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GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

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Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#711

Post by HWR_14 »

realharo wrote: post #670
HWR_14 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine if the mortgage was owned by our home, not ourselves. And we could stop paying it without any personal consequences To a large degree you can just stop paying your mortgage. The biggest personal consequence is you will be evicted and lose both your place to live and any equity you built up. The other main consequence is it will show up on your credit report for 7 years. Maybe some specific forms ask…

This depends entirely on your local laws and the kinds of loans banks offer. In most places, you can only get recourse mortgages. You will be liable for the rest of the mortgage, if the value of the house drops so much that selling it doesn't cover the remaining debt. House values dropping a lot is something that happens fairly rarely, but it tends to happen exactly during the times when you are most likely to be una…

Even in recourse mortgages, banks tend to write off the remainder owed. Especially since it is cheap for them to offer to forgive the remainder to shorten the eviction process and prevent damage to the home. At least historically

Of course, if it's not your primary home, they don't need you to waive your rights to stay in the property.

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#712

Post by cucumber3732842 »

BizarroLand wrote: post #400
spaqin wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over time, eBay has become the middleman - with international shipping centres, basically escrow service with buyer protection, and rather high fees for promotion and of course, the actual sale. No middleman is something like Craigslist or FB Marketplace.

eBay has also started doing strongarm middleman things as well. If you list an item, it strongly "suggests" a price. Sounds innocuous, right? However, when every seller knows they would be stupid to list a product for less than the suggested price, that means that eBay is enacting a collusion process on their sellers to regulate prices for products sold on their platform. I don't think this is illegal in any way, but…

eBay doesn't want to deal with low volume hobbyists. They tend to make mistakes, cause support resources to be used, etc, etc. It wants to deal in people who are either professionals or for whom this is a serious side gig who will do the learning curve once and then make thousands of sales.

It's no different than how permitting departments hate homeowners trying to DIY because they make them work whereas the professionals submit stuff they can just rubber stamp.

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#714

Post by blobbers »

dgellow wrote: post #676
blobbers wrote: post #608

Anyone who is interested in how this sort of thing could work, or interested in how it has worked, could read the book "Barbarians at the Gate". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate ) This sort of acquisition is typically called an LBO or Leveraged Buy Out. The story gets into the details of key figures involved, including Henry Kravis who people today would better know for his private equity firm K…

Minus fixing + selling costs

Yep! Always helps when you have sweat equity or some clever idea.

LBOs can have other formats. Take Debt, assign debt to part of the company, auction off arms, legs, kidneys of company to pay off debt... you're left with a shell of your former company but a boatload of cash to pay off the debt and everyone gets their bonuses.

Unfortunately a lot of LBOs tend to result in job cuts. The Twitter deal was a bit of that sort of thing, and we all see where that went.

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#715

Post by flyingcircus3 »

snapcaster wrote: post #706
flyingcircus3 wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is too much overlap with the tropes found in communities who want to believe in aliens and interdimensional beings to take the Gamestop saga seriously. So many appeals to emotion and ignorance, and the investment in a particular outcome has made the reddit groups around this topic indistinguishable from people who are ride or die Trumpers impervious to the falsification of their bad ideas. There is no longer a…

>The festering wound of people like Ken Griffin effortlessly getting away with their crimes You've fallen for it too, what "crimes" is he guilty of exactly?

I don't believe in the theory, I'm stating that I understand the theory to largely revolve around powerful players manipulating markets, such as robinhood to disallow buying GameStop in January 21. In my view, GameStop enjoyers are so thoroughly radicalized and primed to expect another short squeeze, that the content of any given days news, related to GameStop or not, is regularly deciphered as clear sign that of its arrival. A large part of that certainty has seems to stem from the fact that canonically guilty people like Griffin, remaining free, an ever present festering reminder of their grievance.

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#716

Post by BizarroLand »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #712
BizarroLand wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eBay has also started doing strongarm middleman things as well. If you list an item, it strongly "suggests" a price. Sounds innocuous, right? However, when every seller knows they would be stupid to list a product for less than the suggested price, that means that eBay is enacting a collusion process on their sellers to regulate prices for products sold on their platform. I don't think this is illegal in any way, but…

eBay doesn't want to deal with low volume hobbyists. They tend to make mistakes, cause support resources to be used, etc, etc. It wants to deal in people who are either professionals or for whom this is a serious side gig who will do the learning curve once and then make thousands of sales. It's no different than how permitting departments hate homeowners trying to DIY because they make them work whereas the professi…

Well, in that case they are no longer the platform they claimed to be but are wearing an edgar suit shoddily masquerading as the original.

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#717

Post by BizarroLand »

markdown wrote: post #669
jcranmer wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fee for filing a lawsuit by itself is $405. That's before any lawyer touches anything and you get to find out how high a lawyer's hourly rate is. A simple, easy lawsuit will cost you in the same range as a house. Even if you win, thanks to the American rule of "each side pays their own attorneys' fees." No, $700 is not worth a lawsuit.

Do you not have small claims court? They're usually free.

Even if they're not free, they're pretty inexpensive. Worst case you have to pay to have the other side served.

Also, if you decide to use a lawyer and either you or the person who defrauded you lives in certain states, you can also tack on attorney fees:

https://www.trysmallclaims.com/blog/small-claims-court-attor...

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#718

Post by magnetowasright »

Scoundreller wrote: post #661
avemg wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Etsy is not a general second-hand marketplace. Its niche is artisans making small batch items. And making your own thing at the scale of ebay is not exactly a small feat.

I’ve def bought some CD keys off Etsy. They’ll list anything.

Etsy used to have strict limitations on what was allowed to be sold. I'm not sure how effective it was, but since that restriction has been removed, you're right, they'll list anything. Etsy has become a graveyard for dropshipped garbage, and the odd CD key, apparently! CD keys I can get behind.

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#719

Post by jamesfinlayson »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #679
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told that Australian company Wesfarmers fanatically avoids synergies when acquiring companies so that if the time comes to cast it off, there's no painful separation of a bunch of shared systems/departments/real estate etc.

Not saying synergy is a dirty word, always . It's the assumption that there is a lot of overlap (which rarely materializes) and that assimilation or merging has no cost. In practice, company cultures are rarely aligned (the merger wasn't conjured by employees, they weren't even consulted) and frustrated talent leaves. Time is lost navel gazing. Synergy (i.e.: cost reduction) looks great in Q3 balance sheet, but in th…

Oh agreed - I was at a company that was the result of two companies merging and while the reduced head count was an easy synergy (don't need two legal, HR, cyber-security etc teams), everything else was pretty slow.

Re: GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

#720

Post by Throaway199999 »

crazygringo wrote: post #575
shaftway wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that there's no real advantage to eBay buying a pawnshop conglomerate, but a pawnshop conglomerate buying eBay gets a massive advantage. They're already sitting on a mountain of used inventory, and at some point a lot of it will be thrown away because there are no local buyers for it. Having a commission-free way to offload that inventory would be huge for them.

Ebay commissions are not that high, 13.25% for most items. The barrier to listing huge amounts of merchandise is not the commission, but rather the amount of labor it takes to list and price everything and pack and ship it and deal with refunds and returns for items that turn out to have problems. And how a lot of items are only economical to sell locally, because when you add in shipping costs it approaches the valu…

Ebay commissions are higher than that.

13.25% on the entire deposit to your bank account (price + tax + shipping), not just the item price.

Plus an extra tax of around 5% if you are selling from your country to another.

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