I’ve got a swimming pool at my house, and in that pool is a cleaning robot. For those of you who also own cleaning robots, you probably know they are made of a bunch of plastic parts which (i) break easily (ii) cost three cents to replace (iii) cost an insane amount of money at the store.
For most folks like me, when a part breaks, they just shrug their shoulders, trundle off to Leslie’s Pool Supply, and pay a ridiculous price just to deal with the damned thing. Again, this is just a plastic part that probably costs less than a dollar in materials to create.
This time, however, I took the opportunity to see if Amazon had the part I needed. Yeah, it sure did. Exactly the right part. And for about one-fifth the cost of my retail store.
This little anecdote is part of the reason I think that an overpriced specialty store like Leslie’s is getting killed (symbol is LESL). The stock has never done well, and as this morning’s top percentage loser, we can see now that the company has lost 92% since 2021. I’ve got a hunch this chain is going to vanish within two years.
