Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
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Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#2Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#3As sure as the sun rises in the East, "Suburban Moms (and Dads) Get Suckered By Over-Promised Sales Projections" is the headline that will never go away (see LulaRoe, MonaVie, just about any other MLM scam, not to mention other over-hyped franchises like Quiznos).
At the same time, though, the franchisees had plenty of greed of their own. The article states "They also say it promised them the ability to run businesses as investors rather than as hands-on managers." If your only contribution to a business is giving it money, you are essentially always better sticking that money in the stock market. If you have some special talent, skill, connections, etc. that you can leverage, sure, go for it. But the idea that you can beat the market with no special benefit that you bring to the table is a fantasy as old as capitalism.
Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#4As sure as the sun rises in the East, "Suburban Moms (and Dads) Get Suckered By Over-Promised Sales Projections" is the headline that will never go away (see LulaRoe, MonaVie, just about any other MLM scam, not to mention other over-hyped franchises like Quiznos). At the same time, though, the franchisees had plenty of greed of their own. The article states "They also say it promised them the ability to run businesse…
>If your only contribution to a business is giving it money, you are essentially always better sticking that money in the stock market.... the idea that you can beat the market with no special benefit that you bring to the table is a fantasy as old as capitalism
I feel like EMH is increasingly becoming a strange & unfalsifiable quasi-religion for some people. I believe even the strongest forms of EMH cover publicly traded stocks, and not investments in privately held companies. Are you saying that it's literally impossible for me to invest in a local gym, real estate development, plumbing company, landscaper etc. and not beat the US equity market's average return of 9% a year? Because that's obviously ridiculously untrue. The main reason why I can't price say Apple better than the stock market can is the absolutely staggering amount of global competition to do so. But there's exponentially less competition to invest in a smaller, privately-held local business- I'm not competing with hedge funds and so on.
I'm a Boglehead, and the good parts of EMH have a lot of wise things to say about the impossibility of pricing individual publicly traded companies better than the broader stock market. But super-strong EMH has become a bit of an intellectual cult, and I see people way over-extending it into domains that it was never supposed to cover. It's becoming like a learned helplessness 'it's impossible for anything to be profitable because EMH'
Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#5The article is mostly about franchisees getting ripped off, but I think an important theme is that any business focused on physical fitness often is the fad of the moment, and can be difficult to sustain itself for long because of the need to have customers paying memberships forever. Customers start out thinking they'll always go to the gym or dance studio or whatever, but most inevitably drop out. My advice: stay away from fantasies of owning or investing in membership physical fitness businesses or venues.
Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#6My parents got suckered into Amway back in the 80s and a lot of their generation repeatedly fell for other "run your own business" scams. I always hoped future generations would prove to be more cynical and less gullible and these kinds of things would die. But the next generations seem to be falling for them too, in even greater numbers, plus the modern versions like leadgen and dropshipping "businesses," NFTs, and other online scams. Not sure what can be done about it. It's not technically illegal for a fool to be parted from his money.
Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#7The article is mostly about franchisees getting ripped off, but I think an important theme is that any business focused on physical fitness often is the fad of the moment, and can be difficult to sustain itself for long because of the need to have customers paying memberships forever. Customers start out thinking they'll always go to the gym or dance studio or whatever, but most inevitably drop out. My advice: stay a…
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Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#8As sure as the sun rises in the East, "Suburban Moms (and Dads) Get Suckered By Over-Promised Sales Projections" is the headline that will never go away (see LulaRoe, MonaVie, just about any other MLM scam, not to mention other over-hyped franchises like Quiznos). At the same time, though, the franchisees had plenty of greed of their own. The article states "They also say it promised them the ability to run businesse…
>If your only contribution to a business is giving it money, you are essentially always better sticking that money in the stock market.... the idea that you can beat the market with no special benefit that you bring to the table is a fantasy as old as capitalism I feel like EMH is increasingly becoming a strange & unfalsifiable quasi-religion for some people. I believe even the strongest forms of EMH cover publicly t…
In case anyone else was wondering, EMH = Efficient Market Hypothesis (which is a reason people think that investing in an ETF is the best way to go, since trying to pick individual stocks is a losing game).
Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
#9The article is mostly about franchisees getting ripped off, but I think an important theme is that any business focused on physical fitness often is the fad of the moment, and can be difficult to sustain itself for long because of the need to have customers paying memberships forever. Customers start out thinking they'll always go to the gym or dance studio or whatever, but most inevitably drop out. My advice: stay a…
I guess this is why it’s so hard to cancel gym memberships. I wonder how these places will be affected by ozempic/etc. On the one hand, people won’t have to exercise to lose weight at much as before. On the other hand, perhaps there will be a cultural change that emphasizes muscle mass/tone more than now. That is, being not-overweight will be the default, and the way people will stand out will be muscle tone, perfect skin/hair/etc. What franchises will pop up to serve these needs?
Re: Club Pilates, Pure Barre owners say Xponential left them bankrupt
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