On November 7, 2000, Pets.com announced it was shutting down, telling customers it would stop taking orders just two days later. The company laid off 255 of its 320 employees on the spot, and its stock, which had opened at $11 a share on IPO day earlier that year, was trading for about 19 cents. It remains one of the most famous flameouts of the dot-com bust.
The company had actually looked promising on paper for a moment: Amazon took a majority stake in 1999, and the February 2000 IPO raised $82.5 million. But the underlying business never worked. Pets.com was shipping heavy, low-margin items like bags of dog food at a loss, while spending heavily on marketing to build the brand, including a $1.2 million Super Bowl ad. When a last-minute acquisition offer from PetSmart came in below the value of the company’s own cash on hand, the board turned it down and chose to liquidate instead.
Ironically, the thing everyone remembers best outlived the company itself. The sock-puppet mascot, voiced by Michael Ian Black, had already become a genuine pop-culture figure, appearing on Good Morning America and floating as a 36-foot balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. PetSmart bought the rights to the puppet along with the domain name after the shutdown, and it went on to anchor PetSmart’s own ad campaigns for years afterward.
Source: Wikipedia: Pets.com
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
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