Raking It In, or Not

Kat Panchal is a flight attendant from Philadelphia who was put on leave because of the pandemic. She taught herself to sew and started making masks, selling them on Etsy. Lots of people have done something similar and it's not remarkable these days. 

She was used as an example in a New York Times story about how Etsy has become a Wall Street hit, which was reprinted in the Star Tribune, and I wouldn't be posting about it except that I wanted to point out one minor annoying thing about the story. Not about Panchal, or Etsy, or masks, or even the pandemic. 

No. What I am annoyed about is this quote from the Times text, which was repeated in the photo caption used in the Star Tribune:

Since April, she has sold more than 400 masks, raking in more than $4,500. 

Raking it in? $4,500 (not counting material costs for the masks and pre-tax, I note) is raking it in?

I'm not finding any good sources on this, but it seems to me that the phrase "raking it in" probably comes from the world of casinos, where miniature rakes are used to rake money or chips off of the gambling tables by dealers or people who've won a big pile. 

I don't like this tendency in journalistic writing to thoughtlessly use exaggerated verbs. Other times when I have noted it, the topic seems to be about crime or something negative, and the bad thing always seems to be "shooting up" or "spiking," when "increasing" would be a better verb. Yes, the statistics show an increase, but if you look at the trend line (and the trend line is usually given in a graph within the story) you don't see what a reasonable person would call a spike. But increasing is not very exciting, I guess.

A spike is what we have happening now with the coronavirus. That's a spike. Billionaires are the ones who are raking in the money these days. 

Let's try to keep the verbs under control, at least in publications that consider themselves to be legitimate journalism.