What if you bought Pets.com in 2000?
Hype · Dot-com. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
Every dollar is gone. Pets.com folded within a year of its IPO, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Pets.com sold pet food and supplies online, with free-ish shipping and a sock puppet mascot that became more famous than the company. The puppet appeared in a Super Bowl advert in January 2000 and in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the company went public in February 2000 at the peak of the dot-com bubble, with Amazon among its backers.
The fundamental problem was simple: shipping heavy bags of dog food and cat litter cost more than customers were willing to pay, and the company often sold goods below cost to attract buyers. Each new customer increased losses. As the Nasdaq fell in spring 2000 and investors stopped funding money-losing startups, Pets.com ran out of options. It announced its liquidation in November 2000, about nine months after its IPO. The sock puppet was licensed out afterwards; the shareholders received little. Two decades later, online pet retailer Chewy proved the idea could work, with better logistics and patience.
The lesson: A good idea with broken unit economics still fails, and timing matters, since the same business can succeed decades later under better conditions.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $11.00 | $0 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 2000 would be $4,626 today.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Pets.com is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in Hype
- What if you bought GameStop?
- What if you bought AMC Theatres?
- What if you bought Peloton?
- What if you bought Beyond Meat?
- What if you bought Nikola?
- What if you bought Tilray?