bird with big dick posted:

I love how they're talking about Blockbuster becoming enormously profitable by opening a bunch of brick and mortar theaters as opposed to you know those companies that already own thousands of brick and mortar theaters that aren't really doing that hot.

Boxturret posted:

but they haven't thought of adding games to them!

istewart posted:

I've actually been hoping somebody writes a well-documented, critical book on how Eddie Lampert ran Sears into the ground. Even as it was going on, hyper-capitalist finance/investor types were all, "yup, this guy's totally strip-mining the company for his own benefit, this is going to end badly." And it did! If somebody's already come out with that book and I just missed it, please let me know!

ranbo das posted:

BBBY is actually a perfect example of this, as they were going into bankruptcy a hedge fund bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock from the company directly (which went directly into bonds, which were held by large corporations) and dumped them onto retail investors, netting profit in the tens of millions. Had it not been a meme stock, those hundreds of millions wouldn't have been able to be sold.

I'd bet AMC and GME see similar things when they go down.

Thorgot posted:

AMC is interesting because, unlike the other meme stocks, it shows some signs of recovery.

They still have liquidity and debt issues to go along with record revenues and solid profits, but they aren't facing the same doom spiral as Gamestop and Bed Barf and Babies.

ranbo das posted:

BBBY is actually a perfect example of this, as they were going into bankruptcy a hedge fund bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock from the company directly (which went directly into bonds, which were held by large corporations) and dumped them onto retail investors, netting profit in the tens of millions. Had it not been a meme stock, those hundreds of millions wouldn't have been able to be sold.

I'd bet AMC and GME see similar things when they go down.

quote:

You know the deal. AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. had a meme stock that traded up a lot even as AMC’s business was struggling. AMC took advantage of this dynamic to sell a lot of stock — so much stock, in fact, that it ran out. Its corporate charter authorizes 524 million common shares, and by last summer it had issued essentially all of them.

The obvious solution was for AMC to ask its shareholders to vote to amend the charter and authorize more shares. In 2021, AMC did that, but then withdrew the proposal in the face of shareholder … well, I am not sure what to call it. “Shareholder opposition,” perhaps. “Shareholder indifference,” maybe. The point is that AMC needed to get a vote of a majority of all of its common shares to approve the charter amendment. There were two problems. One is that its shareholders are mostly individual retail investors, and retail investors tend not to vote much [1] ; only about half of AMC’s shares voted at its last annual meeting. The other is that some of those investors really didn’t like the plan to issue more stock, worrying that it would dilute their ownership (or help out short sellers, or otherwise bring down the price of AMC stock). Those two problems are additive: AMC needed a majority of all of its shares to vote to authorize more shares; if 40% of its shareholders didn’t vote and another 20% voted no, then the proposal would fail. So AMC withdrew it.

Last summer, AMC came up with a less obvious but much funnier solution: Its board used its authority to issue “blank-check preferred stock” — basically preferred stock with any terms it likes, without shareholder approval — to issue a new sort of stock called APEs, AMC Preferred Equity Units, that are meant to replicate common stock. They have the same economic rights as common stock, and the same voting rights. AMC airdropped the APEs on its shareholders, issuing one APE for each common share as a stock dividend, and then went merrily along selling APEs to raise more cash.

One way for this to go would be for the market to decide that APEs are a close substitute for common shares, and price them accordingly. That mostly did not happen: By Dec. 21, AMC’s common stock was trading at $5.30 per share, while the APEs were at just $0.685. AMC was selling an economic equivalent to common stock at an 80+% discount to the price of the common stock, which is definitely dilutive for shareholders.

The other way for it to go would be for AMC to ask shareholders again to amend the charter and authorize more shares, and then to use the additional authorization to convert the APEs into common shares and collapse everything back into one, more abundant, class of stock. On Dec. 22, AMC announced that it would do that. The APEs went up, and the common stock went down, as the market anticipated that the conversion.

The shareholder vote to approve the conversion is scheduled for March 14. One assumes it will be approved:

The APEs and common shares vote together as a single class, and there are now way more APEs than common shares.
The APEs have an incentive to vote yes: If their APEs are converted into common stock, that is good for APE holders, since right now APEs trade at a much lower price than the common.
A big block of APEs was placed with one investor, Antara Capital LP, who agreed to hold its APEs through the vote and vote them in favor of the amendment.
The APEs have a voting mechanism where they are technically preferred shares held by a depositary, and the depositary has to vote all of the shares in proportion to the voting instructions it actually gets, so if 40% of APE holders vote yes and 10% vote no (and 50% don’t vote), the actual preferred shares will vote 80% yes and 20% no.
I wrote: “AMC has solved the problem of retail non-voting, by giving its retail shareholders APE units that (1) have voting rights but (2) don’t rely on most of the holders actually bothering to vote.”

BigBadSteve posted:

I see that there's Institutional Suicide: Corporate Culture and the Death of Sears by Henry S. Sharp (356pp), available on Kindle for $7.50U.S.
https://www.amazon.com/Institutional-Suicide-Corporate-Culture-Death-ebook/dp/B085WP5VW3

I don't see any reviews of it.

bagmonkey posted:

I worked for Kmart shortly after Eddie Lampert took over and I'd love to read some books on the downfall, even though I already know a ton of the juicy details. Kmart/Sears absolutely had a path forward to stay relevant and continue to be a part of the retail landscape but Lampert just wanted the real estate. Make a buck today, gently caress tomorrow

TaurusTorus posted:

We’re gonna be the Amazon of brick and mortar retail.

bird with big dick posted:

I love how they're talking about Blockbuster becoming enormously profitable by opening a bunch of brick and mortar theaters as opposed to you know those companies that already own thousands of brick and mortar theaters that aren't really doing that hot.

zetamind2000 posted:

I worked for kmart very briefly during a poo poo time in my life and I got to be part of an eddie lampert idea: in-store pickup but there's only one nearly untrained employee picking merch and the store gets fined if the job isn't done in less than ten minutes even if the merch's untagged in the crates and/or backrooms

bagmonkey posted:

I was there for a while because I weaseled myself into some decent raises, so I got to see SO loving MANY of his terrible ideas. My favorite was Sears Essentials because I got to travel locally for almost a year tearing poo poo down and rebuilding poo poo. It was a blast and I have fond memories of that, not much of the rest tho

rotinaj posted:

The people floating those ideas are basically describing the now defunct type of kids' entertainment center like Discovery Zone, which is like chuck e. Cheese with more playground equipment and poo poo to jump in

It is absolutely just these dudes wanting their childhoods back plus video games and alcohol

A Strange Aeon posted:

I always wonder why there aren't more privatized playgrounds, since at least part of the year or on bad weather days, an indoor playground with special extra stuff seems like a good proposition for parents. And a decent birthday option. Staffing would be minimal, the parents themselves would provide supervision and you could have a little coffee shop or whatever attached for grown ups to hang out in while the kids play. And sell kid snacks of course.

A Strange Aeon posted:

I always wonder why there aren't more privatized playgrounds, since at least part of the year or on bad weather days, an indoor playground with special extra stuff seems like a good proposition for parents. And a decent birthday option. Staffing would be minimal, the parents themselves would provide supervision and you could have a little coffee shop or whatever attached for grown ups to hang out in while the kids play. And sell kid snacks of course.

rotinaj posted:

The people floating those ideas are basically describing the now defunct type of kids' entertainment center like Discovery Zone, which is like chuck e. Cheese with more playground equipment and poo poo to jump in

It is absolutely just these dudes wanting their childhoods back plus video games and alcohol

A Strange Aeon posted:

I always wonder why there aren't more privatized playgrounds, since at least part of the year or on bad weather days, an indoor playground with special extra stuff seems like a good proposition for parents. And a decent birthday option. Staffing would be minimal, the parents themselves would provide supervision and you could have a little coffee shop or whatever attached for grown ups to hang out in while the kids play. And sell kid snacks of course.

Matt Levine's newsletter posted:

I gather that the story here is:

A woman named Sakoya Blackwood, like so many other Americans, “struggled emotionally during the Covid-19 pandemic” and turned to day-trading stocks to pass the time.
It did not work, so, “after unsuccessfully trying to earn money from day trading,” she decided to catfish Adam Aron, the chief executive officer of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and perhaps the biggest celebrity in the world of, uh, people who struggled emotionally during Covid-19 and unsuccessfully tried to earn money from day trading.
So she “began texting Aron under the name ‘Mia,’” sending him “photos of a person that her attorneys later said was a 17-year-old Russian model.”
“Aron, who has been married since 1987, mistook her for a woman with whom he’d had a prior relationship, asking whether she was a ballerina who had done ‘unmentionable things’ to him.”
I just!
He got catfished with pictures of a Russian model with the fake name Mia and “mistook her for a woman with whom he’d had a prior relationship”? What … are the odds of that?
He “eventually sent her explicit pictures,” which she used to blackmail him: “She demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money and threatened to take the photos and messages to the press and AMC’s board, at one point texting Aron the unlisted cell phone numbers of six directors.”
She was arrested and charged with extortion; she pled guilty and served about 10 months in jail.
Today Liz Hoffman at Semafor broke the news that her victim — previously identified only as “Victim-1” and “the Chief Executive Officer of a publicly traded company” — was Aron.
Apparently Aron told AMC’s board about all of this after Blackwood was sentenced this year. “The board determined it was a personal matter, and considers the issue resolved,” says AMC.

Powered Descent posted:

...and it usually has a decent crowd on Friday and Saturday nights, consisting mostly of under-21s in need of someplace, anyplace to hang out.

dr_rat posted:

What the old abandoned rusty nail factory too good for them or something???

Kids today bah, so drat picky.

HelleSpud posted:

shame on an IGA posted:

AMC has been the innovation leader in figuring out to exploit these cults into actually funding the company's operations.

https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/24418

Mercury_Storm posted:

lol, but seriously how is this not illegal

RoastBeef posted:

Apparently one of the apes catfished the CEO of AMC.

shame on an IGA posted:

AMC has been the innovation leader in figuring out to exploit these cults into actually funding the company's operations.

https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/24418

Mercury_Storm posted:

lol, but seriously how is this not illegal

BigBadSteve posted:

I see that there's Institutional Suicide: Corporate Culture and the Death of Sears by Henry S. Sharp (356pp), available on Kindle for $7.50U.S.
https://www.amazon.com/Institutional-Suicide-Corporate-Culture-Death-ebook/dp/B085WP5VW3

I don't see any reviews of it.

rotinaj posted:

The people floating those ideas are basically describing the now defunct type of kids' entertainment center like Discovery Zone, which is like chuck e. Cheese with more playground equipment and poo poo to jump in

It is absolutely just these dudes wanting their childhoods back plus video games and alcohol

an ape posted:

Shame on the moderators at this sub for allowing the perception to persist that this sub has died by suppressing all the posts. You are trying to build a false narrative for anyone coming here looking for information.

For those of you just tuning in, this an idea of the posts for the two main subs over the past 12 hours:

BBBY Sub Posts = 1
PP Sub Posts = 50

While at the same time, there is likely a mod (or mods) in this sub with multiple alt accounts - - they are the ones you see actively shilling negative sentiment, purposely destroying the community. They could even be doing it surreptitiously so that none of the other OG mods even know it's going on.

One post, one single post in 12 hours? Meanwhile more than 50+ on the PP sub! Shame on you!

Trillhouse posted:

no one wants anything to do with us. this can only be bullish.

Original_Z posted:

This looks like the most boring book ever about what should be an incredibly interesting story that deserves a deep dive of what was happening within the company. It's part of Kindle Unlimited, can someone take a look and see if the book is any good?

Ariong posted:

I think there’s a few things at play here. AMC hasn’t really been underhanded about what they have been doing here. They publicly tried to dilute their stock. The public results of that vote were that it did not go through because not enough people voted for it, but also a majority did not vote against. They then publicly came up with and executed this new plan that let them dilute without a majority of shareholders agreeing to it. At no point (afaik) did they make any attempt whatsoever to obfuscate their goals and methods. Are they liable for the losses of people who failed to recognize it?

Jean-Paul Shartre posted:

It’s the same market that sent Pokémon Company stock skyrocketing during the Pokémon Go craze, when that game was made by a different company.

Zippy the Bummer posted:

i was behind a car that had a sticker with "amc" and a gorilla thumping its chest, and i knew something about that driver thanks to this thread. i assume