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Postmates Lays Off All Its City Managers (techcrunch.com)
According to TechCrunch, Postmates has let go of all of its city managers, as it centralizes some of its operations at its headquarters in San Francisco. "The total number of people affected by the move is 15 across markets like Boston, Denver, Las Vegas, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, St Louis, San Diego, and Washington, DC," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In a statement, Postmates said that general managers will take on city managers' responsibilities. "Postmates has grown rapidly over the last six years -- and continues to grow in more than 200 cities across the U.S. As part of that growth, we've decided to centralize some of our regional marketing efforts within our San Francisco headquarters," a spokesperson said in the emailed statement. "Centralizing these functions will enable us to execute more quickly -- and ultimately help us be more nimble and effective as we continue to aggressively scale the company. Our general managers will remain in place and continue to help lead our local efforts. We are thankful to our city managers for all their hard work, and we're confident that they will be successful in their future endeavors."
One of the tipsters, an ex-city manager, said that employees were taken by surprise: Postmates had just earlier this month organized a retreat for the city managers, which they saw as a team building exercise. The tipster also added that the murmurs were that the cost-cutting was being done "as a precursor to an acquisition," but Postmates' spokesperson denied that this is the case, and also ruled out a merger and fundraising as reasons for the cuts.
One of the tipsters, an ex-city manager, said that employees were taken by surprise: Postmates had just earlier this month organized a retreat for the city managers, which they saw as a team building exercise. The tipster also added that the murmurs were that the cost-cutting was being done "as a precursor to an acquisition," but Postmates' spokesperson denied that this is the case, and also ruled out a merger and fundraising as reasons for the cuts.
Seriously, wtf is this?
So a company that nobody has heard of, who makes / performs a product or service that nobody here can identify, laid off 15 people and that rates the front page of Slashdot now?
Seriously?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Postmates had just earlier this month organized a retreat for the city managers, which they saw as a team building exercise.
Those city managers should have seen this coming. During the retreat, they did a "trust fall" exercise... but Postmates made a point of not catching the managers when they fell.
#DeleteChrome
If you think about what makes a sustainable business, part of it is barriers to entry and loyalty that lead to pricing power. There are few barriers to entry for the delivery world (given so much surplus labor and vehicles compared to the demand), and I would say practically zero loyalty.
I know friends (and I myself) who churn between Blue Apron, HelloFresh, Postmates, Taskrabbit, Doordash, Munchery, Safeway, every possible food, delivery, and prep service -- whatever service offers the lowest price or the flavor-of-the-week signup bonus. What do I care if one is named something silly and I change to the other one next week for a lower price?
There's a shakeout happening in this industry, and it's not pretty.