Around fourteen years ago....a Scottish company got 'doped' into buying US-owned Greyhound (the bus company)....paying 3.6 billion dollars. Overpaid? On my own scale....I'd say it was probably 3-billion more than it was actually worth.
So years passed, and this past week, a German deal was done....to help relieve the Scottish company (FirstGroup) of their burden.
What the Germans company (Flixbus) paid? 172-million dollars.
Yes, it was a pretty poorly thought out deal, and you could evaluate Greyhound to say they'd never be at the profit level they were in the 1960s.
ARD (public German TV) has the better reporting over the whole thing.
Flixbus operations in Germany? Well....they ran a pretty simplified operation.....you buy tickets online....show up and the driver scans the paper/cellphone screen. Most riders in Germany? I'd say nine out of ten are just regular people (not dopers or nutcases)....trying to get from point A to point B (usually one to two hours away).
Trying to resolve the Greyhound mess? You'd have to go and deal with old crappy buses, a large group of dopers or low-income folks who ride the bus, and terminals that are in the wrong parts of town (Birmingham is a great example, but you can cite over 200 US cities in the same mess).
If I were Flixbus? I'd dump the bus terminal business and try to angle to airports, making runs from airport A to airport B.....taking people to the smaller towns inbetween, and I'd be blunt on dopers....we don't want your business. An example here: run a route between the Nashville airport and the Memphis airport....every two hours.
The odds of Flixbus giving up in five years....admitting Greyhound can't be saved? I'd give it 50-percent odds.
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