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As orders piled up and supply chains tightened, bike shops around the country couldn’t keep them in stock. Peloton announced in 2016 that customers complained about having to wait weeks and months for their $2,000 bikes and treadmills to arrive. By the end of 2020, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its production and shipping operations.
It’s not hard to see why: Riding outside on public transport was a way to exercise, socialize and get from point A to B without risking exposure to Covid. Indoor riding had the same appeal — if you couldn’t work out in a big sweaty studio, you could at least hang out with a class run by reliable instructors.
Cut to the summer of 2022, and the bike business is in trouble.
SoulCycle, a similarly trendy, upscale cycling business, was the opposite of the epidemic as it focused primarily on in-studio classes. Like many gyms, it was forced to close in 2020 and didn’t reopen for nearly a year.
Even as people return to the gym, SoulCycle faces another problem for its business: inflation.
Meanwhile, more affordable gym chains like Planet Fitness seem to be thriving. The chain reported on earnings last week that its membership base grew as people “traded up” from higher-priced gyms, my colleague Jordan Valinsky reports.
For comparison, a Planet Fitness membership in New York costs around $10 a month. A single SolCycle class costs $38.
Date number: -31.3
Any reading below zero indicates contraction. Economists had expected a more modest slowdown in the survey, which still showed expansion.
“Incredibly scary,” Pantone Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson wrote in a note on Monday. “Obviously the momentum in the manufacturing sector has slowed, but that’s a setback.”
Keeping score
ICYMI: Earlier this month, Equifax announced that it had sent incorrect credit scores to banks and other lenders for hundreds of thousands of customers. For nearly 300,000 people, that mistake resulted in a 25-point or more change in their credit score — enough to deny a loan to some people.
To be clear: Equifax has just one job. It is one of three large credit scoring firms that allegedly collect consumer data that is boiled down to numbers between 300 and 850 and then sold to financial institutions for profit (more on that in a minute).
A high score is, of course, a shorthand way to tell a bank that a person is trustworthy and can repay any loan they want. Low scores = less credit, which means lenders may deny you financing or offer you punishingly high interest rates.
Oh, and even if that information has life-changing consequences, you don’t own it or have much power to resist it. The process is deliberately complicated. And you cannot opt ​​out of the system. I repeat, you cannot opt ​​out.
The Equifax screw-up is the only one we know of from this spring, when an investigation by the Wall Street Journal forced the company to admit its mistakes.
If all of this sounds familiar, maybe it’s because Equifax revealed in 2017 that hackers used a security flaw in its system to gain access to information on up to 145 million people — roughly half the country. Oops…
Errors are rampant In 2019, Equifax CEO Mark Begor told the New York Times that the first time he checked his own report, an unsigned cell phone service had purchased a vacuum cleaner that he didn’t own. Until and did not have a credit card.
at last
Consumer advocates warn that credit information is being used more widely than it was originally intended to be, and sometimes too poorly.
“Credit scores are increasingly a measure of behavior, sometimes just luck,” said Chi Chi Wu, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center.
The outbreak has further questioned the reliability of the data. People and businesses struggling to pay their bills during the lockdown may have seen their credit take a hit through no fault of their own due to layoffs beyond their means.
How can a flawed system be powerful?
Again, no one can opt out, so a consumer base has been built up of for-profit companies with no motivation to provide any real service to consumers.
“One reason [errors] What’s persistent is that they can get away with it — they’re an oligopoly, you can’t pick and choose between them like you can with mobile carriers, Wu says.
Under the current system, any mistake a consumer can make is to argue that consumers are aware of their rights and are engaging in fraudulent self-reporting. Oh, and there’s a big backlog in those complaints so be prepared to wait, CFBB says.
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