I love Blue Apron but get how they are not exactly profitable. Almost every single week they leave an item out of my box and the customer support resolution is to credit my account $40... for like a $3 head of broccoli. I am not complaining obviously, but yeah, fix the missing ingredients.
Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
111–120 of 336 posts
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#112As 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.
The tick size for stocks less than $1 is $0.0001.
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#113After 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 suspect Blue Apron will survive as it will probably be taken over or bought out. It's kinda the leader of the pack and the market will eventually consolidate. It also helps that I might have helped I bought about $1000 discounted gift cards at Costco.
I'm not so sure. Even most people I know who have tried Blue Apron tend to either regress back to not cooking or they "graduate" to buying their own ingredients and planning their own meals. It's not like grocery delivery is that different or hard to do.
I actually think it is pretty great as a way to build the habit of cooking at home and to get comfortable enough in your kitchen. But it only takes about a month to do that. Afterwards it's so much cheaper and easier to just handle the recipes and cooking yourself. Once you get a feel for proportions and learn some staple recipes Blue Apron adds very little extra value and a lot of extra headache (no flexibility in the menus, fixed proportions, etc.) So there isn't much point in doing it.
Also, their vegetarian options too often tend to either be carbs + cheese or bland vegetables. I'd much rather just make Indian food at home.
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I meant to have a portion of that in some sort of subsidized manner... Not a replacement. I also think snap is bullshit. For example, you cant buy toiletries with it and you cant buy things which are cooked. The best cooked deal of anything is a $5 rotisserie chicken at costco. And snap users can never get those. But it would be interesting if blue apron were to cater to larger groups, such as retirment homes, or eld…
> But it would be interesting if blue apron were to cater to larger groups, such as retirment homes, or elderly communities...
SNAP recipients, retirement homes and elderly communities discriminate on cost.
It's almost always more efficient to deal directly with a food distributor or wholesaler at that scale.
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
then thats what the article should be about, not an arbitrary share price metric
It's not arbitrary at all (well, I suppose the listing requirements are arbitrary), as I've noted elsewhere: > You'll get delisted from the NYSE if you fall below $1/share or below a certain market cap for more than 30 consecutive trading days. It's actually a pretty big deal for Blue Apron.
Then reverse split and magically have higher value shares
wow we've come full circle from my parent comment
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m really surprised... you don’t have any online grocery shopping in US? I have been buying groceries only online for years and I wouldn’t definitely call work to click a couple times more on the ingredients that you need for some meal. If you are particularly lazy you can even create shopping lists for every meal that you need and add all of them with a click.
We buy a box that specifically is sourced in our local area. Online grocery shopping solves the 'trip to the store' but doesn't solve meal planning, sourcing local ingredients, managing a shopping list, etc. Right now, the cost of my box includes all those steps. It also occasionally includes locally sourced meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. I can find information on the farms where those items came from easily. I value th…
Most of the online grocery delivery shops give you food from local producers, all of them must indicate the origin, at least in uk.
For some recipes you can’t have local produce, by definition.
Your box doesn’t solve the trip to the store because you still need to buy household stuff, breakfast food and all the other stuff that you use daily that is not sold by blue apron or these kind of services.
The premium doesn’t seem small to me given that is 2-3x a grocery store, at least in case of blue apron...
I don’t think that there is a huge market for people that don’t want to click a couple times more to add the ingredients for a recipe (or actually just a click if you add it once in a shopping list), that are willing to pay a premium but that still need to go to the grocery store for the normal shopping and do all the cooking.
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only used them once and one of the meals was the most complicated hamburger recipe I'd ever made and I didn't think it was really all that good. I half suspect there are motivations behind making the recipes for these services complex and a little exotic. If they had four ingredient recipes that took 10 minutes of prep, I daresay a lot of people would think "I'm paying 2x to 3x what I would pay in the grocery store…
What's really weird to me is that you can go to the store and get food that's basically ready to serve after you warm it up. You could eat steaks, fish sticks, brats, chicken, pork, chicken nuggets, fries, a huge variety of vegetables ready to be steamed from the frozen section. You could eat that every day and pay a quarter of what it costs for this stuff to be hand picked for you. You don't even need to season any…
Most of the prepared food in the grocery store that you just need to heat up isn't very appealing to me for the most part. Fish sticks and chicken nuggets, blech.
However, there are a lot of things like salmon, brats (as you say), etc. that mostly do just need a quick saute or bake. And vegetables can be very quick and simple as well.
However, some people do like the idea of more complex meals and some of those people find BA makes it a bit easier to get there.
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m really surprised... you don’t have any online grocery shopping in US? I have been buying groceries only online for years and I wouldn’t definitely call work to click a couple times more on the ingredients that you need for some meal. If you are particularly lazy you can even create shopping lists for every meal that you need and add all of them with a click.
What countries have widespread online grocery shopping? I've seen it advertised a bit in the US (more and more recently), but haven't seen it gain a strong foothold yet. I've had some friends that used Amazon Fresh. I've used it once or twice, but wasn't confident it was price competitive and also didn't want to wait the day or two when I could just pick it up for dinner tonight. For me it's just an expectation and f…
In UK all the big chains give you the option for online delivery.
The quality is not a problem and it’s fairly easy to switch to a competitor in case it is.
Edit:
Ah Amazon fresh is simply not working as a food delivery service.
They handle the trolley like a normal amazon order, it’s not optimised for tens of items, they mess up a lot of orders and the refund workflow is simply ridiculous.
If you only ever used Amazon fresh for grocery shopping then I can understand your issues.
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#119Earlier 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…
> OK with paying a non-trivial premium to have a lot of menu planning and shopping be handled by someone else This is the one I've never been able to get past. For what these services cost, I can have someone else prepare my meal that will taste just as good or better. Why would I not do that? I get if you're trying to learn to cook or something like that, but that only sounds like a temporary problem.
When I get home, there’s a 60 min window for socializing and meals before bedtime routines begin. Going out to eat requires picking a location, getting everyone into the car, picking your order at the restaurant, waiting for food, waiting for check, piling in and going home. That just doesn’t fit in 60 min.
On the other hand, grocery shopping requires advance collaborative choice. Sometimes the choosing can take over an hour. Delegating one decider comes with its own hazards, and effectively binds the decider to also be the grocery shopper in order to execute appropriately.
Services like BlueApron solve for that by reducing the number of choices and removing the need to leave the house. If you don’t mind cooking / enjoy picking up new cooking skills, you optimize for stress-free time with your family.
Re: Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time
#120Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Plated, and all the other food prep deliver services are a hack. A disgusting, wasteful hack. Calling someone using Blue Apron a cook is like calling someone doing a "paint by numbers" a painter. I'm not trying to be a cooking snob but I get really sick of people praising BA/Plated/etc as some amazing concept or a huge time saver. It's neither, it's for people who want food delivery (as in Ub…
>Calling someone using Blue Apron a cook is like calling someone doing a "paint by numbers" a painter
>I'm not trying to be a cooking snob
Yes, yes you are trying to be a cooking snob. If you had said "someone who uses Blue Apron is not a chef" you'd have a point, but then again no one ever said that. Someone who cooks is a cook. Someone who paints is a painter. There is a big difference between cook vs chef and painter vs artist.
Blue Apron is not McDonalds, they don't make your food for you. They give you a recipe and the raw ingredients, same as finding a recipe online and buying the raw ingredients from the store. And then you cook it. As any normal cook would do.