Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time • Hacker News Board

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#31

Post by ghaff » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

chad_strategic wrote: post #16

robertAngst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang, I had the opposite experience with Blue Apron. Never saved time. Expensive and the recipes took 2-3x longer than it says on the box. Delicious food, but there was no leftovers. We finished the food and were still hungry. Cannot fathom using them as a meal provider. The only thing I learned is that roasted beats and carrots are delicious. Don't need Blue Apron anymore.

I agree that there is just enough food, maybe not enough. But then again, I'm dropping weight. So maybe a good thing. I got faster making meals over time. For me right now time is more important than money. I don't think have ever eaten more roasted beets, carrots, cauliflower, kale and broccoli in the last two years, than I have in my life. (and enjoyed.)

Roasting vegetables seems so obvious in retrospect and, even for a group, it's actually much easier to control doneness. I'm not sure why it mostly only appeared as a technique (outside of root vegetables and squash) relatively recently in the US.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#32

Post by SkyPuncher » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #30

robertAngst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang, I had the opposite experience with Blue Apron. Never saved time. Expensive and the recipes took 2-3x longer than it says on the box. Delicious food, but there was no leftovers. We finished the food and were still hungry. Cannot fathom using them as a meal provider. The only thing I learned is that roasted beats and carrots are delicious. Don't need Blue Apron anymore.

> Delicious food, but there was no leftovers. I don't understand why do you want leftover food?

So you can eat it for lunch the next day.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#33

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

beart wrote: post #11

chad_strategic wrote: post #6

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old. We used Blue Apron as the starting point. I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know the…

I've never used Blue Apron and I'm curious - how much actual cooking do you do with a typical Blue Apron meal? Are you preparing, mixing, cutting, etc. or are you primarily mixing together already prepared ingredients and timing them as they cook? Could someone who has never cooked use Blue Apron as a starting point to learn basic cooking skills?

> Are you preparing, mixing, cutting, etc.

Yes.

> Could someone who has never cooked use Blue Apron as a starting point to learn basic cooking skills?

Somewhat; it won't, e.g., teach you knife skills, which are important for both safety and speed in preparation, but it will give you exposure to a wide range of cooking techniques and what they produce.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#34

Post by samstave » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #15

chad_strategic wrote: post #6

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old. We used Blue Apron as the starting point. I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know the…

There's definitely a use case for these services. It's just a fairly narrow one. - Willing and able to cook for, ideally, more than one person - Able to plan a week ahead for the most part - OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else I tried Blue Apron and thought it was "OK" but I could never really make these meal kit services work out for me. t obvio…

Blue aprons should seek to have some subsidies from states or insurance where they can provide healthy meals to SnAP users, or elderly, or offer it to apartment complexes where they know how many units just want "blue apron sunday dinner" or something

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#35

Post by wgerard » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

porpoisely wrote: post #20

Thanks to inflation, penny stocks are now stocks that trade under $5. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pennystock.asp Also, penny stocks tend to be fairly illiquid with very marginal market cap and tend to trade on OTC/pink sheets and not on major stock exchanges. So blue apron is penny stockish, but not quite there yet. We'll have to see if NYSE gives Blue Apron the boot.

The SEC actually has a pretty concrete definition of what a "Penny Stock" is:

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=f4effbf9fb932f767e...

That being said, there's also the common usage of the term which blue apron arguably falls under.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#36

Post by gammateam » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

wgerard wrote: post #24

gammateam wrote: post #4

Just reverse split: less shares, same market cap = higher price. wow no more penny stock status

Investors aren't stupid and realize a company doing a reverse split just to maintain the minimum share price is doomed. See also: $HMNY.

then thats what the article should be about, not an arbitrary share price metric

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#37

Post by Bluecobra » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

beart wrote: post #11

chad_strategic wrote: post #6

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old. We used Blue Apron as the starting point. I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know the…

I've never used Blue Apron and I'm curious - how much actual cooking do you do with a typical Blue Apron meal? Are you preparing, mixing, cutting, etc. or are you primarily mixing together already prepared ingredients and timing them as they cook? Could someone who has never cooked use Blue Apron as a starting point to learn basic cooking skills?

My experience from trying it out a few years ago is that you do all the work. Nothing comes prepared, so basically a box of ingredients + the recipe. I would think it would be a good way to learn how to cook. I hated this, and would rather have all the prep work done for me (e.g. diced onions instead of a whole raw onion). Also I didn't like all the packaging/ice packs/bubble wrap. It all seemed really wasteful compared vs. going to the store with reusable bags.

That being said, the food/recipes were good but the portions were pretty small for two people. I think this would have been perfect when I was single and had a lot more time on my hands.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#38

Post by vincentmarle » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

apetresc wrote: post #8

As someone who's very un-knowledgeable about the stock market - is there something special about the $1 mark? Isn't it arbitrary how the total market value of the company is divided into individual shares?

You can only bid up to a cent difference. So if every new bid changes the entire valuation of your company by at least 1% then it becomes very volatile.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#39

Post by ineedasername » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

spyspy wrote: post #13

chad_strategic wrote: post #6

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old. We used Blue Apron as the starting point. I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know the…

The problem is the extremely small niche it fills. The market is people who have enough time and patience to cook their own meals, but not enough to grocery shop and look up a recipe. If you're new to cooking that's one thing, but I'd imagine many users eventually "outgrow" the service as they become more skilled and/or realize how much the convenience is costing.

Outgrow

In my case it was a combination of that and quality problems. (This was Hello Fresh, not Blue Apron though). We had a lot of great meals, used the "family plan" so we'd have left overs, but there was some kind of inflection point where we started have regular issues with the meats. In a period of about 6 weeks we had 4 or 5 problems. Beef that was open and dropping it's liquid out. 3 chicken meals in a row where it gave off a foul odor of sulfur, indicating it had spoiled. We had issues with other fresh ingredients as well, though these were the only ones that ruined the meal completely.

Each time, Hello Fresh customer service was good in giving a refund and even a meal credit, but it was too much. You can't plan your meals when there get's to be a 1 in 3 chance your food is spoiled. We cancelled, but by that time we already had about 20 solid recipe cards for dishes we loved and could easily do ourselves, so we didn't bother looking for another meal service. Maybe we will if/when we get bored with our choices again, but it would probably be temporary given the premiums paid.

I'm looking towards Amazon's purchase of Wholefoods and what that might do for meal services to bring the cost down substantially, then I'd consider a regular subscription.

Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

#40

Post by taude » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

chad_strategic wrote: post #6

After 10 years of marriage, my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old. We used Blue Apron as the starting point. I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner. The quality of the food and the time saved is well worth the price. I know the…

I thought the Blue Apron recipes were too complicated, used too many pans to wash, and wasted too much packaging material. I found no time savings when was all said and done. I have an easy enough time following recipes from books like America's Test Kitchen cooking for two [1], etc, and spending 10 or 15 minutes planning meals each week. Plus, I probably spend quite a bit less, and if I meal plan correctly, I'll do some form of big-batch meal one night that then becomes leftovers or other meals...

I did like not making dinner decisions, though, when the meals were things I liked.

Note: I haven't used the service in nearly four years.

[1] The Complete Cooking For Two Cookbook: https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/8da852d4663a41e4f978fa4...

EDITED: added link to book I was referring to