PSQ Holdings (NASDAQ: PSQH) stock is up 114%. PSQH stock jumped that much in the first day of trading for the IPO and SPAC merger with Colombier. The actual business inside all of that is the “patriotic marketplace” of PublicSq. We're hugely in favour of the basic idea.
No, not because we're aggressive conservatives or anything, but because people should spend their money according to their own morals and ideals. That's how we as consumers bend the capitalists to our will after all. If the woke and progressive deliberately buy Ben & Jerry's then yes, the countervailing force should also exist. We're not just fine with that we're positively approving of it.
We also get the point that all too many large corporations are woke (BUD isn't going to use Dylan Mulvaney again any time soon but there are many other such examples) and that there's a critical mass of those who would like an alternative. As with Trump's Truth Social and the DWAC merger/SPAC (that may or may not happen, who knows?) if you can garner a crowd early on then sure, you've got the beginnings of an interesting business. What, or even how, that crowd is defined and motivated isn't really the point from the business angle - it's can you get a crowd so as to be at scale?
So all of those things are good about PSQH.
PSQ Holding stock price from NASDAQ
But in the medium to longer term we don't think PublicSq is going to work. Again not because we're conservatives, or not or even anti-conservative. But because of this next desire: “"We are looking to build the alternative to Amazon, and we really believe with the help of our consumers and future investors that that's exactly what we can do," Seifert said. "We want to be a company that's by the people, for the people and owned by ‘we the people,' and that only happens if the people will rally around it and build it with us.””
That is, we think, to misunderstand what Amazon is. Sure, we see the online marketplace and think that if we've got one of those then we can be like Amazon. But that's not what Amazon is, not at all. Really, the website is the last and least part - it's the network of warehouses, the skein of transport contracts that make Amazon. In fact, this is pretty much true of supermarkets themselves, places like Walmart. They're not retail companies - they're logistics companies. The beating heart, the tick tock that makes them work, is their ability to shift product, not the ability to create a crowd that wants to buy.
PSQH as a social network, as a community of the like minded? Sure, and that also has a value. PublicSq as a new Amazon? Not without a few tens of billions of dollars spent on the logistics chain it won't be. We're sure there's going to be some interesting stock price moves here but eventual success in that idea of being the conservative Amazon? Nope, our view is that there's no chance of that at all.
By the way, the Tucker Carlson link is merely that they're going to spend lots of money advertising on his show. Which is sorta negating the entire premise, that people are flocking to the app because it's great that a conservative alternative exists.
