🚤 Superyachts’ sunk costs

Some people “just really want their items,” Blake Robertson, a teenage Depop seller who received a death threat from a customer, told CNBC.

Threats are rare, but long negotiations with bargain hunters and bidding wars have become common on reselling platforms in a way they haven’t in traditional stores.

Thrifting has always been a popular hobby…

… but it’s boomed online in the last few years, with people turning to platforms like ThredUp, Depop, and Poshmark to browse beyond their neighborhoods. Other contributing factors:

• The pandemic: Bored at home, people shopped online (and for fashionable Zoom outfits).
• Inflation: They want the deals!
• The environment: Gen Z and millennial shoppers, in particular, are seeking more sustainable options.
• Brands — from fast-fashion giants like H&M to higher-end retailers like Reformation  — are partnering with resale platforms to offload extra merchandise.

Forget it, Jake, it’s the internet

Depop — purchased by Etsy for $1.6B in 2021 — recently deleted its comment section, telling CNBC comments didn’t help buyers decide on items.

• On Reddit, some sellers discussed the rude comments they’d received from buyers wanting cheaper prices.
• A 2019 Business of Fashion investigation revealed sellers — many of them teens — received inappropriate messages from creeps.

Long-time resale champ eBay has similar issues; heck, people even send spicy messages on LinkedIn.

In many ways, the rise of harassment and bad behavior is simply an unfortunate testament to a platform’s popularity and we wouldn’t be surprised to see more guardrails in the future.

Until then, please enjoy some @depopdrama.

Forgive us if we’re a little sour today — it’s just that we have to wait a whole ‘nother year for the next Palm Beach International Boat Show.

What a treat to (virtually) gallivant across a Florida marina, brandish gobs of (make-believe) money, and (mentally) shop for freshly debuted luxury vessels.

• Per South Florida Business Journal, the just-wrapped festival o’ ferries assembled watercraft worth $1.2B.

Fortunately, we’ve got a weekend full of memories for the scrapbook…

In case you have a few million sitting around

These were our favorites on parade in Palm Beach:

• Feadship Arrow is the kind of Cinderella story one can’t help but root for. The floor plan includes a gym, bar, and massage room. The trade-in still carried a confident, like-new asking price of ~$150m.
• Benetti Alfa brought 229 feet of life-of-the-party energy — the hydropalace has an infinity pool that converts into a dance floor.
• That’s fitting: Anyone who drops a mere $70.5m to land the 2021 winner of the “World Superyacht Award for Displacement Motor Yachts Between 1,000 and 1,599GT” will be quick to cut a rug.

Piercing the fantasy…

…is the exorbitant price that must be paid after the mega-sum purchase. (There’s also the whole “superyachts produce 1.5k times more carbon than the average car” thing to consider.)

• A rule of thumb, per CNN, is that 10%+ of a superyacht’s purchase price will be spent yearly to keep it afloat.
• Running 10 weeks on a boat Alfa’s size through a cost calculator spits out a ~$4m estimate.

It’s not all sunk costs, though: Some owners try to recoup losses via chartering.

1) The “Top 100” — not the Morgan Wallen-dominated list, but the internal moniker for Apple’s 100 highest-ranking leaders — reportedly gathered last week for a demonstration of the company’s upcoming mixed-reality headset debuting in June.

2) Remote work is an increasingly remote possibility for American workers. According to new Labor Department data, 72.5% of businesses had little to no remote work in 2022, up from 60.1% in 2021, and close to the 76.7% pre-pandemic figure.

3) Here’s some star bucks for ya: When the $150B International Space Station has to dodge space junk, the cost of an emergency maneuver averages $1m per incident. As for the commercial satellite industry, evading space junk is considerably cheaper — in some cases just $699 a pop — thanks to satellites’ relatively small size. (Still, satellite operators are on the hook for ~$58m in annual junk-ducking costs.)

4) A Massachusetts man was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for stealing $8m+ through online romance scams. One case involved a Florida woman who he had send over $200k+ to help release him from custody… after an “explosion on his oil rig.”

5) A group of MIT researchers doing God’s work — testing 1k+ Oreos to understand the best way to separate the cookies such that the creme sticks to both sides — found that, no matter if they’re slowly twisted apart over five minutes or 100x faster than a human, the creme will stick to one wafer ~80% of the time.