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

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

#91

Post by yourbandsucks »

heavyset_go wrote: post #44
samstave wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The average SNAP benefit is $126 a month. According to Blue Apron, their price per serving is $10 plus shipping. At their lowest tier, Blue Apron costs $50 a week for 4 servings. Neither Blue Apron nor SNAP recipients could survive off of one another.

Why can't they sell for cheaper than $50/4?

Sounds like they have a lot of high-tech labor costs for a fundamentally low-tech, low-margin business. They were all over my LinkedIn a year or two ago.

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

#92

Post by ghaff »

joshstrange wrote: post #76
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…

> 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. After 10 years of marriage your wife had to be the one to bring up that you should probably be helping with basis household chores?? > I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. Is it because you haven't really saved the time? Also Peopl…

>> I know there are some disadvantages about Blue Apron such as waste, carbon food print etc...

>How nice of you to throw in a one line disclaimer, I'm sorry but that's not enough and undersells the horrible underbelly of this industry.

I suspect that a lot of the people who make the most noise about the packaging waste eat out a lot. And there's an enormous amount of food waste (and well as all sorts of other costs) in restaurants. But, heh, out of sight out of mind.

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

#93

Post by joshstrange »

bthrn wrote: post #84
joshstrange wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. After 10 years of marriage your wife had to be the one to bring up that you should probably be helping with basis household chores?? > I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. Is it because you haven't really saved the time? Also Peopl…

There is basically nothing helpful or constructive in your comment here. You seem to be pretty upset about this, do you have some sort of vendetta against Blue Apron?

I have a vendetta about people lying to themselves. Blue Apron saves neither the time nor money people like to think it does. I get a very "the emperor's new clothes" vibe from the whole thing.

I also have a vendetta against people who assume women should do all the cooking and that by asking questions about what someone might want to eat they are "nagging".

I have a vendetta against our culture fof writing off all the waste this produces for such little gain.

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

#94

Post by notyourday »

scrumbledober wrote: post #29
Pfhreak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my wife thought it would be helpful for me to start cooking, as she was getting stressed out with our 2 years old. This seems like a good opportunity to see if there is more labor (emotional or physical) that your wife is doing that she could use a hand with. > My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner Meal planning is work. She is doing a job for the family. She is trying to includ…

HN: come for the engineering talk, stay for the relationship advice.

In my experience successful engineers are successful in relationships. Life is the biggest agile engineering project one engages in.

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

#95

Post by joshstrange »

ghaff wrote: post #92
joshstrange wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. After 10 years of marriage your wife had to be the one to bring up that you should probably be helping with basis household chores?? > I can't tell you how much time we save in planning meals and trips to the store. Is it because you haven't really saved the time? Also Peopl…

>> I know there are some disadvantages about Blue Apron such as waste, carbon food print etc... >How nice of you to throw in a one line disclaimer, I'm sorry but that's not enough and undersells the horrible underbelly of this industry. I suspect that a lot of the people who make the most noise about the packaging waste eat out a lot. And there's an enormous amount of food waste (and well as all sorts of other costs)…

> But, heh, out of sight out of mind.

Literally the definition of Blue Apron.

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

#96

Post by scott_s »

chrisseaton wrote: post #61
SkyPuncher wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can eat it for lunch the next day.

If you want two meals why not get two meals instead of expecting one meal to provide two - doesn’t seem like a reasonable expectation to me.

One benefit of cooking "a meal" is that the effort to cook 1 meal for 2 people is not significantly different than the effort to cook 2 meals for 2 people. Since Blue Aprons competition is people cooking and preparing their own meals, it seems like a reasonable criticism to me.

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

#97

Post by cityzen »

Maybe we're seeing now that burning up hundreds of millions in VC cash to try to acquire users with free meals isn't really a viable business model? After being annoyed hearing them on every podcast I ever listened to for awhile, I signed up for the sole purpose of getting free meals, nothing else. I have a grocery store a mile from my house, I don't need a startup sending me food to cook. I did enjoy the free meals, though! Thank you VCs!

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

#98

Post by magic_beans »

losvedir wrote: post #56
rayiner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's targeting a narrow intersection of people who are rich enough to pay $10 per serving for a meal, have the time to cook every night, and are okay with the lack of customizability in ingredients.[1] We considered it but it made no sense for us. It would save us a little money versus eating out all the time, but it doesn't solve the time problem (my wife and I both get home around 7:30 or 8:00 and need to get the f…

> I would rather see a high-end TV dinner service. This is interesting. If I understand your point, I think Kettlebell Kitchen[0] qualifies. I have friends that use that and love it. But I'm sure there must be others out there. Does anyone else use a service like this? I've been thinking about using something like it for myself. [0] https://www.kettlebellkitchen.com/

Lots of people at my gym love it! It's so easy to use since they deliver to the gym.

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

#99

Post by fatnoah »

rayiner wrote: post #45
ghaff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's targeting a narrow intersection of people who are rich enough to pay $10 per serving for a meal, have the time to cook every night, and are okay with the lack of customizability in ingredients.[1] We considered it but it made no sense for us. It would save us a little money versus eating out all the time, but it doesn't solve the time problem (my wife and I both get home around 7:30 or 8:00 and need to get the f…

My two working parent family used it for a while. While it didn't save any time vs. cooking something from scratch, it really helped us broaden the food horizons of our family. We (including a formerly finicky child) ate a lot of things that we normally wouldn't, and fewer trips to the local market meant fewer impulse buys of random other food. That meant dinner was all we had and it was a great tool to get our child to try new things and to start to enjoy eating new things (catfish tacos, squid ink pasta, etc).

We eventually stopped due to many delivery issues we encountered. Our deliveries would frequently come one or even two days late and sometimes not at all. My favorite was when a weeks worth of deliveries all arrived on the same day.

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

#100

Post by ChuckMcM »

wgerard wrote: post #55
ChuckMcM wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will do a reverse split, perhaps 10:1 to get the stock back up in price.

Doing a reverse split just to meet the share price requirements is generally viewed as a sign the company is spiraling out of control (i.e. investors will continue selling to cut their losses). I don't have the numbers offhand, but I would wager a large sum that companies in trouble doing reverse splits just to meet listing requirements almost always continue tumbling downwards. For a recent example, see Helios and M…

Perhaps not spiraling but yes it isn't exactly a healthy sign either. It happened a lot during the dot com fallout :-) and even Sun did a reverse split 3:1 on its way out of existence. Literally though it is 'price neutral' and serves to meet investor needs (like to stay listed on an exchange) just as 'forward splits' are done, in part, to enable institutional investors to own fractions that are compatible with their portfolio goals.

Always interesting to review the comments from when they went public (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464690)

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