Now, the miniseries’ co-hosts, P.J. Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni, are facing their own allegations of behavior that was “near identical” (according to a Twitter thread from Eric Eddings, a former colleague) to what was going on at BA. The LA Times has the rundown on how this all unfolded.
No one is better at Twitter these days than 80-year-old Dionne Warwick. Just last week she experienced Charli XCX’s catalog for the first time, and now she’s the subject of an intimate feature written by Hunter Harris for Billboard magazine. Give it a read and, while you’re at it, visit Harris’ Hung Up for more pop culture writing you’d probably enjoy if you like what I write here.
Is a serial killer responsible for the deaths of 51 Black women in Chicago, or is the city’s law enforcement arm so inept and biased that it just looks that way? That’s the question asked by Ben Austen in the Chicago Reader last week. If you want to feel enraged about the systems at work that allow this many killings of Black women to go quietly unsolved for 20 or more years, give it a read.
What do we do in this house? We stand with Charisma Carpenter in this house, as do all of her female Buffy co-stars who joined her in speaking out against Joss Whedon over his abusive behavior. I wonder why it took her male co-stars so long to do the same? If you haven’t been following the brewing allegations against Whedon for many years, this timeline from The Cut has you covered.
Bravo to whoever leaked Heidi Cruz’s text messages about the family trip to Cancun. In response, The New York Times asks if group chats are sacred. It depends, of course, who you ask.
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Watch: Yes, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is worth the $20 movie rental. The movie is weird, ridiculous and almost perfect: You’ll get Jamie Dornan singing, dancing and ripping open floral shirts. A Reba McEntire cameo. A scene that will give you uncomfortable thoughts about Kermit the Frog’s legs. It’s got everything.
Listen: I just stumbled on the work of NYC Soundcloud artist Ernest Rareberrg thanks to Spotify’s Scorpio playlist. It’s got a moody, lo-fi energy to it that feels right as we come up the beginning of a second year of work-from-home forever.
Give: If you’re not following what’s going on in Texas, you should be. While the power appears to be returning in the Lone Star State as it faces an extraordinary winter storm, water disruptions are continuing and many lives have already been lost because of the dire conditions. As though that wasn’t concerning enough, this Texas Tribune story highlights just how close the state came — a matter of “seconds and minutes” — to a blackout that would have taken months to address.
If you are able to contribute, Texas Monthly runs down a number of mutual-aid groups and nonprofits on the ground that could use help providing financial assistance to impacted communities.