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Comment by mcronce | Hacker News Reader

> I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.

It's essentially converting reputation to cash

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Is this the "It's my money, and I need it now" / "It's your money, use it when you need it!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg) of execs trying to cash out and bail before things go to shit?

My question is, why is this happening now and why didn't it happen before?

Is it because Amazon is simultaneously wildly popular and a total trash fire, so customers are becoming gradually inured to their bullshit and so other companies are thinking they can slip under the radar with this ploy?

Was there an industry conference where this idea was presented and nobody ever explicitly agreed to collude, but there were nods all around the room and everyone knew what they were expected to do?

Many of these are no longer viable businesses, so they do what any nonviable business does and gradually shut down, liquidating all their assets in the process which in this case happens to include the reputation they've built up when they used to be a viable business?

So the answer to "why now?" would be, because they only recently began failing thanks to Amazon/COVID/insert your favourite recent civillisational change.

Amazon is killing them and has been for a decade, and they’re trying to compete. Too late, and badly, as it turns out.

You didn’t notice it as much earlier, because it wasn’t the high end ‘stuff you went there for’ that people stopped buying, it was all the other random things they bought when they went there to buy something, and the marginal customers.

Now the core customer base is eroding, and they’re getting desperate.

There's a term for this in marketing. It's called cashing out brand equity. You take a hit to your rep, but you get some liquidity out of the brand by cutting corners on your product/service. Venture capital firms are infamous for using this as a business model. They take over a company that is struggling and they cash out the brand equity and every other kind of equity until nothing is left.

Product brands have been doing it for ages, retailers are realizing they can do it too

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