On February 18, eBay announced that it would buy Depop, a massively successful secondhand fashion marketplace, from Etsy for $1.2 billion in cash. While this sounds like a staggering amount of money, this cash transaction amounts to about 3% of eBay’s overall net worth of $37.24 billion as of February 27, 2026. Not too long after this announcement, on February 26, eBay announced it would lay off 800 employees as it works toward alignment with its “strategic priorities,” including AI investments.
This dance of selling or buying and laying off employees is one we’ve seen play out often in the last few months. Lowe’s, a massive employer in my hometown of Charlotte, had acquired Artisan Design Group (ADG) for $1.3 billion in June 2025 and Foundation Building Materials for $8.8 billion in August 2025. They also just laid off 600 employees a few weeks ago for the same generic reasons as eBay.
Companies, like people, react to uncertainty, sometimes leading to overreactions or overcorrections. With Etsy’s sale of Depop and eBay’s subsequent actions after the purchase, what we’re seeing isn’t just portfolio optimization or keeping an eye on the bottom line. I argue that what we’re witnessing is how market anxiety proliferates throughout corporate culture like a virus.
What Market Anxiety Looks Like at the Corporate Level
Let’s take a step back for a second to define market anxiety. Typically, we think of market anxiety as happening at the microeconomic level, or human level, where fluctuations in the market trigger stress, worry, and potentially even impulsive or emotional decisions. People high up in corporations aren’t immune to these emotions either, and market anxiety can lead to collective, reactive decision-making. Thus, at the corporate level, market anxiety can manifest itself as:
- Asset shedding (like Etsy selling Depop)
- Hiring freezes
- Layoffs
- Narrative pivots toward “core focus” (think eBay’s earlier comment about “strategic priorities”)
We can think of Etsy’s decision to sell Depop as part of a broader pattern. When leadership at one company sees another retreating toward what feels safest and most defensible, it may lead them to do the same.
Corporations Like Etsy or eBay Don’t Always React Rationally
In July 2021, Etsy bought Depop for around $1.625 billion. Etsy’s then-CEO, Josh Silverman, said at the time, “We believe Depop to be the resale home for Gen Z consumers with a unique offering and highly-engaged user base.” Fast forward nearly five years, and under the direction of a new CEO, Etsy is clearly more focused on contraction than expansion. In a news release on February 18, Kruti Patel Goyal, CEO of Etsy, shared, “We are excited that this transaction [selling Depop] allows us to focus exclusively on the compelling opportunity we see in front of us: to grow the Etsy marketplace in ways that matter most to our buyers and sellers.”
While the move was strategic, it was also a response to economic headwinds and investor pressure. As I’ve read the news over the last few months about acquisitions, layoffs, big purchases, and mergers, I keep coming back to a study I came across while writing my article about epigenetics and financial stress.
Dear CEO, Let’s Discuss Your Childhood
In 2012, researchers investigated whether people spend or save during economic downturns. What they found is that it depends on one’s upbringing: people who grew up in lower socioeconomic homes took more risks and were more impulsive, whereas those who grew up in more affluent environments took fewer risks and were less impulsive. Notably, when economic environments were more stable, tendencies associated with these early-life experiences were dormant, emerging only when the economy was uncertain.
More broadly, the research shows that economic threats change decision-making patterns, and perceived scarcity narrows focus and risk tolerance.
Just last week, eBay announced that it was laying off 800 employees. Interestingly, Etsy didn’t have any layoffs in 2021 after it bought Depop, and it paid $400 million more for it than eBay did. Now I feel inclined to interview eBay’s CEO, Jamie Iannone, about his childhood.
It’s evident that the sale was a strategic pivot for both companies, and I do not doubt that the brightest minds of those in charge weighed the pros and cons of the transaction. The most fascinating aspect of market anxiety, however, is how transmissible it is. If you had all the C-Suite people together in a room, you might think that the sheer number of people present might neutralize anxiety; that’s not how anxiety works, though. While strategy and anxiety are not mutually exclusive, they can influence each other.
How Corporate Market Anxiety Can Spread
As I mentioned, anxiety is contagious. Speaking to HuffPost in 2024, Carrie Howard, a licensed clinical social worker and anxiety coach, put it bluntly: “Contagious anxiety can happen in the context of being in close proximity with someone, or it could also happen in a larger context, like at a grocery store. For example, if you’ll remember the great toilet paper panic of COVID ― when even just going to the store or hearing that other people were buying toilet paper ― it’s like all of a sudden it incited that anxiety in all of us.”
We can see the same concept of emotional contagion happening in corporations. One company makes cuts, another follows. One company restructures, and peers follow suit a few weeks later. It spreads through analyst narratives, earnings calls, investor expectations, and the media.
Do you remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) and laid off 80% of its workforce back in 2023? Instead of shock and horror, some CEOs lamented that they couldn’t do the same or openly pondered how they could replicate it at their company. The contagion of market anxiety has led to layoffs becoming the norm, with the US accounting for the “overwhelming majority” of them globally.
Big companies understand how market anxiety can impact their brand value. Thus, we can understand the workforce reduction at eBay as one part financial recalibration, one part reputational strategy. The company is trying to tell investors it’s focused on growth, and that this growth will not come at the expense of efficiency. And on the flip side, Etsy is trying to share a totally different story – that it’s narrowing down.
What the Sale of Depop Communicates
Depop is a British secondhand fashion resale app hugely popular with Gen Z, who are concerned with affordability and sustainability. In 2021, when Etsy acquired Depop, it generated $32 million in revenue; by 2024, that figure had grown to $85 million. Its user base ballooned from 3.3 million in 2021 to 7 million by the end of 2025. Given that 90% of Depop’s users are 30 years or younger, the platform’s acquisition by Etsy represented a huge win in its efforts to appeal to Gen Z. If it grew revenue and users, why sell?
On the other hand, it’s a volatile industry, and Vinted, a competitor, has grown much more rapidly. (Take a peek at this chart by Business of Apps to see just how quickly Vinted has taken off.) So what does Etsy’s sale mean? It could be a retreat from experimentation or a shift from cultural expansion to focus on operational defensibility.
In volatile industries, companies must reallocate capital quickly. Selling Depop could simply reflect disciplined capital management. My take is that when there’s volatility, we tend to only focus on our most important elements. Think about when we’re stressed: adrenaline directs blood flow to the organs that will keep us alive (i.e., the heart and brain that enable us to fight or flee) and away from the less immediately-needed organs (i.e., the bladder, intestines, and stomach). Plus, when we’re stressed, we have a lower tolerance for risk.
The sale could be Etsy’s version of our fight-or-flight analogy, where money (“blood”) is diverted to only the most important parts of the business (“organs”), and the less important areas are simply cut to maintain survival.
The Culture Shifts We See in Economic Downturns
It felt like not too long ago, in the early 2020s, businesses couldn’t quench their thirst for expansion, platform acquisition, and touting their wins. As someone who works in tech, I read countless articles about companies’ hiring sprees, and despite the pandemic’s lingering effects, it felt like there was some optimism ahead. In some ways, it felt similar to the 2010s, when the economy started to recover from the Great Recession in 2008. In the 2010s, the music was joyful and dancy, people wore vibrant clothes, and I remember feeling optimistic about my job prospects once I finished my education.
With an economic upturn, inevitably comes a downturn. In these economic downturns, we see companies making anxious decisions. Just yesterday, I was reading about Block’s recent 40% workforce reduction. This was despite 2025 being a “strong year” for the organization on many metrics. One of the reasons for the layoffs, according to Block co-founder and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, was overhiring during the pandemic. It was also because he believes that, with the improvement of intelligence tools, a “significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better.”
One might think, if Jack Dorsey is concerned, and he probably has better access to information than I, then I should be concerned, too. People pick up on that anxiety, and it permeates throughout our communities.
The Deeper Question: Are These Moves Actually Rational?
We’ve discussed how quickly anxiety can spread, and how scarcity can reduce risk tolerance. We’ve also considered the concept of corporate survival using the analogy of adrenaline in fight-or-flight situations. With Etsy’s sale of, and eBay’s purchase of, Depop, are these decisions strategic or merely reactionary and amplified by fear?
To answer this, I want to share my own experience working at a Fortune 50 home improvement company. When you see announcements from executive leadership in mass emails or town halls, it can be easy to forget that these are real humans with emotions, biases, and childhoods that shape their perspectives. When I do get the chance to see executive team members in person, I’m reminded of that. They experience anxiety and scarcity like us, even if they have fancy MBAs or a resume the length of a CVS receipt.
I don’t believe companies are immune to emotional decision-making, no matter how many people are on the board or how impressive their credentials are. Many variables go into any decision they make, and they think things through deliberately. However, the fact remains that perceived scarcity often leads to conservative decision-making, even when long-term opportunities still exist.
What This Teaches Us About Interpreting Market News
Anxiety, and specifically market anxiety, is a behavioral force in our society. When we humanize the people at the helm of these massive companies, we can recognize when some of their decisions are driven by fear and understand why “strategic focus” language spreads. While it always bums me out to hear about layoffs, when I step back for a second, I can recognize them as a signal that executives are narrowing their focus, protecting what feels essential, and occasionally overcorrecting.
Like toilet paper during the pandemic, we need to remember that executives are susceptible to anxiety when they hear looming stories of their peers’ layoffs, acquisitions, or sales. While I don’t agree with laying people off at such an expensive time in human history to live, the layoffs illustrate something human. They show how quickly anxiety can ripple through leadership teams, investor calls, and perhaps entire industries.
Recognizing the humanity in these companies doesn’t invalidate the business logic behind their decisions. Instead, it reminds us that, behind every billion-dollar purchase or layoff announcement, are people responding to the same behavioral forces we experience.
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