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• Peloton told employees it is slashing roughly 780 jobs, closing a significant number of its stores and hiking the prices of some equipment. 
• The company didn’t specify how many of its 86 retail locations it plans to shutter. 
• It said it will be exiting last-mile logistics and closing its remaining warehouses and shifting delivery work to third-party providers.

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A Peloton store in Walnut Creek, California, U.S., on Monday, Feb. 7, 2022.

Peloton told employees Friday that it is slashing roughly 780 jobs, closing a significant number of its retail stores and hiking the prices on some of its equipment in a bid to cut costs and become profitable. 

The company didn’t specify how many its 86 retail locations it plans to shutter, but said an “aggressive” reduction will begin in 2023. 

Peloton said it will be exiting last-mile logistics by closing its remaining warehouses and shifting delivery work to third-party providers, resulting in a portion of the job cuts. It is also cutting a number of positions in its in-house support team, which are mainly located in Tempe, Arizona, and Plano, Texas, and instead will rely on third parties. 

“The shift of our final mile delivery to 3PLs will reduce our per-product delivery costs by up to 50% and will enable us to meet our delivery commitments in the most cost-efficient way possible,” Chief Executive Officer Barry McCarthy wrote in a memo to employees. 

“These expanded partnerships mean we can ensure we have the ability to scale up and down as volume fluctuates,” he added. 

Peloton, which had just lowered the prices for its products earlier this year, is raising the price of its Bike+ by $500 to $2,495 in the United States. The price of its Tread machine is going up by $800 to $3,495.

McCarthy acknowledged the about-face on pricing, saying that the equipment price reductions made sense for the company back in April, as Peloton tried to get rid of inventory quickly.

Investors sent Peloton shares up more than 9% in afternoon trading on the news.

Under McCarthy, who took the reins from …….

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/peloton-says-its-slashing-780-jobs-closing-stores-and-hiking-prices/ar-AA10BgKh

Soon after writing about two Goochland sisters and their remarkable summer – one hiked the length of the Appalachian Trail, the other was pedaling from coast to coast – I received an email from reader Tom Grenell in Emporia.

Grenell wrote in admiration of what Eliza and Maya Sweeney were doing and said another pair of siblings did the same thing 34 years ago: he and his sister.

“We were older, 30 and 29, but so many other things were eerily similar,” Grenell said of the Sweeney sisters’ experiences. “The adventures have obviously stayed with us for all these many years, and articles such as yours rekindle an avalanche of amazing memories.”

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Tom Grenell, upon reaching the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine, on Sept. 20, 1988.

Submitted photo

I wanted to find out more, so I spoke to Grenell by phone.

Grenell, 65, is a retired veterinarian, originally from New Jersey, who after school joined a practice in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., and later opened his own practice in Emporia. He was working in Roanoke Rapids when he was able to take a six-month leave of absence in 1988 to hike the AT, which is something he’d been wanting to do since hiking a section of it in New England a few years earlier.

Meantime, his sister, Nancy Barta, a school teacher, was making plans to pedal from Seattle to Cape Cod during her summer break. Just like the Sweeney sisters said of the timing of their journeys, Grenell said there was no particular coordination on the part of him and his sister, though their trips overlapped that summer, nor was extreme sibling competition – one trying to outdo the other — at the heart of it.

“It just happened that way,” he said.

In reading the piece about the Sweeneys, and in particular, Eliza Sweeney’s hike on …….

Source: https://richmond.com/news/state-and-regional/lohmann-hiking-the-appalachian-trail-is-a-memory-that-will-never-fade/article_bba9be8d-e868-50aa-84cf-5394d2cf6363.html