Re:Zenefits cuts nearly 50% of workforce
by Analemma_ on Thursday February 09, 2017 @12:28PM
(#13608798)
One answer: destructive to other businesses that can't compete with VC-backed price dumping. A good recent example was wash.io: they undercut and drove out a bunch of laundromats in San Francisco, and then, just to put the cherry on the stupidity cake, they went out of business themselves, so now there are a whole bunch of people in SF that can't do laundry. There was an extensive Twitter debate about this that I would link to, but it appears to have all been deleted.
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Re:Zenefits cuts nearly 50% of workforce
by GVIrish on Thursday February 09, 2017 @03:39PM
(#13610720)
That sounds like a good subject for a long blog post or article in the SF Chronicle.
Re:Zenefits cuts nearly 50% of workforce
by pliny on Thursday February 09, 2017 @12:44PM
(#13608980)
Where did all the washing machines go? Did they destroy them? If all those places sold their washing machines when they went out of business then the capacity for doing laundry was conserved.
Re:Zenefits cuts nearly 50% of workforce
by untog on Thursday February 09, 2017 @12:53PM
(#13609066)
Come on. You can't just conjour up a laundrette like you spin up an AWS instance. You need to find real estate, employees, equipment. All of those will have been redistributed when the business shut down and any new proprietor will have to start all over from scratch.
Re:Zenefits cuts nearly 50% of workforce
by djrogers on Thursday February 09, 2017 @01:23PM
(#13609391)
I think the GPs point was that presumably the equipment and real estate still existed at some point after wash.io shut down. They could have been sold off as businesses rather than simply being dumped through an auction house, but it sounds like that's not what happened.
Re:Zenefits cuts nearly 50% of workforce
by dragonwriter on Thursday February 09, 2017 @03:03PM
(#13610383)
> Where did all the washing machines go?
Presumably, to places where a VC backed startup hadn't destroyed the laundromat industry. San Francisco is not a closed economy.
> Where did all the washing machines go?
Probably to community theaters (Or hotels, or the equivalents thereof) in Pittsburgh, who picked them up for a discount at a liquidation auction.
Great news for out-of-state community theater, bad news if you need your laundry done in California.
Either that, or they went straight to the junkyard. Move fast and break things.