A signal of how bad things have gotten... Blue Apron was forced to cook up a "reverse stock split." The stock price got so small ($0.55 heading into last week) that the meal kit pioneer is merging every 15 of its own shares into 1 to boost the price to a less embarrassing number (fractions aren't in season). Now a single serving of Blue Apron stock is around $7, but its logistics, competition, and customer loyalty challenges are the same.
Limited breadsticks... Olive Garden owner Darden Restaurants fell 4% Thursday on word the number of visitors at its top chain actually slowed (despite them being assured that they were family). Olive Garden makes up half its parent company's sales, but it wants more "quality" customers (their words), so it's cutting back on "value meals."
I'm not feeling lucky... Google faced a few more existential issues with the free internet last week:
- Reports surfaced that Google Maps is being manipulated in order to drown competition in an ocean of fake business pins.
- And Google Calendar was down for three hours due to an outage. "Fashionably panicked."
- Then the FTC opened an investigation into Google-owned YouTube for the way it protects/exposes children's privacy.