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Hot Topic To Buy ThinkGeek Parent Company Geeknet
jones_supa points out the news (also at Ars Technica, and -- paywalled -- at the Wall Street Journal) that clothing and music retailer Hot Topic has announced plans to buy Geeknet, parent company of ThinkGeek and ThinkGeek Solutions, for $117.3 million. ThinkGeek Solutions is a distributor of video-game themed merchandise through licensed web stores. Hot Topic Inc. will pay $17.50 per Geeknet share. Privately held Hot Topic, based in Los Angeles, has more than 650 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Geeknet will become a Hot Topic subsidiary.
This news inspires some nostalgia here; ThinkGeek was for a long time one of Slashdot's sister sites under the umbrella of VA Linux, and I had some fun years back helping to set up the ThinkGeek booth at LinuxWorld in New York.
Good luck figuring out who owns Sycamore Partners.
plus $7.00 shipping (more than it actually costs to ship).
Actually that's probably pretty close to their actual cost to ship an item like that. Couriers like Fedex and UPS charge by weight (or dimensional weight) and discounts to shippers are based almost entirely on volume. Thinkgeek doesn't do the kind of volume Amazon does and won't get the kind of discounts Amazon gets. So I'd expect their freight cost to be $5-7 or so for an item like that for ground service with tracking. Then you have to consider handling. They have to pay for a box and stuffing which will probably cost between $0.50-1.00 and they have to pay someone to put the item in the box, seal it, and ship it which is probably another $0.30-0.75. Frankly $7 isn't shocking at all.
People have gotten spoiled on freight costs but I used to own a company that would ship several hundred packages a week and $7 shipping and handling for delivery by UPS or similar is pretty much what you should expect to pay from anyone who isn't a very large company that ships thousands of packages a day.
I know that trainwreck watching ain't nice, but it's a funny pastime for antisocial assholes like me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I rarely go to malls or cd stores anymore but I was at the mall with my teenage son not to long ago. The local hot topic has game, movie, and pop culture t-shirts and hats all displayed at the front of the store and as you go farther from the front door the content becomes more adult until you reach a door that says "you must be 18 to enter".
I think he was saying that a tiny USB PacMan light is going to be so small as to not actually cost $7 to ship it.
Even a 1 pound ground package will be cost something close to $7-10 and probably more if it is any distance. UPS and Fedex don't deal in weights less than a pound - they round up to the nearest pound. You don't have to take my word for it. Go ahead and try to get a better price from Fedex or UPS. I promise you that you cannot do it.
It should be about $3 or less.
It isn't $3 and won't be unless you ship a HUGE (meaning many tens of thousands) number of packages. The only way you might get a shipping cost that low would be to ship it in a padded envelope using first class mail via USPS with no tracking. I've been shipping via UPS and Fedex for literally decades. Your perception of what it should cost to ship doesn't match reality.
The prices are already marked up so fucking high I can see up Ms. PacMan's skirt, they can afford to let a couple of small items ship for free
High prices does not mean they are necessarily profitable and no it doesn't mean they necessarily can afford to ship stuff for free. Maybe they can but you simply don't have the information to make that judgement.
There are a couple of assholes sellers on Amazon charging $18 to ship a fucking $7 item, but for the most part Amazon ships stuff for very little, or free.
There is no such thing as free shipping. If it is "free" then it is simply rolled into the price of the item, possibly at the expense of the profit margin of the vendor. Companies like Amazon get good shipping rates because they ship an enormous volume of packages. I use their Prime service and it's great but I have no illusions that the service is actually free of charge.