The pricing consultant they brought in was Simon Kutcher...

Another proof point that once the founder-CEO is replaced by a professional CEO, it's game over more often than not. This happened in 2017 at Optimizely.

Happening right now at UserTesting. As the CMO would say: "yay!"

Yuuuuuuuuup.

The PR they generated for it was crazy... would love to read a post-mortem.

"If people don't pay for a company's products, that company will go out of business."

The problem is that capitalism has broken down.

20% of publicly traded companies are zombies. Their earnings are below what they need to pay INTEREST on their debt.

Government is bailing out inefficient companies, whose assets would otherwise be sold off to more efficient operators.

ShadowStats.com tracks the Consumer Price Index according to the old 1980 and 1990 methodologies.... 6% or 10% annually vs. less than 2% under the current CPI index.

I have long suspected this- thank you ...

The Hertz investors clearly didn't :)

The money apparently goes to the victims. Maybe people are being charitable.

If it's anything like bankruptcy in the UK, it will go to the subset of the "victims" who have the best lawyers.

Fees for Lawyers and accountants dealing with the bankruptcy will be deducted first. Any money owed to banks will be paid next. If there is any left, it will go to pay any taxes owed to the government or the local authorities. Eventually whatever is left will be divided proportionally between whoever is left owed money, but this will probably be a tiny fraction of the amount they are owed, if anything at all.

THIS x 1000.

Walmart used to have a page for employees telling them how to apply for food stamps.

Those costs should be charged back to the company.

Taxing the rich won't solve for crony capitalism...

Tesla's $7b in taxpayer subsidies.

The armies of lobbyists who LITERARILY write legislation.

The regulatory capture affecting certain professions - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/592376568

The government is an incredibly poor & wasteful allocator of capital. Full stop.

The founders of the country would shudder at at the size, scope and over-reach of the government...

Also remember, income tax was introduced as a "temporary" measure... the country had roads, hospitals, and orphanages before that.

> The government is an incredibly poor & wasteful allocator of capital. Full stop.

Which government? What is the threshold for “poor allocation”?

Seems like the free market misallocates a lot of capital to me. WeWork was allocated over a billion dollars of investment, and $47 billion in value, that could be easily argued would have be better used elsewhere.

At least that money can get counted for properly... and venture capital as an asset class still generates double-digit IRRs, and LPs stop funding investors with poor returns.

The Pentagon has spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars in building systems to just try to account for its waste, highly recommend this long read from Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pent... and http://nebraskansforpeace.org/pentagon_accounting_fraud

The stuff about government people spending 15 year careers entering phony numbers is just insane: https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-accounting-conceals...

> The founders of the country would shudder at at the size, scope and over-reach of the government...

I don't think they would (not all of them). Jefferson would for sure, but this is basically Alexander Hamilton's utopian dream. The world he wanted to create. Congrats Alex, you won, everybody else lost.

I agree w/ you that the govt is wasteful. I wish we had where states provide all the citizen benefits and also received the majority of tax revenues, and the fed was a lot smaller and even states managed their own armies and the fed just borrowed soldiers from states for international purposes. Basically their own countries just unionized over interstate commerce and such.