I'm one of the 800 Peloton employees losing their jobs. After massive layoffs in February, I've spent every day of the last 6 months wondering which shift would be my last — now I know.
- Peloton told employees last week it's cutting 800 jobs, closing retail stores, and raising prices.
- An anonymous Field Specialist at Peloton, whose identity Insider has verified, describes the warning signs that foretold this latest round of layoffs at the company.
I'm coming up on almost four years with Peloton, but I'm one of the 800 workers whose jobs are being cut. As a field specialist, I deliver bikes and set them up in customers' homes.
When these cuts were announced, everybody was pretty much in shock. We kind of knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know exactly how. You could kind of tell something was up, but our bosses couldn't tell us anything that was happening because they weren't being told what was happening. A lot of it was hush-hush up until this announcement.
It's been a very tough year for us. Until a few weeks ago, the only time I'd seen our warehouse this empty is when we first moved into it. Before, our entire racking system, which is where we store bikes before they're delivered, would be full. There wouldn't be any room to put anything else. Now, they're empty for the most part. So we've been thinking, "Well, that was full last week, but why isn't it full now? Where's all of our product?" New stock isn't coming into our warehouse to replace the stock leaving our warehouse.
After Peloton slashed 2,800 jobs in February, my warehouse lost roughly half of its staff. A lot of people had to learn how to work other systems just to make sure everything was working the way it's supposed to. Some days, we didn't have enough people to make deliveries, so a delivery van would have to cancel appointments or reschedule for another day when we had more staff.
We're still taking care of the customer the best we can, but we can only do so much. We have fewer and fewer people but they still expect us to deliver as much as when we had a hundred workers, and that's probably affecting the customers' experience.
I think Peloton and the customer are losing a little bit of the personal touch that Peloton offered through its white-glove service. With the way our scheduling is now, you could be at one location and you've got a 45 minute-to-an-hour drive to the next location to drop off and set up another bike, and you have eight or nine bike deliveries in a day.
After the February layoffs, we were all wondering, "Is this going to happen again?" It was only when we showed up each day and saw our assignments that we'd know, "Okay, we're working today." It's been like that for the last six months. Morale has been extremely low because nobody knew what was going on, and we kept seeing our stock price go lower and lower.
I think one of Peloton's issues has been some mismanagement of funds. Peloton wasted all of that money building the manufacturing center that we're not going to use after all.
Going forward, I think some of the product lines they have now may disappear or at least change. I've seen Peloton change its prices multiple times now, and it's kind of weird that a company can't decide on what the price point of their product is. I have a feeling you'll always be able to have a Peloton instructor, because there's plenty of those, but Peloton equipment may not exist in the future.
It's been one roller-coaster of a ride. When we're finally done, it'll be a little sad because I've thoroughly enjoyed working with the company and my teammates. I'm not really sure what my next step would be. I'll just start over again and see what next chapter is going to be written. I have a feeling these are not going to be the end of the cuts.
Peloton did not respond to a request for comment.