I have to disagree with you on a couple of points. I do agree that there's a lot of evil in hedge funds and Wall Street in general. And I love the Reddit people screwing with them and Melvin(?) needing a bail-out because of their massive bets against Game Stop.
But Game Stop is fundamentally doomed and this is probably not going to save them for one big reason: the CEO and board really don't want to save it. They want to milk what little is left out of it then pop their golden parachutes.
They closed 460 locations last year. They're highly leveraged in malls, and malls are dying. And there's the basic problem of so much game content is being distributed online, so what's the point of going into a brick and mortar store? You're not going to buy State of Decay 2 or 3 or whatever in a store because you have to download it.
Their purchase of the Think Geek stores was widely viewed as a bad idea. They were beautiful stores, but they carried material that needed to be seen in person. The stores were wonderful to wander through and admire, and I spent some fair coin in them. But if there's one thing you can say about every Game Stop store that I've seen, it's that they are SMALL. There's just no way you can carry Think Geek merchandise in them, and you can't afford to expand the stores. So you move Think Geek online, and now you're competing against the entire internet of geek merchandise. You're going to fail to distinguish yourself against that crowded universe, guaranteed failure.
Absolute waste of money.
So all this stock manipulation is going to achieve is prolong the death of Game Stop and give more money to the board and stockholders.
In the end, the chain is still going to die an unpleasant death. No more money is going to go to the employees, they're still going to make $12-15 an hour. No more merchandise is going to go into the stores, they've been slow to stock new titles for years.
The board and the CEO want it to die.
Total kudos to the people demonstrating that Wall Street is nothing to respect. But Game Stop is moribund, and what they are doing is not going to change that unless they can somehow manage a total board takeover, and then we'll see if they're up to the challenge of running a nation-wide multi-million dollar company that is tipping over the precipice.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2021-01-30 06:41 pm (UTC)But Game Stop is fundamentally doomed and this is probably not going to save them for one big reason: the CEO and board really don't want to save it. They want to milk what little is left out of it then pop their golden parachutes.
They closed 460 locations last year. They're highly leveraged in malls, and malls are dying. And there's the basic problem of so much game content is being distributed online, so what's the point of going into a brick and mortar store? You're not going to buy State of Decay 2 or 3 or whatever in a store because you have to download it.
Their purchase of the Think Geek stores was widely viewed as a bad idea. They were beautiful stores, but they carried material that needed to be seen in person. The stores were wonderful to wander through and admire, and I spent some fair coin in them. But if there's one thing you can say about every Game Stop store that I've seen, it's that they are SMALL. There's just no way you can carry Think Geek merchandise in them, and you can't afford to expand the stores. So you move Think Geek online, and now you're competing against the entire internet of geek merchandise. You're going to fail to distinguish yourself against that crowded universe, guaranteed failure.
Absolute waste of money.
So all this stock manipulation is going to achieve is prolong the death of Game Stop and give more money to the board and stockholders.
In the end, the chain is still going to die an unpleasant death. No more money is going to go to the employees, they're still going to make $12-15 an hour. No more merchandise is going to go into the stores, they've been slow to stock new titles for years.
The board and the CEO want it to die.
Total kudos to the people demonstrating that Wall Street is nothing to respect. But Game Stop is moribund, and what they are doing is not going to change that unless they can somehow manage a total board takeover, and then we'll see if they're up to the challenge of running a nation-wide multi-million dollar company that is tipping over the precipice.