Gym galaxy
Planet Fitness CEO gets shot into the sun
Good morning, gym bros. This is your Stock Market Rundown for September 19th, 2023. Thanks for tuning in once again. Let’s get started:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: GALACTIC CHANGES AT PLANET FITNESS 🏋️
And you thought dropping weights in the gym was obnoxious… how about your gym chain’s stock dropping to a 52-week low?
Planet Fitness plunged last week after announcing the sudden departure of longtime CEO Chris Rondeau. Wall Street analysts stunned by the “abrupt” move confirmed that this was no mutual thing—Rondeau was canned.
Rondeau, who has a buff physique befitting a fitness exec, had been the CEO for a decade. He started at the bottom, working at the front desk at the first-ever Planet Fitness location in New Hampshire. During his tenure, membership has grown fivefold, and the footprint exploded to more than 2,400 locations.
It’s a mystery how such a successful exec could have set off the Lunk Alarm. (That’s a siren that goes off at Planet Fitness when gym bros go full meathead mode, grunting or flexing in the mirror.)
Planet Fitness, which operates as a franchise, has a brand based on being a “Judgement Free Zone”. That means they won’t judge you if you buy a membership and then never show up to work out. In fact, their business model depends on it—if all the paying patrons decided to work out on the same day, the elliptical machines would conk out.
A member of the board of directors has stepped in as interim CEO while the board finds a permanent candidate, possibly hanging around the Smith machine.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
With everybody working from home in their sweatpants, US commercial property is stressed out to the max. Office vacancy rates are above 2008 financial-crisis highs. Houston, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles are the markets where office renters should have the easiest time scoring a deal from desperate landlords.
If you think filling up your Audi is expensive, wait ‘til you fuel up the speedboat at the cottage. The price of diesel, jet, and marine fuels have spiked, rising even more than crude and gasoline, as production cuts meet red-hot demand.
McDonald’s is dodging minimum wage increases by replacing workers with machines: digital orders from kiosks, delivery, and the app were 40% of sales last quarter. The next time you “supersize it” at the drive-thru, you could be talking to an AI.
With markets buoyant, overly-pessimistic Wall Street strategists are frantically backpedalling. They’re finally admitting that their bearish calls for 2023 were about as on point as your cousin Carl’s fantasy football picks.
That’s it for today, my friends; see you first thing tomorrow. Yours in capitalism, The Axe