VitaminShoppe.com Horror Story and Its Lessons
from the it's-all-about-the-hype dept
A good article from James Cramer at theStreet.com talking about the public life of VitaminShoppe.com. In a few brief paragraphs Cramer details why this dot com stock shot way up and then coasted down. It follows the pattern of many other dot coms. Hype over a big brand name IPO. Hype over market share numbers (remember when everyone wanted market share?), and then hype over a big deal (in this case with AOL). The fact is that none of these really mattered towards what matters now: profitability. It just shows the extremes that investors look at. They chose one or two things that are of utmost importance, but don't often seem to look at an entire business to see if there's really a full business there.
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