| To: rogermci® who wrote (888) | 10/12/2022 6:34:19 AM | | From: Glenn Petersen | | | | It looks like they are going to try to accomplish this through regulations rather than the legislative process. They know that the proposed regulations would never make it through Congress.
An updated version of that article notes that there are 50 million workers in the gig economy. Most of those jobs did not exist when this board was started. They exist only because of the innovative entrepreneurs who were willing to risk tens of billions of dollars on the creation of disruptive new business models that have been of enormous benefit to both consumers and the workers who have been able to supplement their primary incomes without the stifling hassles and responsibilities that come with actual "employment." How exploitative can these companies be when most of them are not yet profitable? How smart is it to risk killing them when the economy is on the cusp of a recession? Just two years ago they were considered essential workers. Now they are an endangered species. |
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| To: Rarebird who wrote (890) | 10/12/2022 12:07:42 PM | | From: rogermci® | | | | | The point I was making is UBER has bottomed. Unfortunately I didn't buy yesterday at 23 and i bought at 25 today. Might retest 23 but represents good value here regardless. |
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| From: Glenn Petersen | 10/21/2022 6:32:25 AM | | | | | | Instacart postpones its IPO
Dan Primack, author of Axios Pro Rata
Axios
October 20, 2022
Grocery delivery app Instacart has decided to push its highly anticipated IPO into 2023, believing the current stock market is too volatile, as first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by Axios.
The big picture: Only 65 companies have gone public on U.S. exchanges this year, which represents an 80.7% decline from last year, per Renaissance Capital.
-- U.S. IPO proceeds are down a whopping 94.1%.
Backstory: Instacart filed confidential IPO registration papers with the SEC earlier this year, and as of a few weeks ago was still hoping to get out in 2022. But the San Francisco-based company recently changed course, in the midst of increased volatility.
What they're saying: Instacart declined to comment on its IPO plans, but did provide Axios with the following statement:
-- “We are incredibly proud of the work our teams are doing to power the future of grocery with our retail partners, and our business has never been stronger.
-- In Q3, our revenue grew more than 40% year-over-year, and our Net Income and Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled from Q2.
-- We remain focused on building for the long-term, and we are excited about the opportunity ahead."
The big question: How employees take the news. Particularly those who'd been with the company for years and were expecting to sell shares into the IPO.
axios.com |
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| From: TimF | 11/3/2022 5:51:47 PM | | | | | | Lyft said Thursday it would lay off 13% of its workforce, or about 683 employees, in the ride-hailing firm’s latest cost-cutting step to cope with a weakening economy.
As decades-high inflation hits consumer spending and drives up costs for businesses, companies across sectors are cutting jobs and downsizing their operations to preserve profits.
Lyft’s latest move is expected to result in a charge of between $27 million and $32 million in the fourth quarter. It follows a hiring freeze earlier this year and 60 job cuts in July.
The company, which is slated to report third-quarter results on Monday, said the layoffs would not have an impact on its previously issued forecast for the period.
nypost.com |
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| From: Glenn Petersen | 1/15/2023 9:15:24 PM | | | | | | As Gig Economy Companies Flee Europe, Getir Is Taking Over
Rapid grocery delivery apps are leaving the continent, putting the Turkish startup on top. But, its reign is anything but stable.
Morgan Meaker
Wired
January 11, 2023
FIVE YEARS AGO, investors wouldn’t return Nazim Salur’s calls. Now his company, Getir, is the biggest rapid grocery delivery company in Europe. After the Turkish startup acquired its German rival Gorillas last month, the company was valued at $8.8 billion.
Getir first expanded into Europe via London in 2021, when a post-pandemic gold rush for instant groceries was in full swing. Investors were convinced that lockdown habits would stick and consumers would continue to demand grocery deliveries direct to their homes. Since 2020, investors have flooded the global sector with more than $5 billion in funding. Those billions funded the dramatic expansion of an industry promising a new era of ultimate convenience: groceries on your doorstep in 10 minutes. In Europe alone, companies launched between 2020 and 2021 included Gorillas, Weezy, Blok, Dija, Fancy, and Cajoo.
In a delivery app reckoning, all of those companies have since disappeared or been absorbed by Europe’s three major players: Getir, Flink, and GoPuff. Since Getir swallowed Gorillas in December, the company’s yellow and purple mopeds can be found on roads across seven European countries. Its next largest competitor, Germany’s Flink, is active in three. The American competition, GoPuff, has recently downsized and now only operates in France and Britain. Getir has received funding from Abu Dhabi state investor Mubadala and investment firms Sequoia and Tiger Global to fuel its growth.
The company’s rise from London to Europe’s biggest instant grocery provider is down to Getir’s experience in its home market, says general manager in Europe, Turancan Salur. “We are the pioneers of the sector,” he says. Getir might be new in Europe, but it’s been operating in Turkey for eight years and claims to already be profitable in Istanbul. As a private company, Getir does not publish financial reports. “We have a lot of experience under our belt there and we’ve navigated our fair share of difficult situations and economic difficulties,” says Salur.
While Europe’s newcomers were wrestling with IT problems linked to logistics management, he says, Getir already had custom-made fixes ready to go. “We basically had a preview into the future, whereas our competitors didn’t.”
Getir’s dominance is reflected in number of downloads. The company’s app has been downloaded on Android phones 28 million times worldwide, according to AppRadar data that does not count iPhone installs. That figure far eclipses downloads of GoPuff’s app, which has been installed 5.4 million times. And Getir is not only winning over consumers—couriers are also switching to the company. “From my personal experience, Getir is so much better than being fully dependent on Deliveroo or UberEats,” says Ian Morrison, a courier in London who has been working for Getir in London since June 2021. He gets paid £11.05 ($13) per hour, and receives holiday and sick pay. The company provides him with an electric moped to ride during his shifts and covers his insurance.
Despite that, Getir is not perfect, he stresses. Compared to when he joined, he has to work more hours to receive the same pay, due to changes to the bonus system. He also describes the pressure his warehouse is under to make deliveries quickly, which means the people packing orders are more likely to make mistakes, resulting in wrong or missing items.
In Berlin, workers are more critical. Former Getir worker Ronnie (who declines to give his surname because he wants to protect his privacy) says he experienced missing wages from his pay slips and was given faulty bikes to ride during the six months he spent as a courier for the company. In response, he unsuccessfully tried to organize a works council, a common feature within big German companies designed to complement unions. As a result, he says, he was fired. Getir declined to comment on the case.
Ronnie (who was also fired from Gorillas before he joined Getir) says the problems with pay and equipment were similar at both companies. Yet so far, Getir has not experienced the same protests and unofficial wildcat strikes that Gorillas struggled with in Berlin, its home city.
“We don’t expect any staff challenges,” says Salur. “We have good working conditions. That has not been an issue for us.”
That may change as Getir inherits the attention once bestowed on its competitors. There are multiple social media accounts set up to criticize working conditions at Gorillas, and the Getir Workers Collective launched on Twitter last year. Unions are also anticipating a degradation of working conditions as couriers have fewer employers to choose from. “Working conditions will decrease just as it happened at Deliveroo and UberEats,” says Edouard Bernasse of the Paris-based Collective of Autonomous Platform Couriers, also known as CLAP.
Getir might have swallowed up many of its instant grocery rivals—it acquired Gorillas as well as the UK’s Weezy and Spain’s Blok—but that doesn’t mean there is no competition. “The restaurant delivery companies have also alighted on this segment,” says Peter Backman, a food delivery analyst. Deliveroo and UberEats, companies that traditionally focused on takeaway delivery, now offer groceries in the UK too. In mainland Europe, the German company Delivery Hero operates a series of brands that deliver takeaway alongside groceries.
Getir’s Salur insists companies like Deliveroo and UberEats are only indirect competitors because their business model is different—they rely on third-party shops to fulfill orders whereas Getir delivers straight from its own warehouses. That means the company is more likely to have customer items in-stock and can offer lower prices, he says—a factor that will be important to weather Europe’s cost-of-living crisis.
Getir might have defied critics’ prognosis that the instant grocery bubble has burst—for now. But the past three years has taught the sector that this is a brutal business, and Getir’s reign in Europe is anything but secure.
As Gig Economy Companies Flee Europe, Getir Is Taking Over | WIRED |
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| To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (894) | 2/28/2023 4:50:49 PM | | From: Glenn Petersen | | | | Instacart’s Revenue and Profit Climb Ahead of Public Listing
Grocery-delivery company increased sales 39% last year despite slower results on its app
By Jaewon Kang, Berber Jin and Corrie Driebusch
Wall Street Journal
Feb. 28, 2023
A part-time worker for Instacart filled customer orders in New Jersey last year.PHOTO: MICHAEL LOCCISANO/GETTY IMAGES
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Instacart Inc. generated sharply higher sales and profit in the fourth quarter, according to people familiar with the matter and an internal memo, as the company prepares for its highly anticipated initial public offering of stock.
The grocery-delivery company told employees on Tuesday that its revenue increased more than 50% in the fourth quarter, compared with the same period a year earlier, while gross profit rose more than 80%, according to a memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Instacart’s full-year revenue increased 39% to about $2.5 billion for 2022, people familiar with the matter said, as the company reaped the benefits of a push into advertising while it has struggled to increase order volume at the same pace it did during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instacart in 2022 processed $29 billion in overall sales across the platform, a measure known as gross transaction volume, up about 16% from the previous year, the people said.
Instacart shared those numbers Tuesday during a call with investors. During the call, executives said the company is waiting for more cooperative markets to go public.
Write to Jaewon Kang at jaewon.kang@wsj.com, Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com and Corrie Driebusch at corrie.driebusch@dowjones.com
Instacart’s Revenue and Profit Climb Ahead of Public Listing - WSJ |
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| From: Glenn Petersen | 3/14/2023 4:57:44 AM | | | | | | Uber and Lyft shares rise after California court victory lets them classify drivers as contractors
PUBLISHED MON, MAR 13 20238:12 PM EDT
UPDATED MON, MAR 13 20238:50 PM EDT
Rohan Goswami @ROGOSWAMI
CNBC.com
KEY POINTS
-- In Nov. 2020, California voters approved Proposition 22, which allowed ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft to classify their drivers as independent contractors, limiting the companies’ obligation to provide certain benefits.
-- A group of drivers challenged the proposition, and in 2021 a judge said it was unconstitutional.
-- But on Monday, an appeals court overturned that ruling, allowing Prop. 22 to stand.
Ride-sharing apps, including Uber and Lyft, can continue to treat their drivers as independent contractors, a California appeals court ruled on Monday, overturning a lower-court decision that barred them from doing so.
In Nov. 2020, California voters approved Proposition 22, which allowed ride-sharing and delivery app makers to classify their drivers as independent contractors. A California judge ruled the proposition unconstitutional in 2021, arguing that it infringed the legislature’s power to set standards at the workplace. The state and a group representing the companies and other parties appealed that decision, and Monday’s ruling came down in their favor.
Shares of ridesharing and delivery companies rose on the news, with Uber, Lyft, and Doordash notching gains of more than 4% after hours.
Prop. 22 created a set of criteria which determined whether ride-share drivers were employees or independent contractors> In practice, it exempted Uber and similar companies from following certain minimum wage, overtime, or workers compensation laws for hundreds of thousands of Californian rideshare drivers. Instead, the ballot measure required companies to provide compensation and healthcare “subsidies” based on “engaged” driving time, as well as other benefits, including safety training and “sexual harassment training.”
It was the most expensive ballot issue in California’s history, with ride-share companies contributing over $181 million to the “Yes” campaign. Companies reportedly moved aggressively to prompt their drivers to support the initiative, which passed with 58.6% of votes in support.
A group of ride-share drivers sought to strike down Proposition 22, and won a lower court decision. But in a 63-page opinion issued Monday, California justices from the 1st District Court of Appeal disagreed with that court, and upheld the proposition.
“Proposition 22 does not intrude on the Legislature’s workers’ compensation authority or violate the single-subject rule,” the opinion read.
“Today’s ruling is a victory for app-based workers and the millions of Californians who voted for Prop 22. Across the state, drivers and couriers have said they are happy with Prop 22, which affords them new benefits while preserving the unique flexibility of app-based work,” Uber chief legal officer Tony West said in a statement.
Uber, Lyft shares rise after California court upholds Prop. 22 (cnbc.com) |
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