10 Comments
May 3Liked by Ashley Rodriguez

Not in the coffee industry, but last week my company fired me and other 80 employers with exactly the same modality: no notice at all (yes, they will pay us for those two months, but the psychological impact of being cut out out of the blue is huge) and the reason they couldn't cope with so many staff. What a joke! They were in a financial crisis and doing a spending review by months, and yet they kept hiring until the week before! This shows the amateur business attitude of a CEO that, while leading a team distributed in 9 countries in the world, has never really evolved from their startup mentality. I see many similiraties with the story of Foxtrot scaling up when they couldn't: this ambition doesn't show greed, just the hubris of wanting to be on the next Forbes cover, where you're actually losing grip with the reality.

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I'm so sorry this happened to you! But it's WILD that it continues to happen — CEOs expanding without any actual care or consideration of the ramifications when things fall apart. Sometimes I'm baffled by how much money people who are fundamentally bad at business get!!!

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Apr 25Liked by Ashley Rodriguez

“Yeah but we sell *local* products!!”

Insane to me the weight that this apparently holds in an investor pitch. Like that really felt different enough to earn them hundreds of m’s of capital

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I can't get over how unoriginal these ideas are, which tells me that VC money is just handed out to people who fundamentally don't understand particular industries! Like, look where the money is in coffee right now (beanless, mushroom, super auto). It's like people don't understand the industries they seek to "disrupt"

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Apr 29Liked by Ashley Rodriguez

Did Dom's ever officially merge, or will they be able to separately extricate themselves from the bankruptcy proceedings?

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I don't know! The reporting I read indicated that they had fully merged, so I'm not sure what happens next to Dom's!

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Apr 25Liked by Ashley Rodriguez

📣📣

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Ty ty ty!

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Let’s be perfectly clear. As a foxtrot employee in management who was there on the day we closed. This company in 10 years was scaling up with NO MODEL that was making money. They were spending money left and right to build stores to lose money. That’s because it was a company built on back room deals and bringing in people that had no idea how to run a retail business. Semira the vp of operations was previously just a district manager for Starbucks ( they had about 8 vps that I’ve been able to identify and several directors) for a 32 store chain. There was ALOT of spending at the corporate level, very extravagant. No one cared about profits and sustainability. Investments are to help the company grow, but that can only be fueled by a profitable model. The executive geniuses took the “Chicago” model and expected it work in Dallas and Austin. They just wanted to play. I came in last August from an extensive retail background and couldn’t understand their decisions. My Store lost money from day 1. Other stores I saw on the P&L were doing the same. No one was making money, but the company kept spending. Nothing made sense. At Christmas time merchandise like wine was flowing into all the stores an incredible rate. Stores were heavily overstocked. Store processes like inventory management was something that didn’t make sense and no one could explain. I would ask questions and get a round of about answer. Come to find out the “inventory expert, had no inventory experience, he was just a software guy they hired. Normal procedures were unknown to these people. I was foolish and hung on too long, partly because my supervisor who I trusted l, kept telling me everything was alright when I asked. This was a fool’s errand. Many of the executives would bring on friends from outside of retail to work in positions they weren’t qualified for. A simple look at their linked-in profiles explain that. They gambled with people’s lives and in April when the money started running out, panicked set in and they told us not to spend money. A Week later they closed . The virtual call was cold. Just well it’s over good bye and they cut it off. No questions or anything. There is a special place for those “executives” in hell. Obviously no one understood how to use quicken.

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I just learned that LaVitola is in talks with investors to reopen some of its DC locations and I’m so curious about how they expect that to work when they suddenly fired all their employees a month ago with no warning. They’ve proven themselves to be untrustworthy and even if they rehired everyone they fired, I’m not sure if they would even want to come back.

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