Really? I bought a bathroom vanity from them for my remodel, and was ultimately tremendously impressed with their service. It’s a good vanity, a good price, a good delivery service, and they’ve fallen all over themselves to make good on a couple of discrepancies: sinks turned out to be smaller than advertised and there was no epoxy in the box. For those two failures, I got more than $500 in refunds.
I like this one, because it doesn’t list the millions of people on robinhood who lost their shirts.
Good that you did, early investors in ponzi’s get returns too. ;)
Furthermore, the most concerning line in the whole of Wayfair’s financials is Operating expenses. The largest component of this is Advertising and selling expenses.
And all you need is $25M to invest, then you can gamble and be rich!
Takes money to make money baby!
The fun part about shorting is that it’s always potentially doubling your short, no matter where you jump in!
Makes sense, if they’re booking refunds in selling expenses.
Wayfair is a funny one: they’re here in Boston and I both know a few people who work there as well as interviewed for a position there early last year. My somewhat informed sense is that (1) they should be in a pretty good position, because in terms of online furniture they have good tech, good customer experience, they’ve transitioned to a lot of decent-quality own-brand product (which typically means better margins), they know their target market (and it’s a good one in terms of disposable income) and overall they’ve got a really good profile for a successful online retail business, but (2) internally they consider themselves a tech company first and a retailer second, which leads to them doing a lot of generic tech company things and getting in generic tech company trouble, except they’re in a business where the things you need to do to make money are obvious and well-known, so it’s actually disappointing when they don’t make money, which is a key difference from a generic tech company.
Being quite familiar with the corporate staff levels of the other big national retailers based in Boston, it was very obvious when I was interviewing that their corporate org chart was wildly bloated. Was it 30% too bloated, which is roughly what they’ve dumped out of corporate between last summer’s layoff and this new one? I wouldn’t actually be surprised, though of course that depends on them being able to identify the right people/positions to keep.
They’re doing it because everyone else is.
This would be the part that gives me pause as it sounds like a variation of every start up from Silicon Valley in the last 30 years.
As for whether this business model has legs, guess we’ll see. You description from a bit of an inside view sounds like they might, I’ll remain more skeptical.
We need to do more with less. But first, how about a little Sting?
To be fair, this has been the right move for any business because tech investors are insane. Think of WeWork raising 22 billion as an innovative tech company even though their business model – commercial real estate rental – has existed for thousands of years.
Well, it worked great until they exploded at least
He said not to stand so close to him. How much clearer could he be?
The competitive advantage, as it were, is that they probably have the best delivery and supply chain network for shipping Big Stuff. But better-run companies have squandered more of a business advantage, so still very much TBD. Just not on their death bed quite yet.
Wayfair is that bad off? Bought some stuff from them in years past and found them good. I did read a headline that said their first retail location in my metro area was going to open this year and got pushed back to '24.
Haha, I just got that.
Have you considered the impact of insane conspiracy theories?
A friend who’s worked for Google for 15 years got laid off on this round. By a generic email in his inbox. In his FB post about it, he talked about how there was just no rhyme or reason to the layoffs- almost like they did it randomly ‘to be more fair’. Folks that were there for 20 years, new hires, people that had just been promoted, managers in positions for a decade.
It really does seem like all these companies are doing it because all of the others are, too.
Are they “copycat” layoffs or is this just blatant collusion to knock workers down a peg because they got too much power over the last few years?