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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Look, I get that most people are just going to read the headline, hell most people who share this article will probably never open it, but that's really no excuse for writing an 'article' that has no more substance than the headline.

Questions I want answered in an article like this:

* What is Blue Apron's reason for the job cuts?

* What are Blue Apron's plans for the future? Focusing on core markets, expansions, grocery store partnerships, more product offerings?

* What do their finances look like? Things like customer acquisition, subscription length, service costs? How did the job cuts affect them?

* What is the author's analysis of the situation?

* How's the meal-prep market doing overall?

* Is there a downward trend in these kinds of convenience services?

* Was this going to happen anyway or was there increased pressure from the IPO?

* Is this typical for companies that IPO?

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It's Bloomberg - they specialize in getting info out quickly and filling in the details as they hear about it. Not thorough, but being first is what, you know, gets you to the top of Hacker News and lets you sell ridiculously expensive stock trading terminals.

Now we see some of the future details coming in:

> Blue Apron Holdings Inc. is closing a New Jersey facility and moving 1,270 jobs to a bigger site opening in the state later this year.

> More than half of the employees at the Jersey City facility have decided to move to Linden, New Jersey, a company spokeswoman said. According to a public notice, the original Jersey City fulfillment center will close by October. Workers notified Friday of the changes will still have the opportunity to relocate to the new warehouse, the spokeswoman said. The move affects 24 percent of Blue Apron’s workforce.

> Opening new site in Linden that will need 2,000 or more staff

They're growing and relocating, this isn't a massive downsizing as the headline would have you believe, unless it's PR spin on something I don't fully understand.

The stock is definitely down 5%, so if you figure it out feel free to let me know and I'll buy some options :)

> More than half of the employees at the Jersey City facility have decided to move to Linden, New Jersey

Fun fact if you haven't experienced it before. A company will close a facility, and say you can have the same job elsewhere usually requiring drastically different travel time. If you refuse you can't draw unemployment or get any benefits because you turned down the job.

It's not all roses.

Ah, then that's the PR spin I was trying to be cautious of. It's hard to tell the math from the way they've written it here. What was the former number of employees and what will it be going forward?

That makes sense, and explains why the stock is down. It's actually a nastier form of layoffs. Thanks!

Edit: Actually it looks like it's a net increase in employment. This is insanity.

buying blue apron calls. It's trading at $5.78

You're going to get burned dude.

IBM use to offer a relocation option after layoffs ("resource action") to India with Indian pay, happened to me :)

Do you know of any IBM employees not from India taking the relocation option to India?

This happened almost 10 yrs ago and I don't anyone who took the deal....I can't imagine anyone would accept such a package, even people who are from India...it was basically just a legal and PR cover, they knew no one was going to take it.

Depends on the state! I don't know about NJ but in CA there is some coverage for you depending how far the office moves..

To be fair, it's only 12 miles away. While definitely a pain I don't think it's totally unreasonable especially considering there are almost certainly legitimate operational needs for a larger facility.

In London that's about the same as moving an office from West London to East London (which is happening all the time).

It looks like Blue Apron misspoke to the press and gave numbers that made it sound like massive layoffs, and Bloomberg wrote the initial version of this article based on the CNBC reporting, which was based on the bad numbers. See this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jowens510/status/893545938790363139

If that's true, that is an error of massive proportions, and you should buy blue apron stock/call options right now.

The algorithmic trading hasn't picked up on that yet.

>that's really no excuse for writing an 'article' that has no more substance than the headline

I don't really agree. This is breaking news and it is unlikely that the distributor has any of the answers to the questions you've asked. Readers of a new distributor (here, Bloomberg) get the convenience of having to only follow one source to get a variety of breaking news.

Seems like there's an opportunity for a publishing platform that can pull up answers to rudimentary questions like these and include them in sidebar to breaking new like this.

Did you even read the article yourself? The first word in the article links to their stock info, which should answer most of your questions.

The second sentence explains that the laid off employees chose not to relocate to the new, larger facility in a different city, which answers a few of your other questions.

The WARN notice showed up about an hour and a half ago. It's still a developing story.

They may not have the answers to any of those questions yet. It's still news.

> * What is Blue Apron's reason for the job cuts?

Companies sometimes increase headcount before a fundraising event to create a signal that growth is occurring, or to maximize one area of visible growth as much as possible. This headcount is not always needed after the raise.

> * Was this going to happen anyway or was there increased pressure from the IPO?

After funding the company can focus on essential expenditures and focus its growth and revenue targets on what matters most to investors. It's a good thing for shareholders to cut costs, since headcount can always be increased again when necessary.

You want a steak in 15 seconds. I want a pony and a million dollars. We all can want things, but we shouldn't necessarily expect to get them.

Does any of that really matter though? Blue Apron is now accountable to the share holder, so they need to be profitable no matter what. The business doesn't matter, they are fast casual delivered to your house, it's a fragile and easily replaceable market to be in, so they need to be profitable to appear strong.

If the reason is that they improved operations efficiency by 24%, id day that detail matters a lot.

From the context, I don’t think that’s the reason, but the article should probably say.

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