This article is more than 1 year old

Urbanfetch and don't carry

More than 100 job losses

New York-based Urbanfetch is to shut its consumer delivery service in the city and ditch its London office.

The dotcom, which delivered online orders of goods such as books, food and electrical items within the hour, will now only run its corporate delivery service Urbanfetch Express. It is not known how many of the 400 New York staff will lose their jobs.

All 100 employees will go in its four-month-old UK business - which the company claims was healthy. But according to Urbanfetch CEO Ross Stephens, the B2B operation - started six months ago - is more profitable than the two consumer delivery businesses combined.

"Present market realities dictate that we focus our resources where we can make a profit in a much shorter time frame than our B2C business would have required," he said.

The consumer operation will keep running for a few weeks to liquidate inventory. The announcement comes just two days after the collapse of merger talks between Urbanfetch and New York rival Kozmo.com.

In dotcom desperado news, the Tribune Interactive is to cut 80 jobs in a bid to generate profit - including 20 staff at LATimes.com, and six at the ChicagoTribune.com and ChicagoSports.com. It has a total of 650 staff.

Today also saw two more dotcom exec vacancies open up. WebMD founder and co-CEO Jeff Arnold and Stamps.com chairman and CEO John Payne both announced they would quit their positions. ®

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