211–220 of 336 posts
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Housing prices are rising dramatically even where populations are declining and land is abundant. It's not as simple as saying there's a housing shortage due to zoning.
Are you sure? Housing prices in my small Midwest hometown have risen by something like 1%/yr on average for the last 30 years.
Anecdotally, the last time I went to Bed Bath and Beyond, it was an absolute ghost town. No one was there, the prices were absolutely garbage, and the inventory was no better than anything you'd find literally anywhere else. I looked around and thought to myself, "Wow, I bet their corporate rent costs a fortune to just be here, and they're probably burning cash hand over fist." I'm not surprised in the slightest. Con…
>The prices are garbage I get the feeling that BBB, like Kohl's and Joann's, are places you just don't shop unless you have a coupon, because there's always a 30% coupon.
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The whole stock market in 2023 makes no sense to me, not just Bed Bath and Beyond. So many companies no longer pay dividends. So many classes of stock are now non-voting shares. Common stock shareholders usually get nothing if a company goes bankrupt and liquidates. So if I don't get dividends, can't vote, and am not entitled to a share of the company's assets, what is the actual value in owning stock? Do I just wait…
Everything has been fundamentally detached from reality, from stocks to housing. Houses can sit empty without tenants for years but they’ll only go up. Companies can be unprofitable for literal decades but they’ll keep finding funding and buyers. Commercial properties can bleed tenant but the prices will only be up. In a world of shrinking growth , stalling productivity, and dying demographics, the market behaves lik…
Anymore? When have markets ever been rational? Markets only line up with reality over the long term. You can point to any instant, and even any decade in time, and point major inaccuracies in the public's collective financial thinking.
> Houses can sit empty without tenants for years but they’ll only go up.
Do you have stats for how much of a problem this is? The problem seems to be vacancy rates that are too low, not too high.
> Companies can be unprofitable for literal decades but they’ll keep finding funding and buyers.
This was a ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) phenomenon and even then, was very limited in scope. Uber raised billions on a dumb business plan, yes, but that investment is tiny compared to the total amount invested in that period.
> In a world of shrinking growth , stalling productivity, and dying demographics,
Opinions should be based on facts, not over-excitement. Growth has been booming in real terms for centuries now. Many countries are in demographic decline, but overall we still have lots of net population growth for a long time. Productivity is not stalling, and is in fact skyrocketing all over the world.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
> the market behaves like infinite growth is baked in.
Lots of people blindly pump their money into index funds every month. While this raises PE ratios to near-historic highs (not all-time highs mind you) it is by no means "infinite".
I find lots of great businesses with stock that sells for far more reasonable prices, given that they are off of the major indices.
Blind doomsterism doesn't help anyone.
This is a huge loss IMO, buying kitchen supplies and bedding on Amazon is complete shit. Target isn't much better due to lack of variety and types of bedding. I've bought the same bed sheets for 5+ years, a few months ago I bought new ones since some bleach got spilt on one set, it comes in and I could tell immediately the quality was far worse. One wash later, its ripping & fraying. Thankfully I could return them. S…
I want to buy a mattress. Mattress review sites are all phony. Amazon is all phony reviews. Mattress FIRM is hugely overpriced. Bed, Bath, and Beyond's brands were just names they'd acquired. That entire industry has managed to shoot itself in the foot. Probably better to order from an actual manufacturer on Alibaba.
The hotel was also great. If you're ever in Houghton in the UP of Michigan, I would highly recommend the Vault hotel.
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I wish this narrative would die. It's probably true that there's not enough housing but it's also true that AirBNB is sucking up many of the vacancies and apartment ownership consolidation is allowing owners to endure vacancies longer than they should be able to. You're simply never going to convince everyone that building more is the answer when there's such low-hanging fruit in front of everyone's eyes that you ref…
I don't understand why you are suggesting Airbnb isn't "fair" demand on the housing stock. Also it is really hard to believe that Airbnb is a meaningful impact on housing prices outside of certain touristy locales. My suburban neighborhood has had 5+ offers on every house that has come for sale in the last year and there are no Airbnbs in the neighborhood and only two within a five mile radius. The only real answer i…
I don't think this kind of dichotomous thinking generally holds with complicated real-world problems. They are almost always a confluence of multiple "answers".
E.g., yes, housing supply is probably part of the solution. But so may be integrating policies that disincentivize viewing something necessary (like housing) as an investment asset.
Anecdotally, the last time I went to Bed Bath and Beyond, it was an absolute ghost town. No one was there, the prices were absolutely garbage, and the inventory was no better than anything you'd find literally anywhere else. I looked around and thought to myself, "Wow, I bet their corporate rent costs a fortune to just be here, and they're probably burning cash hand over fist." I'm not surprised in the slightest. Con…
It's not just BBB. This description could apply to a good number of chain stores these days. There are exceptions but this seems to be an increasing trend. There are ghost town stores everywhere you look. If I make a trip to (for example) Target, it feels nothing like Target of 20 years ago. The chances are good that they don't have what I hoped to find there. I'm getting used to being regularly disappointed and am l…
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Random thought and I figure there must be a law against this: But what about the opposite, could a company sell off it's assets and do stock buy backs right until it goes bankrupt so that some investors get more $ ahead of the creditors?
There are various tricks around this area (the Texas Two-step is a favorite) but most of the blatant ones have clawback possibilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy
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I don't understand why you are suggesting Airbnb isn't "fair" demand on the housing stock. Also it is really hard to believe that Airbnb is a meaningful impact on housing prices outside of certain touristy locales. My suburban neighborhood has had 5+ offers on every house that has come for sale in the last year and there are no Airbnbs in the neighborhood and only two within a five mile radius. The only real answer i…
> The only real answer is to build more I don't think this kind of dichotomous thinking generally holds with complicated real-world problems. They are almost always a confluence of multiple "answers". E.g., yes, housing supply is probably part of the solution. But so may be integrating policies that disincentivize viewing something necessary (like housing) as an investment asset.
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They're still 5x more expensive than Alibaba. Which is where most mail order mattresses come from. Making a mattress costs under $100.
Alibaba is super cheap because you're buying the literal bargain basement version of the product, and what you're getting almost always violates local product safety laws that domestic manufacturers and/or sellers must contend with. Yes, the mattress at Costco is 5x the price. But it's probably 20x the value.
I find the whole situation fascinating. Bed Bath continued to sell hundreds of millions of shares while they were preparing for bankruptcy and retail investors (or meme stock investors) continued to buy them. I assume Bed Bath did all the paperwork that is necessary (like calling out risks, that the raised capital will go to creditors first, etc) for such a stock sale. But it is clear they were doing it out of bad-fa…
The whole stock market in 2023 makes no sense to me, not just Bed Bath and Beyond. So many companies no longer pay dividends. So many classes of stock are now non-voting shares. Common stock shareholders usually get nothing if a company goes bankrupt and liquidates. So if I don't get dividends, can't vote, and am not entitled to a share of the company's assets, what is the actual value in owning stock? Do I just wait…