Slate Money: Better Does Worse

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🗓️ 11 December 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

This week, Felix Salmon, Emily Peck and Stacy-Marie Ishmael talk about Better.com’s CEO firing tons of employees via Zoom, DoorDash’s dark stores and increased hiring, and New York City Council passing a measure to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. In the Plus segment: What’s going on with inflation now. Mentioned In the show: Better.com CEO Firings “Better CEO ‘Taking Time Off Effective Immediately’: Email” by Maxwell Strachan “The Dark Side of 15-Minute Grocery Delivery” by Lev Kushner and Greg Lindsay “Closed Movie Theaters Leave Void From Small Towns to Big Cities” by Brian Eckhouse and Dave Merrill "Cream Cheese Is the Latest Casualty of Cyberattacks” by Elizabeth Elkin and Deena Shanker “How a Cream Cheese Shortage is Affecting N.Y.C. Bagel Shops” by Ashley Wong Email: slatemoney@slate.com Podcast production by Cheyna Roth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Better Does Worse edition of Slate Money, your guide to the
0:18.6	business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, I'm joined by Emily
0:24.8	Peck of Fundres. Hello. Hello. By Stacey Marie Ishmael of Bloomberg. Hello. And in this
0:34.6	here she and the Roth produced show we are going to talk about Better, which is actually a mortgage
0:41.6	company and the atrocious way of laying people off. We're going to have an old conversation about
0:46.2	is there a good way of laying people off in firings and all of that kind of thing? In a context we
0:51.4	have to say of firings and layoffs being basically less common and virtually non-existent these days.
0:58.0	We are going to talk about 15-minute grocery delivery. It's a thing now. Is it a good thing? Is it a
1:03.3	bad thing? We'll work that one out. We are going to talk about voting and whether you need to be a
1:08.7	citizen to be able to do it. We have a Slate Plus about inflation. It's all coming up on Slate Money.
1:17.6	So let's start by talking about better.com. The place that does everything better.
1:29.2	Stacey, what is better.com and what did they do worse? Well, I can start with what they did worse,
1:36.0	which is they reason that any of us are talking about better.com is because their CEO, a person
1:41.6	named Vishal Garg, laid off 900 employees by Zoom. Being laid off by Zoom, I guess it's 2021,
1:49.6	but the way that he did it was remarkable. It really has once again triggered a conversation,
1:57.3	including from his own board around, do we have to treat employees like the worst of humanity
2:05.7	and not at all respect what it is that they are going through? His board seems to have
2:12.1	basically fired him or like suspended him or something. He's on the leave. It's a bit like when
2:20.8	those people, like when those TV hosts take a long scheduled holiday that they hadn't told anyone
2:26.0	about. What possible TV hosts could we be thinking of? Better.com is like a mortgage company,
2:33.1	right? They're not saving the world. They're providing mortgage financing and the idea that
2:41.2	the way you can talk to employees is like this is something that I'm always baffled by. What
	...

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