PETITION provides analysis, commentary and curated links about financial markets, distressed investing, restructuring and bankruptcy.
Our primary product is an a$$-kicking email briefing sent on Wednesdays and Sundays.
This is the age we live in. We would love to be corrected because, admittedly, we don't make a habit of reading SEC-filed "risk factors" for fun, but this risk factor in the recent J. Jill S-1 struck us as odd...
Is this language typical or is this a recent add-on given the proclivities of our current President?
Now that Christmas is behind us, there will be a lot of focus on retail numbers and the performance of various hardware products - whether that is the Apple Watch, Fitbit, Amazon's Echo, GoPro, etc. While not scientific by any stretch of the imagination, the top AppStore downloads and Google searches are indicative of...well, something.... And that something seems positive for Fitbit.
With press under increasing scrutiny in the wake of "fake news" and (perceived) political bias, you'd think they'd spend an ounce of time doing a little homework before publishing an editorial.
We're not making any statements about the candidate. But, today, this is what the Times had to say about President-Elect Trump's selection of Andrew Puzder as Labor Secretary:
Query what the Times means when they say "[t]here is no evidence that health care reform has harmed job growth, and there is certainly no evidence of a restaurant recession." What? While it may be hard to delineate causation between the ACA and restaurant distress, how can the New York Times say that there is "certainly no evidence" of a restaurant recession?
Perhaps they didn't notice the recent bankruptcy filings of Cosi Inc., Garden Fresh, Fox & Hound, Logan's Roadhouse, Don Pablo's, Buffetts and Champps. We covered the distressed restaurant space here, including the statement in the Garden Fresh supporting first day declaration that causes for the bankruptcy filing include increased healthcare costs, higher minimum wage (in California), and headwinds facing restaurants. Or how about this in the publicly-filed first day declaration supporting Cosi Inc.'s chapter 11 bankruptcy filing: "The deteriorating sales are at least partially due to macro-economic issues as the restaurant industry as a whole and the fast casual sector in particular are experiencing decreasing sales trends."
We can debate to what degree the above constitutes sufficient evidence. Indisputable, however, is that there certainly is more than "no evidence."
The chart below (credit: Statista) paints a ROUGH picture for the print industry. Nothing new here but as ad revenue continues to be cannibalized by mobile, it will take more than a charitable post-Trump uptick in newspaper subscriptions to save the magazine and newspaper industries. Query to what degree the re-emergence of podcasts is reflected in these statistics.
