11–20 of 68 posts
I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.
The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.
Parents have children, and then send them to daycare. Is this significantly different?
If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad.
The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.
> Wag and Rover are two of the newest and largest players in the booming pet industry, each with more than $300 million in venture capital funding. If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad.
This is a silly, meaningless analogy. Every grown adult on earth was not walking around with a computer connected to broadband internet in their pocket in 1999. There were less than 500 million internet users total.
The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.
I find your second statement a little bizarre. People are going to feel varying degrees of attachment to their pets. Why would you care? You can think it's silly or weird, but who are you to take offense at something like that?
> Wag and Rover are two of the newest and largest players in the booming pet industry, each with more than $300 million in venture capital funding. If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad.
>If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad. This is a silly, meaningless analogy. Every grown adult on earth was not walking around with a computer connected to broadband internet in their pocket in 1999. There were less than 500 million internet users total .
The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.
There are all kinds of reasons one may employ the services of a dog walker: reduced mobility of a previously healthy owner, impaired functioning of an elderly dog's bladder necessitating more frequent bathroom visits, travel, the arrival of a new child allowing less freedom to walk the dog, and about fifty more that spring to mind without even putting much effort into it.
All that said, there is not a chance in hell that I would ever trust a dog to a "valley" startup employing (effectively) randoms vs a local company with prior approved knowledge of who will be performing the service.
The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.
To each their own. Of probably equal or greater offense to me is the idea that one treat living, sentient beings to be owned and treated as property.
As to your other point, I have no idea other than changing circumstances. I find that having a dog saves me from being a lazy slob and forces me to drag my arse out the door for an hour when I otherwise wouldn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad. This is a silly, meaningless analogy. Every grown adult on earth was not walking around with a computer connected to broadband internet in their pocket in 1999. There were less than 500 million internet users total .
$600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?
$600M in VC money is $2/US citizen. If half of households have a dog, that's ~$8/dog-house. If 10% of them want a dog-walker (the biggest "if"), that's ~$80/customer. At $30/walk, $600M in investment doesn't seem entirely crazy.