Retail Watchers

Weight Watchers is kind of a specialty retail chain. Before COVID, you could find many brick and mortar locations in various strip malls and community shopping centers. There are also meetings that happen at senior centers, community centers, churches, hotel meeting rooms, etc. When COVID hit, they had to pivot to Zoom meetings. Post COVID, many meetings lost their brick and mortar presence and moved to churches, hotels etc. I am a WW member and got a email today letting me know that my meeting location, which was at a technical college meeting room, is closing! In the immediate Seattle area, most meeting locations, even if a rented space, are going to close. The brick and mortar locations do sell product. It seems to me that they are pushing the virtual meetings and online selling! Not sure how members are going to react. Plus the optics of all this is bad since WW is also buying Sequence, a online medical obesity drug treatment company. So to many it will seem hypocritical for them to buy Sequence and close many of their workshops!

These places were in many strip malls, so the rent should not have been so high. These places should be profitable for the company.

They bought out their long-term franchisee, Florine Mark, in Detroit and upstate Michigan a couple years ago and have been consolidating locations there. Out in the Coachella Valley in California they have moved to a single studio mid-valley and a couple of hotel meetings; there was a well-attended location in SmokeTree Village in Palm Springs which they gave up on.