CE 100 Index Slips 1% as Eat Pillar Declines, Offsets Roblox, Live Nation Gains

The CE 100 Index ended its first full trading week of the fourth quarter down 1%.

Six pillars lost ground, and four made slight gains.

The best-performing pillar was the “Have Fun” group, which gained 2.1%.

In that, Live Nation gained 5.4%. News came this week that the Live Nation-owned livestream concert platform Veeps is launching an all-access subscription.

Veeps All Access will be offered as a subscription that includes not only concerts but also additional exclusive content, beginning with performances and other videos from a range of popular artists.

Per the subscription announcement, the program sells for $11.99 per month or $120 for an annual subscription.

Roblox Shares Continue to Gain

Roblox was up 5.1%, tacking on gains seen in the wake of the announcement that Walmart Discovered — a new virtual experience — is being launched on Roblox. And also in recent weeks, Roblox said it has acquired Speechly, a company specializing in tools for speech recognition and natural language understanding, to enhance the voice features of Roblox, including voice chat.

But the Eat pillar lost 5.2%, led by Dominos, which gave up 9.8%. The company said earlier in the week that it has partnered with Microsoft to “create the next generation of pizza ordering and store operations” with generative AI technology and cloud computing power. Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service, as per the announcement, will make strides in “enhancing the ordering process through personalization and simplification.”

Shifting Delivery Dynamics

Also within that group, DoorDash was off 6.2%.

As reported at the end of the month, there’s been a mandated increase in delivery drivers’ pay in New York City — and higher fees may spur customers to shift to pickup. Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub lost their attempt in court to avoid a boost in the minimum pay for delivery workers to $17.96 an hour. DoorDash called the ruling a “deeply disappointing outcome for delivery workers, merchants and customers,” according to a statement in the wake of the ruling.

PYMNTS Intelligence’s data on the economics of dining — and the shift inherent in the delivery sector — shows that 48% of consumers say inflation has made them more likely to choose pickup and that 58% of takeout customers said they pick up restaurant meals to save on delivery fees.

Elsewhere, WeWork shares plummeted 26.5%, leading the Work pillar down 1.4%. The company said at the beginning of the week via an SEC filing that it would miss two sets of interest payments totaling about $95 million.

WeWork said in the filing that it has a 30-day grace period to make the payments before being in default and said that it “has the liquidity to make the Interest Payments, and may in the future decide to do so,” and added that “entering the grace period is intended to allow discussions with certain stakeholders in the Company’s capital structure to commence, while also enhancing liquidity.”

WeWork, as has been widely reported, is seeking to renegotiate its leases. And in an interview with The New York Times, WeWork’s interim chief executive, David Tolley, said of its lenders, “I believe they will absolutely understand our decision to enter into the grace period,” and added that no decisions had been made yet about a possible bankruptcy filing.