Wayfair is laying off 1,750 workers | Hacker News Reader

Wayfair is laying off 1,750 workers

wsj.com

184 pointsgreymalik76 comments

Their lack of success might not be entirely pandemic economy driven as the article suggests. I was part of that cohort that discovered and ordered from Wayfair around the start of the pandemic. In 3/3 cases, what I ordered turned out to be of poor quality and slightly different from what was pictured on their website. I’ve had this experience with Amazon and other platforms from time to time, too, but never so consistently. So I decided not to order from there again. I have to wonder if their declining popularity is just a result of other customers like myself having been burned too many times.

Same experience. Poor quality items, confusing dupes with different prices, not particularly cheap compared to other retailers. That said, their customer service was great, likely at great expense to them. Often they would replace an incorrect item without requesting the original be returned, and in one case they shipped a family member the wrong item 3 times before finally sending the correct item. They were told to keep all 4 items.

Damage and returns are a huge cost for the company, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Same here. First time order, and it was poor quality so I requested a return. They refunded and didn’t even want it back. It was $200 but I guess they knew it was junk and not worth the shipping.

While I've browsed around Wayfair in the past, I was mostly put off by the way that there usually seem to be a lot of identical items from different manufacturers - which always gave it a somewhat unscrupulous feel.

Yeah, same situation here. I was looking for furniture after a recent move and ended up sticking to Ikea and a local furniture discounter where I could see/touch it in person, even though I strongly preference online shopping, simply because Wayfair and other sites like it felt like "Wish" for furniture. Lots of obvious shell company names producing identical designs, all manufactured on the fourth-shift as counterfeits/knock-offs of well known products, or just low-cost/low-quality designs sold at significantly above cost.

I ordered from the once and was pleased enough with the result, although it was literally months between order and delivery. At a certain point I thought I was being scammed. The main reason I did not order from them again though, was because although they have a huge inventory, most of it seems...cheap. Lots of assembly-required manufactured wood Scandinavian-lite options, not much that looked permanent. I literally couldn't find anything that looked both durable and in a style I didn't mind. I really wanted to like them because for me buying furniture is still an unsolved problem.

Expensive IKEA without the meatballs and shopping experience.

So I got lucky. I was using wayfair early on and the quality was always great and exactly what I wanted. I think my average order must be have been between 1-2k with them, a couple of times a year. Haven't used them since 2016(?) though.

I was very skeptical of them early on, I do think they are a drop shipper of sorts.

But I have several desks and a shed and even an AC unit that were the best price, higher than ikea quality, and good support. They have good return policy too.

Maybe it depends on what you buy?

Man... HN is full of doomscrolling today with all the layoff articles.

"Engineers over the age of 50 sent to a farm in upstate New York to live out the rest their days in peace"

Lucky for me, I'm already up here! (I've got a little over a decade to go before hitting the 50 milestone, but I figured I'd beat the rush)

Congrats! It's beautiful up there. You're doing it right [=

Indeed I believe that's the goal of FIRE.

Where do I sign?

No, I swear I'm in my 50s. I just have a youthful appearance.

Those are the lucky ones. Others are just put on an ice floe.

I'd sign up and I'm just over 30.

I hate to break it to you but when your beloved pet gets sent to a farm upstate, it's a euphemism for being put down or sent to the glue factory.

Neurologically I am usually the last to understand the point of a joke. I completely missed this.

It's not doomscrolling, its reality. The writing has been on the wall for over a year, and yet people still refuse to see it.

We're at the beginning of a major contraction in tech. It might not be pleasant to hear about but if you work in tech it's important to pay attention.

It really saddens me how often the HN communities general reaction to unpleasant news is to immediately stick their heads in the sand and claim everything is fine.

I'm not an economist, so I'm looking out for an informed opinion on this. What are you basing this on?

I either see the dismissive takes or the doomsayer comments but it all just seems like speculation. I'm not sure if we're in a genuine period of tech decline or it's just overblown companies trimming the fat.

I'm surprised people working in tech can not see this coming, haven't you ever looked at the current tech industry and thought to yourself "something is not right here?"

Tech has been a massive game of shuffling around VC money to create the illusion of a massive part of the economy when it's really all the same money being shuffled around looking for profit and failing to find it.

The heart of the problem boils down to this: There are basically two types of tech companies a.) unprofitable ones, and b.) profitable ones who make most of their money from companies in group a. For over a decade investors have been focusing more and more on growth while completely forgetting the basics about how a business need to run.

This same issue happened in the dotcom bust, PG even has a great description of this from a earlier essay [0]:

> It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too. Not in the Enron way, of course. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a Ponzi scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter—stimulating another round of investments in startups.

I remember the dotcom bust and the big difference between then and now is that the duration of the bubble was much smaller during the dotcom. People back then proclaimed we where in a "new economy" where profits didn't matter anymore. The boom was only a few years and so those critics where proven correct in a short window of time. This time we've been in a bubble so long people don't even remember that companies need to make profits and be sustainable.

During the period of cheap money VCs flooded the industry with so much cash it started to get weird. Wayfair is a great example of this, they had 150 data scientists at one point, what in the world does a furniture reseller need with that many DS people?

Now we're starting to see the conditions that allowed this bubble to form relax very quickly. Not only is cheap money no longer a thing, but the consumers who have been gleefully pouring their extra money into apps that don't quite make sense are starting to feel their wallets get tighter (actually the data looks like they're starting to max out their credit and being forced to reduce spending).

And that's just tech. We truly are in an "everything bubble" [1] were asset classes across the board are wildly overvalued. Unlike the dotcom, this will not stop with tech.

0. http://paulgraham.com/bubble.html

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble

Yeah if anyone has worked at a B2B SaaS startup you would see fast that a large portion of the VC money is just buying other SaaS startup products.

We were basically required to buy all of the products our investors also invested in, and in return they would buy ours. Eventually all of those $10-20/user/month subscriptions add up and really hurt your runway. When I left they were paying for around 30 different subscriptions. Don't get me wrong most of them were useful and cool products, but they definitely were not required.

I briefly worked at a self-proclaimed newly minted unicorn, and every other day I was getting an invite to a new SaaS product for something. It was incredible.

I joined a startup a while back after being in a bigger company for many years and I was baffled by the number of weird SaaS products in use, often for one small function. At least for a couple of these SaaS companies, I later heard, were run by friends of our former CTO. So maybe this isn't just a VC thing, but a startup culture thing. You buy my marginally useful product, I'll buy yours.

Yeah thinking about it more, I agree with you it is both.

We 100% purchased products because the CTO was friends with the other CTO. The other thing was the sales people jumped between startups and would just sell to their same contact list they always have. I wouldn't be surprised they did deals where we bought their product and they bought ours for the same price.

Also, the last start up I worked for used all the products of other start ups funded by the same VCs. It's like a keiretsu of early adopters.

> ...haven't you ever looked at the current tech industry and thought to yourself "something is not right here?"

Yes, but I've thought something has been wrong for near enough a decade. Like I said, I'm a layperson so I'm looking for a source that isn't other tech bros recycling each others' hot takes.

> Tech has been a massive game of shuffling around VC money to create the illusion of a massive part of the economy...

This is how I've understood how tech has operated. Spotify, Uber, etc.

I just don't have the subject knowledge to work out for myself whether you're another doomsayer or not. I appreciate the detailed comment (and I'm reading the sources) but I think it misses what I'm looking for.

If you want a more purely academic/economic perspective on the larger issue I recommend "The End of the Everything Bubble" by Alasdair Nairn. As implied by the title, it doesn't focus exclusively on tech but on the asset bubble as a whole.

Agree with pretty much all points, think the latter part is the real crux of the issue. VC since '08 has just been the wealthy (like 0.01% ers), and sovereign funds trying to figure out where to get returns with ultra-low interest. In addition they have learned that prior to '08 they gave away to much of the pie, so now startups stay private way longer then before. Essentially endless D,E,F,G rounds that end up diluting any chance of a mid-late employee of seeing any value of working for a private company. Its a game now, keep investing and keep the ball rolling with endless rounds even though unprofitable. Cozy up to other funds to cross-pollinate, when one bet gets close to bottoming out then ask buddy to acquire in exchange for you acquiring a buddies low performer. Justify your valuations with growth stories until you get pension funds (i.e. the public) or heaven forbid an IPO on a company who never made a nickel, then cash out. It all works as long as money, i.e. interest stays cheap. At a macro level stock buybacks should be outlawed unless for the express purpose of preventing delisting. Its a meme stock but Bed Bath and Beyond was tanking hard and they just kept pumping up their stock with buybacks. It only makes sense in terms of stockholder/executive compensation. If ever there was a time to make use of excess capital it is in turning around your business. When did companies start seeing every penny of profit must be returned and not gasp go into R&D and expansion/turnaround? If they really want to return money to shareholders then we have a vehicle for that, dividends and gasp shareholders can pay some taxes. Like 90% of long term investors have DRIP set anyway so kinda a non-issue for the layman. https://ycharts.com/companies/BBBY/stock_buyback

Most companies have solutions looking for problems and/or are selling $1 for 50c, that worked for a while in an economy fueled with cheap VC money, but the dance is over.

> informed opinion

How many billion dollar company's core source of value is "we have a webpage"? Having half a million experienced developers who are bored and unemployed might disrupt all that real fast. Interesting times.

I'm genuinely curious if there's a wall this was written on. Does anyone have links to articles/websites that predicted the size and timing of the layoffs?

a lot of layoffs seem to be trimming fat from over hiring during covid

Didn't Wayfair have a massive layoff right at the start of Covid, though?

Yes, they laid off ~500 folks in Feb 2020 right before covid gave them a huge (and in retrospect, temporary) shot in the arm.

> Didn't Wayfair have a massive layoff right at the start of Covid, though?

You missed the following one from last year

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/wayfair-to-layoff-5-of-its...

https://archive.ph/l85GP

There is a tiger in the forest, and it might be stalking me. It's gotten some of my friends, and I might be next.

No emotion is forever, there are brighter days ahead.

edit: I should be clear that I am fine. I am not affected by layoffs, I do not currently have persistent negative emotions. If you do, it is appropriate and good to find help.

It's their 3rd layoff in the last two years. Last year, they were shouting from the roof about opening of three new engineering offices - Austin, SFO, and Toronto. I used to work there during 2019-2020, so I could say - No, you don't need these new offices. Not sure why their leadership took that step.

wow! one little website is busy these days https://layoffs.fyi/

20 days into the new year and there have already been more than 1/3 of 2022's total layoffs.

Admittedly most of those have come from a handful of large companies.

How about weekly articles about companies who aren’t doing layoffs to celebrate them?

Are layoffs at a furniture reseller something hackers find interesting?

That’s like asking whether layoffs at “a bookstore” are interesting

Wayfair is a major player in e-commerce and a very "tech heavy" place. They offer work and salaries that are highly competitive outside of the FAANG bubble. Chewy is another similar company that people often disregard.

E-commerce players in specific verticals (furniture and pet supplies, respectively) are large. We just don't see them because of the absolute fucking behemoth that's Amazon.

I assume a lot of the people affected are probably from their tech department.

wondering how this was missed. or may didn't get much traction on HN https://www.reuters.com/technology/capital-one-scraps-1100-t...

Yes, as it should. Most of what passes for 'tech' is a snazzy UI over low-margin services like dropshipping, food delivery and short term sublets. The ax is swinging at a number of them.

Besides that, Wayfair shares the same 5-10 benefactors whose cash has been holding up numerous unviable companies.

It would be cool if we could have a dedicated section of hacker news or something for these announcements? Like, who cares?

What about a weekly "Who's firing" thread instead ?

Edit: I'm actually sorry for people who've lost their jobs and are negatively impacted by this, but HN is going to get pretty lame if it's just page after page of layoff announcements for the entire recession period.

Yeah, this is getting a bit fearpornish. Shunt it off to somewhere else at this point.

"Sucks that you got let go, but I don't like reading about these things so let's throw your misery and sorrow into an incinerator so I don't have to see it"

I bet approximately 0 people are using whether links to their company's layoffs have been posted on HN as a coping mechanism.

I'm sure that people who have been affected, whether by a specific company mentioned or otherwise, will appreciate reading the comments in the layoff threads such as those talking about employee's worth. What they probably don't appreciate reading is people moaning about having to spend a second reading about yet another layoff.

To say that nobody who has ever been laid off has gotten some amount of coping value from the threads is as asinine as declaring they need to be abolished to the deep dark pits of HN.

These are people's lives we're talking about. Any amount of positive energy is going to be immediately taken when your life has been upended.

I think the parent may be missing the trees for the forest here. I am not going to dismiss 'misery loves company' take, because there is a solid psychological basis for it. I certainly would not put it at zero.

Still, I think one somewhat unspoken reason for some of those posts is to indicate something along the lines of:

'hey. i was affected. i am available for x if you need me'

I am not going to give any specifics, but I know when me and my colleagues went through rounds of layoffs and this kind of informal job search helps to help one gain ground.

So by the same token, there are people without jobs that get anxiety by seeing additional layoffs and getting concerned about their prospects. Do they not deserve sympathy?

You didn't really show concern for them the last two comments. I might believe it were genuine had it been the argument you led with instead of complaining about it being "fearpornish".

And if anything, they'd be the most emphatic towards those laid off.

If there are really going to be that many layoffs, then it seems like an important thing to be covering. Maybe with a weekly roundup, though, like you suggest.

Is it important?

It's news, but as the guidelines suggest, "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic".

The earliest and biggest lay-offs fall under the criteria of "new phenomenon", but posting every company stretches that credibility.

"Hacker news" is different to "Tech news", and hopefully the voting will reflect that difference and these

>>Like, who cares?

The HN voting mechanism suggests that some HNers care enough to upvote these types of announcements to the front page.

There's https://layoffs.fyi which tracks these layoffs.

Edit: corrected the link

https://layoffs.fyi/

Also this is a good link

https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

Nobody's forcing you to read them. Or... is someone forcing you to read them? Are you in need of help? Reply with an innocuous emoji if it's not safe to be direct.

Well, no one is forcing people to post this on HN either.

If people posted well written articles backed by solid journalism and presented statistics and analysis about the cause of the majority of these lays offs then it would be interesting to read and intellectual, IMO it would fit in better with the "theme" of HN. I don't think these articles have a place on the "Hacker news", maybe in the financial review?

Honestly, what's the motive for posting these things one after the other? Is it to help signal some type of financial meltdown, so we feel sympathetic and know "company x" is bad, I just don't really understand why it's interesting to read about or relevant to this community.

Wayfair, like many of these firms, aggressively added staff during the pandemic to expand its warehouse operations and customer-service teams. It had 16,681 full-time equivalent employees as of the end of 2021, up from 12,100 at the end of 2018. Its customer-service staff roughly doubled over that period to about 4,900 people, according to company filings.

So it's pretty clear to see what happened here, a furniture company hired like crazy to meet the surge in demand for WFH furniture and now, demand has slowed and doesn't really need so many people, is that a surprise ?

I feel people must enjoy upvoting these titles because it's a bit dramatic, else there is nothing else interesting to read in that article.

Usually people who are on an industry news site are trying to keep a pulse on the industry. Mass layoffs are an important part of that pulse and layoff after layoff after layoff makes it a bigger part of the story, not a smaller one.

Downvote it and move on if you don’t like it.

Wayfair is a furniture reseller, what industry are you referring too?

Wayfair has a several thousand person software engineering org, so: that one.

Honestly, many many many companies now have several thousand person "engineering" teams, or IT teams.

Telcos, online retailers, banks and on and on.

Is Amazon a book seller only? This is so out of ignorance.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a Who's Firing thread before. Agree a regular one like that would be better.

Interesting; there could be a standardized format for the terms of the layoff too similar to the hiring threads

Considering that currently Hacker News is page after page of ChatGPT, I think this is an improvement.

Very true.

For a moment I thought you were referring to the comments being AI generated. Who knows, perhaps many of them are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com