The Almighty Buck

The NYT Magazine this week focuses on a topic near and dear to its heart: money. Stories about the dotcom boom, priorities, the cult of Wall Street. Some of the stories are interesting, as with this comparison of how far a dollar goes depending on where you live. Some are disturbing, like this one on CEO salaries. And several are (unintentionally) humorous, like this one about bankrupt Etoys and this one, by a rich writer who believes everyone else is rich too.

Comments

babycenter vs eToys

[Anonymous Coward]

Another interesting part of the story.

eToys had one subsidiary, Babycenter [babycenter.com], which they bought in 1999 for like $90 million in eToys stock. I still know many Babycenter employees.

Here are some stats:

- Number of employees in December, 2000:
eToys: over 1000, not including babycenter
babycenter: 90

- Number of layoffs by Feb 2001:
eToys: 700
Babycenter: 20

- Revenue in 2000 (not profit):
eToys: $70 million
Babycenter: $20 million (consider that they had
10% of the staffing)

- Expenses in 2000:
eToys: $100 million
Babycenter: $20 million

- Typical expenses in the FALL of 2000 (Which
is when they were considering bankruptcy):
eToys: Brand new shiney Pentium III with a flat
screen monitor for most employees
- Brand new shiny headquarters in West Los Angeles, with a $100 million 10 year lease

Babycenter: The poor schmucks are still using
PII/366 & Sun Ultra5 machines
- converted warehouse in SOMA, San Francisco

- Amount that the entity sold for in spring 2001
eToys: $7 million to KBToys
Babycenter: $12 million to Johnson & Johnson

- Number of employees who still work for the company:

eToys: 10 or so
Babycenter: 70 (almost everyone)

- Number of days that the website has been down
due to the bankruptcy

eToys: 90 - March - May
Babycenter: Zero

- Number of managers who came in from the parent company to replace existing managers:

eToys: almost all of them
Babycenter: 1 , the finance controler

Re:Are we really richer?

[zaren]

Just to put a response on this from someone you're talking about... :)

I live in Taco's neck of the woods - cost of living is a bit on the high end here, IMHO - and I'm working one job, while my wife stays home to take care of our two kids. We're paying the bank for the privelage of living under a single roof, and that privelage takes up about 50% of my monthly takehome pay. The only reason we could afford the house was thanks to an inheritance, which barely covered the down payment.

Yes, we have two color tvs and two vcrs, but that's only because we spent good money on the first ones, and they still work well enough to be used in the basement on occasion. There's also an original Nintendo connected to that tv in the basement that we bought used years ago - no Playstations, no XBoxen. No Game Boys in the house, either. I splurged last month and ordered one of those 76-games-in-one game systems that were mentioned in an article here recently, and it's the best thing in the world as far as the kids are concerned. The dvd player that we just got last Christmas is a no-name Best Buy special, and we don't own any dvds (yet). The newest computer that was purchased was a used Bondi blue iMac, and that was two years ago. There's also the G3 that I bought five years ago (wow, that thing's getting old...) with a G4 upgrade that I put in it last year.

We don't go out to the movies, and if we're lucky, we go out to eat once a month. It's too expensive for these things, and the kids are too much hassle to take out in public sometimes :) Nobody in the house drinks, smokes, or does drugs other than caffeine and chocolate. I've always said I never did those other things because I couldn't afford them :) Yes, we have two cars; one is my economy car for shuttling to and from work, and the other is the grocery getter / kid hauler. Both cars are fully paid for, and over 10 years old.

According to that article, we're a "below average" household, based strictly on the income numbers and education levels. Strangely enough, our household basically is the 50s/60s standard model - I come home from a day at work, the kids run up to greet me at the door, and the wife is getting dinner ready after her long day of cleaning / laundry / kid corraling. She does the bookkeeping too - I just bring home the money :) (She's the one with the business degree, after all; I'm just a geek.) She says things are kind of tight, but they've always been that way; we still manage to get by somehow. We don't have the latest and greatest toys (despite my geeky wants and urges), but we're still a happy, "average" American family. I don't see that we're particularly well off, but we're holding our own. The trick to the financials of all this is -

wait for it -

live WITHIN your means.

Just like they did back in the "good old days" before all the PDAs and TiVos and cell phones (oh yeah, one Tracfone in the household - $20 every two months for a phone I barely use for thirty minutes a month), you only spend what's in the bank, or what you KNOW is going to be in the bank come the next paycheck. There's only been a few times that our total credit card debt has been over $1500 at the end of a month, which from what I understand is WAY below average. This is something that people seem to have forgotten - the people that give you those pieces of plastic want their money back someday, and someday SOON.

Like that NYTimes article says, everyone acts like their financial salvation is coming just over the next hill... but the odds are REALLY good that what's over the next hill is just the next paycheck. If you live life expecting that next check, you won't be surprised - or at least, you won't be disappointed when the monthly bills show up. If you learn to take care of what you have, and make do with what you have, you don't have to be throwing tons of money out the window every month for the next "newest and bestest". Regular oil changes are a lot cheaper than a new car every few years because the engine blew up after you kept treating it like crap.

We may not be financially compared to other households in this country, but we're financially stable, and we're overflowing with intangibles that a happy family provides.

/me checks the preview... wow, I was in a mood to write tonight, wasn't I? :) Sifting through to edit out some of the more personal information...

And after this lengthy monologue about money and happiness and making do, I leave you with a link to a site where you could win new geek toys, and put some affiliate money in my pocket in the process so I can buy more toys :)

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Apple hardware still too expensive for you? How about a raffle ticket?