Audio By Carbonatix
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THE HEADLINES
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NOT IN THE CARDS
Walmart is going all “it’s not you, it’s me” with its current store credit card partner, Synchrony. The companies have been together for almost two decades, beginning their courtship in 1999. For context, Will Smith was a rapper in 1999.
Wally-world’s new bae? Capital One. The companies will partner on cards that can only be used in-store or online, as well as Walmart branded credit cards which holders can ironically use on Amazon … or wherever plastic is accepted.
Things at Synchrony have been going about as well as they have been for its former parent company, GE (read: piss poor). Walmart accounts for 19% of Synchrony’s store-credit portfolio. Its top five clients also include(d) Toys R Us and JCPenney.
This is the biggest news to drop in the store-credit card space since Costco dropped Amex back in 2016.
Water Cooler Talking Point: “Let’s be honest, it’s pretty unfair. Synchrony shows up to Bentonville with a PowerPoint deck, three VP’s of Sales and some company branded stress balls. Cap One sends Samuel L. Jackson. Game over.”
AND THAT’S THE BOTTOM LINE CAUSE BEZOS SAID SO
It’s good to be Jeff Bezos. Besides not being Mark Zuckerberg, the richest man on earth’s company announced record-breaking quarterly profits of $2.53B yesterday.
Despite the great bottom line figure, Amazon’s revenue missed estimates for the quarter. Analysts predicted a 41% increase in revenue, but the company achieved 39%. To which a company spokesperson responded, “At least we’re not Facebook.”
The thing is, with such intense capital investments to this point, the A to Z retailer has not turned much of a profit. With expansion in their distribution channels, growth in the cloud computing service’s space, and an effort to cut costs, profitability seems to have investors hot and bothered.
Water Cooler Talking Point: “I don’t know about you, but I’m registering for Amazon’s last mile program. It’s like Uber for packages.”
IT’S HIP TO BE SLACK
Slack, the office chat service geared towards tech workers and millennials has no plans to stop fighting the good fight against Microsoft, the Goliath to its David. Atlassian, the makers of Slack competitor Hipchat, will be selling the service to Slack, who plans to promptly put Hipchat out of its misery and migrate its users to Slack’s platform.
Atlassian won’t be left out in the cold, however. The Sydney-based communication’s company has announced that Slack will only be buying the intellectual property for Hipchat, so the two companies will likely be working together on products moving forward. Atlassian also received a small share of Slack as part of the deal.
For current Hipchat users, the future may seem uncertain, but they’ll be able to continue using the service they’re used to until at least February of next year.
For those keeping score at home, the Microsoft Teams platform boasts 200k “organization” clients, while Slack counts 500k.
Water Cooler Talking Point: “As soon as Slack rolled out the ability to insert inappropriate gifs directly into a work-related chat app, it was apparent that they were in this thing for the long haul.”
IN OTHER NEWS
- Pass the aux cord. Spotify reported a 10% increase in subscribers in the previous quarter, due largely to promotions (read: people who signed up for a $0.99 per month trial to stop the Spotify spamming). The streaming giant now boasts 83M paying subscribers and 180M overall users. However, in its second quarter as a public company, SPOT missed revenue (er, loss) projections.
- You know what they say: third time’s the charm. The Winklevoss twin’s bitcoin ETF was rejected for a second time by the SEC partially due to security concerns, but mostly because, “well, f*ck the Winklevii.”
- Stripe plans to begin issuing credit cards. The dynamic product will be used by businesses to control employees expense account … thus stripping what little joy corporate Americans still grasp onto.
- Better ingredients. Better pizza. Better lawyer up. Papa John is suing Papa John’s seeking documents (presumably olive oil stained PJ’s napkin) “because of the unexplained and heavy-handed way in which the company has treated him since the publication of a story that falsely accused him of using a racial slur.” Yes, the racial slur he apologized for using …
- RadioShack is giving it another go. It plans to open 100 pop-ups in HobbyTowns across the US. What could possibly go wrong when a two-time bankrupted electronics outlet teams up with a fledgling hobby chain?