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I don't think there has been a thread specifically to address Big Box stores, and it might seem like a minor issue given the more obvious big news going on in the world, but the economic and political effects of Big Box stores are a fairly major deal. I don't know the entire history of the Big Box store, so instead of giving an encyclopediac introduction, I will just give a quick sketch of what they are today. Big Box stores are large retail chains, usually national or international, that sell general merchandise, usually at low or medium prices. The most famous is Wal-Mart, along with Target, K-Mart and others. There are also Big Box stores that focus on specific lines of merchandise, such as Lowe's or Home Depot (home improvement equipment), Best Buy (electronics), Cabela's (outdoor gear). There are also "Little Box" stores that are the same thing on a smaller scale. (Walgreen's Drugs or The Dollar Tree)]. Big Box stores are almost exclusively built as new, purposeful developments that rely on highway or freeway access on cheap land. The are, as the name implies, usually architecturally boring and utilitarian. Most stores are almost identical. They are usually built in commercial parks that work as uncovered shopping malls, with a general purpose retail outlet like Wal-Mart providing the "anchor" and specialized retailers in attached or detached buildings. Big Box stores have kind of been a Bête Noir for many on the left, for several reasons: 1. Low wages. Many of these businesses keep prices low by keeping wages low. Employees also have little job security or benefits, and because the chains are run nationally, there is little personal loyalty to the employees. 2. Environmental impacts from sprawl: Big Box outlets tend to have gigantic parking lots and encourage more driving, which leads to every type of pollution, including water, air, noise and light. Since they are often new developments, they also involve habitat loss and destruction. 3. Destroying neighborhood and town character. Big box stores often destroy local businesses and downtown areas, turning cities into a bifurcated downtown and a highway interchange full of retail that has little community interaction. (People can expand on these points and others at great length, I am sure). On the other hand, here is a few of the pro's: 1. Supply chain logistics. These stores, through a unified supply chain, can deliver goods to more places at a cheaper price, thus increasing efficiency. Some of the low prices are not due to predatory business practices as much as they are due to good centralized planning. 2. Related to the first: these have often opened up new classes of goods in places they wouldn't otherwise be. Unified marketing and economies of scale were one of the things that allowed things like computers to be sold outside of specialty shops. 3. Sometimes "the unique character" of local businesses isn't a good thing. Both in hiring and in how they treat customers, local businesses can be discriminatory. National HR standards and employee conduct training can make for a more pleasant shopping experience. (Or: if you are a woman looking for a job, you might have a lot better of a time applying at Ace Hardware than at Earl's Toolshed) Also, not exactly a reason, but many people feel, with some reason, that anti-Big Box viewpoints are often snobbish. I am sure everyone has comments to make about this that are somehow interesting or informative, so lets get arguing! Thread Update April 2017 I must have been behind the times when I started this thread, because I was still under the impression that retail, especially Big Box retail, was a behemoth that was literally and figuratively steamrolling across the United States' small towns, turning idyllic small towns into parking lots full of Bed, Bath and Beyonds, PetSmarts and Walgreens. But it turns out that 2017 is one of the worst years in a long time for retail, where the Big Box stars that surplanted "Mom & Pop Stores" are being replaced by Amazon, as well as suffering from previous overexpansion and shifting demographics. Several large, historically important retail chains are facing major setbacks, with Sears/K-Mart being one of the biggest. This thread's focus has naturally shifted to be on the causes, and effects, of 2017's Retail Apocalypse. I will see if I can have a mod change the thread title to reflect this. glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Apr 22, 2017 |
# ? Dec 3, 2016 19:38 |
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# ? May 4, 2024 10:35 |
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Many of these large stores are now going under as they either move to emulate Amazon or get crushed by Amazon. In their wake they're abandoning their buildings which are now turning into blighted hulks. A lot of large retailers also are dependent on commercial corridors or shopping centers to drive traffic to their shops and they rely on the presence of a high density of large box retailers in one place in order to generate the traffic they need. When a single large box goes under, the drop in traffic causes a sudden a precipitous drop in sales for all of the surrounding boxes. The creation of these developments is highly incentivized because most cities and towns see 100% of the sales tax go to the local governance. This is why local officials love to rubberstamp or even pay for any kind of high volume or high ticket-price (think car lots) development because they see more of that sales tax revenue than any other type of development. That being said, when you look at the circulation of revenues and profits, local independents recirculate more of their revenues and profits (think wages, buying locally for their supply chains and maintenance, and taxes) by a large margin than any big box retailer or Amazon I think that the US retail space is actually in a prime position to see local independent retailers make a resurgence. The modern retail space is incompatible with the big box store model and the only reason they're holding on anymore is because of favorable tax subsidies.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 01:23 |
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Big box stores are cool and good for finding things you need, at low prices, all in one place.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 04:16 |
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I feel like a lot of big box stores are going to go under because they're awful at keeping things in stock. If I'm going to a physical store, I want either expertise that only an expert can provide in-person and/or a hands-on experience with the product (only one of which is possible to get from a big box store), or I'm loving impatient and I want whatever it is NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW! If you say "I can order that in" you can go gently caress yourself, because I specifically came to the store because I wanted something today, rather than two days from now if I order from Amazon. I'd say there's also a division between "local big box stores" and giant multinational chains. We have a computer/tech store around here called Memory Express. I think it's probably up to 5-10 locations now, and it fits the definition of Big Box Store pretty well, but the employees are a little less dumb than Best Buy, and the product selection is a little bit wider, the service is way better, and it's just a nicer experience to shop in all around. Frankly, I think specialized stores are the way to go, in terms of physical shops. I want to know that the staff is knowledgable about their (possibly small) range of products, and the thing I need will be in stock. I will pay a premium for this and be happy to do it.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 04:32 |
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Different segments are going to be under different amounts of pressure. The worst-off are entertainment and electronics, which are doomed because content is all going to digital distribution and hardware prices are crashing. Barnes & Noble is probably hosed and Best Buy might be hosed (I'm really skeptical that what's left on their sales floor makes enough money to justify their real estate footprint, especially since the items most exposed to competition from Amazon are the bulky electronics that justify their huge size in the first place). Office stores are probably hosed because they're basically just electronics, furniture, and stationary, the first two are dying to Amazon and the third is dying to Wal-Mart. Stores that depend largely on clothing sales might be OK since those benefit from changing rooms and inspection, and pantry/grocery have a pretty large "need-it-now" factor. Wal-Mart is actually having a different set of problems anyway: It has too many stores that are competing with each other and it's losing a lot of sales to places like Walgreens that are more conveniently located. Wal-Mart Express was supposed to expand them to rural areas, but that was a bust (probably because they were awful). The empty shells of these things will be an interesting thing to watch though. A lot of them aren't getting converted into new retail, but instead are winding up with novelties that take up a ton of floor space like indoor racing and trampoline parks. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Dec 4, 2016 |
# ? Dec 4, 2016 06:10 |
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OneEightHundred posted:Different segments are going to be under different amounts of pressure. The worst-off are entertainment and electronics, which are doomed because content is all going to digital distribution and hardware prices are crashing. Barnes & Noble is probably hosed and Best Buy might be hosed (I'm really skeptical that what's left on their sales floor makes enough money to justify their real estate footprint, especially since the items most exposed to competition from Amazon are the bulky electronics that justify their huge size in the first place). Office stores are probably hosed because they're basically just electronics, furniture, and stationary, the first two are dying to Amazon and the third is dying to Wal-Mart. I went into a Barnes and Noble last year, and it seemed they were kind of trying to combine an "experience" with just a place to buy things. So you have books, toys, displays and a cafe. So it kind of offers a "service" as well as just a product. Its a keen bit of marketing, but I don't know how successful it will be on two grounds: 1. If you want an authentic, interactive community experience, like those millenials are doing in their renovated downtowns, going to a shopping park and drinking a coffee while reading the newspaper isn't really that involving. 2. Its expensive for the experience. Buy a book for 4 dollars on Amazon, or buy it for 10 dollars at Barnes and Noble and drink a 5 dollar coffee. The added value of that experience doesn't seem to be 10 dollars. So while I think that repackaging themselves as not just retail outlets, but service and entertainment centers, might help a little, but it doesn't seem to be a full strategy.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 16:58 |
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glowing-fish posted:2. Its expensive for the experience. Buy a book for 4 dollars on Amazon, or buy it for 10 dollars at Barnes and Noble and drink a 5 dollar coffee. The added value of that experience doesn't seem to be 10 dollars. on the other hand it's super expensive to fly or drive all the way to a fulfillment center or amazon hq to destroy their bathroom
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 17:20 |
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glowing-fish posted:I went into a Barnes and Noble last year, and it seemed they were kind of trying to combine an "experience" with just a place to buy things. So you have books, toys, displays and a cafe. So it kind of offers a "service" as well as just a product. Its a keen bit of marketing, but I don't know how successful it will be on two grounds: This isn't actually new, for what it's worth. I used to go into B&N to just sit down at the cafe and read over a decade ago. I think you're right that this kind of "experience" doesn't justify the existence of a huge retail store, though. In the specific case of B&N, I could pretty much get the same thing if Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks offered some sort of in-store ebook lending system that I could access on my phone or tablet.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 19:59 |
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The only one I don't actively loathe is Costco. I'm not a fan of Amazon as a company, but anyone who makes life more miserable for Walmart gets brownie points from me.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 20:09 |
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Amazon is crushing these places, because they are simply no fun to shop at. Unless you are furnishing your first apartment, in which case it is helpful to have everything basic together at low prices, it's simply easier to order your new toaster from Amazon and wait 2 days. No-one needs a toaster faster than that. No one needs to spend a precious hour or two of existence driving, parking and physically walking through a store to find the toaster display, then standing in a queue while the miserable checkout person scans the 45 items of the person in front of you (who is presumably furnishing their first apartment) as slowly as humanly possible.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 20:29 |
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I hate going to Walmart, Target, or Kmart. I hate it, hate it, hate it. But I can't quit them. There is rarely anything on Amazon that I need that I'm willing to ride out a two-day wait for that I can just drive ten minutes to Walmart and get for a couple of dollars more. It's just easier for me to go to Guiry's and buy some paints than it is to order it on Dick Blick and wait. But I also love shopping. It gets me out of the house for a while at least. This article written by Joe Lansdale sums it all up for me quite nicely, though: Joe Lansdale posted:"Walmart, I can't Quite You"
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 22:17 |
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glowing-fish posted:So while I think that repackaging themselves as not just retail outlets, but service and entertainment centers, might help a little, but it doesn't seem to be a full strategy. Fun anecdote: 10 years ago, if you walked into a Best Buy, movies and music were like a third of the store. Today, they're about 3 short aisles. Best Buy had other product categories that they could expand into that space though, but if retail book sales fall through, B&N is going to be a coffee shop the size of a Staples, and they're mostly located in shopping malls where the leases are really expensive. There's another important but infrequently-cited factor too: Non-fiction sales are being eroded by the availability of information on the Internet. The only silver lining is that e-reader share is stagnant at around 20%, so print is here to stay for a while at least.
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# ? Dec 4, 2016 23:42 |
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Star Man posted:I hate going to Walmart, Target, or Kmart. I hate it, hate it, hate it. But I can't quit them. There is rarely anything on Amazon that I need that I'm willing to ride out a two-day wait for that I can just drive ten minutes to Walmart and get for a couple of dollars more. It's just easier for me to go to Guiry's and buy some paints than it is to order it on Dick Blick and wait. But I also love shopping. It gets me out of the house for a while at least. I don't know who to disagree more with in that article: the strawman, or the author who destroyed the strawman, presumably to the slow clap of onlookers. I guess one thing about Wal-Mart specifically is that I grew up in what I think was the last part of the US to get Wal-Marts, Oregon and Washington. There was already the Fred Meyer chain, which was founded in Oregon, invented "One Stop Shopping", but were built with a little bit more harmony in regards to urbanization (and were unionized). I don't think I heard about Wal-Marts until the early 1990s, and I can't even remember the first time I went into one. One of the interesting things about that article for me is how much going to Wal-Mart has become this type of reverse-snobbery in certain places "All those East Coast ELITES care about their communities! Well, we will show them by destroying our towns!" This is especially odd to me considering this recent election was about protectionism: people want to protect their wages, protect their traditional towns, but also don't want to listen to those COASTAL SNOBS who are suggesting that maybe there is a downside to replacing towns with freeway interchanges. Its like, you know that if you want to keep those "manufacturing jobs in America", you won't be able to buy a fan for $5 dollars at 3 AM, right?
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 00:00 |
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glowing-fish posted:I don't know who to disagree more with in that article: the strawman, or the author who destroyed the strawman, presumably to the slow clap of onlookers. How are you liking Chile, btw? Having to go to five different stores to maybe hopefully find the not-really-even-specialty things you need is life here. So is paying at least double what you should for lovely merchandise or waiting 20 days because your stuff is imported and the independent store you deal with only brings in one consolidation per month. There are big box stores here, sort of, but they're hilariously bad.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 00:46 |
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OneEightHundred posted:B&N is planning to close a third of their stores, so they're not doing well regardless, and this is despite the fact that their biggest brick-and-mortar competitor (Borders) closed. Brick and mortar stores for a hell of a lot of goods are just dying. This is especially true of media; instead of storing it on some physical medium now you can just download it. Way easier and the thing never wears out. There are always people who will want the physical media (records are still produced for hardcore audiophiles, for example and I'm definitely one of those weirdos that would prefer a physical book to an e-reader) but even then the internet has been taking over certain things. Why buy a huge, bulky encyclopedia set when you can just look it up on Wikipedia? Literally everybody's cell phone has the entirety of Wikipedia on ready access. While there will always be a store somewhere at least moderately nearby for poo poo you need right loving now for whatever reason most goods you can wait a few days or a week for. You don't even need to physically handle the good. Plus online reviews makes it harder to peddle badly made garbage that will break too quickly. At the same time no physical store can sell everything. Amazon can. I can order a toaster, a camera, three tripods, a set of screwdrivers, an entire pallet of pickled beets, a 55 gallon drum of lube, and 87 coffee cups with a few clicks so long as I have the money. I can even do it at 3 a.m. while sitting in my apartment drunk in my underwear. I'd have to visit multiple physical stores to get those things and will have trouble finding some of them. You can buy pretty much anything on the internet no matter how ridiculous it seems. Rather than being limited to whatever the store chooses to stock you can get whatever odd thing from somebody, somewhere.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 04:38 |
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OneEightHundred posted:and pantry/grocery have a pretty large "need-it-now" factor. I can confirm thiso. He'll the company actively promoteseeking our online shopping which can be picked up at the store or home delivered, but it's a tiny niche
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 05:07 |
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HEB makes the rest of American grocers look like Soviet food depots.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 05:09 |
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glowing-fish posted:1. Supply chain logistics. These stores, through a unified supply chain, can deliver goods to more places at a cheaper price, thus increasing efficiency. Some of the low prices are not due to predatory business practices as much as they are due to good centralized planning.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 05:52 |
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the trump tutelage posted:It's worth noting that these are only pros if you believe our current consumption/consumerism culture is a good thing. I mean they're kind of good in a "humans necessarily consume to exist" sense, some people might buy too much stuff but everyone needs to buy some stuff in order to live, we all need clothes, food, and shelter.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 10:42 |
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glowing-fish posted:1. Low wages. Many of these businesses keep prices low by keeping wages low. Employees also have little job security or benefits, and because the chains are run nationally, there is little personal loyalty to the employees. quote:3. Destroying neighborhood and town character. Big box stores often destroy local businesses and downtown areas, turning cities into a bifurcated downtown and a highway interchange full of retail that has little community interaction. ToxicSlurpee posted:Brick and mortar stores for a hell of a lot of goods are just dying. This is especially true of media; instead of storing it on some physical medium now you can just download it. Way easier and the thing never wears out.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 12:42 |
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Small time retail, like small business in general is rife with employee abuse.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 14:10 |
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Cicero posted:While I don't doubt that the wages are low, are they lower than non-big-box retail? Also I think there are some that are known for having okay wages, like Costco. I was wondering about that myself. Seems to me that most of the smaller stores I know, in my region, including the "mom and pop" variety, are minimum wage and low future except for the owners. One dead end, minimum wage and minimum benefit job is the same as every other.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 15:02 |
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I hope the general poverty is helping push consumerism down the toilet. Buying poo poo is a soulless experience and I've tried to minimize personally. Its like that lovely cube city from the Reboot cartoon plopped down in every suburb forever. loving things everywhere are annoying as gently caress I cannot possibly relate to the person going into stores like World Market that infect these spiritless retail landscape. Who is buying this cheap chinese poo poo that has no functional purpose? I get decorations can be nice, but most of it is absolute poo poo in quality. I'd rather a nice handmade thing with some soul put into it than a thousand faux art pieces. Same with pretty much everything is, disposable garbage that fills nothing other than a mental illness that makes people buy as much poo poo as possible to fulfill an addiction.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 15:13 |
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quote:I get decorations can be nice, but most of it is absolute poo poo in quality. I'd rather a nice handmade thing with some soul put into it than a thousand faux art pieces.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:15 |
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the trump tutelage posted:It's worth noting that these are only pros if you believe our current consumption/consumerism culture is a good thing. I don't really know what "consumerism culture" means. It seems to be a nebulous thing to criticize. But I know that I buy certain things. Lets say I want to buy a box of envelopes. If my town has five stores selling envelopes, and each one of those stores has their envelopes trucked in from a different warehouse in a different truck, that is less efficient than if you have one store with one truck and one warehouse.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:15 |
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Sylink posted:I hope the general poverty is helping push consumerism down the toilet. Buying poo poo is a soulless experience and I've tried to minimize personally. Its like that lovely cube city from the Reboot cartoon plopped down in every suburb forever. Consumerism is a soulless experience? Can you explain more, please? I've never considered the idea that materialism is a vapid escape from a meaningless life.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:18 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:You can buy pretty much anything on the internet no matter how ridiculous it seems. Rather than being limited to whatever the store chooses to stock you can get whatever odd thing from somebody, somewhere. Prices for smallish consumer goods aren't that great on Amazon though, like if you needed to buy dish soap or trash bags or a can of tomatoes you can pay 2x, or I've even seen 4x more than if you were to buy it in a grocery store. It's just not economical to ship a single can of tomatoes to someone's door. glowing-fish posted:I don't know who to disagree more with in that article: the strawman, or the author who destroyed the strawman, presumably to the slow clap of onlookers. It's not really a strawman though. A lot of criticism of Wal-Mart basically boils down to classism--'ugh the people who shop there are trash' and 'why does anybody need to pay low prices for consumer goods?'. It's no wonder that people take umbrage to that. Also, as mentioned before by other posters, working retail for a small business isn't really that much better and may even be worse than working for Wal-Mart.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:23 |
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Only semi-related to this discussion, but interesting enough to warrant a crosspost: Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011quote:What is Amazon Go?
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:34 |
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Best Buy will be fine. If you look at the moves they've made in the last few years, they've become super aggressive to responding to the threat of internet sales. They've gotten rid of rebates and they got rid of restocking fees. They've aggressively matched prices to amazon and online retailers. They've shrunk floor space of items declining in sales like movies and music and expanding big ticket items that don't commonly get purchased online like appliances and high end TVs. Even more importantly they've expanded heavily in the "store within a store" concept and have companies like Apple and Samsung buying floorspace in their stores at a premium. On the flip side, Amazon is no longer the sure fire bet for lowest price. Often times they just match whatever local big box has it for. For any big purchase I just check Best Buy or Target first and if they aren't cheaper they will happily match it anyways. Amazon is coasting on their reputation and if they didn't have so much money coming from AWS they would be in trouble.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:34 |
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Cicero posted:Only semi-related to this discussion, but interesting enough to warrant a crosspost: Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:51 |
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I've linked it every time this convo comes up, but there was a paper written that concluded that if Wal-Mart increased their internal minwage to 12/hr, the annual cost passed on to the average shopper was under $100. So each full time worker would make more extra in a week than the average shopper would spend extra in a year. I can't find the paper because apparently they raised it to $10 since the last time I looked and googling "walmart minwage" just brings up a bunch of wsj meltdowns
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 16:53 |
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Cicero posted:Only semi-related to this discussion, but interesting enough to warrant a crosspost: Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011 Sam's Clubs around me are already doing a similar thing. You scan the item barcode on your phone as you shop. You pay from your phone and show the phone receipt at the door like you would a paper one. It's a pretty painless process, except for getting the barcode on a giant box of something to scan right.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 17:17 |
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La Brea Carpet posted:Sam's Clubs around me are already doing a similar thing. You scan the item barcode on your phone as you shop. You pay from your phone and show the phone receipt at the door like you would a paper one. It's a pretty painless process, except for getting the barcode on a giant box of something to scan right. I'm pretty sure this is something Sam's Club has rolled out nationwide at this point and it's pretty great. I have no idea why Amazon decided to go with a more complex solution for the same end result. I find it kind of interesting that phone apps are basically doing an end run around things like self checkout and touchscreen fast food kiosks.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 17:24 |
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Inferior Third Season posted:This sounds loving terrible. Now instead of a cashier going one-by-one through my things at a checkout register, I'll have to do it myself at my car when loading it up to make sure I didn't get charged for something I picked up but didn't set back in place just perfectly enough for the sensor. Paradoxish posted:I'm pretty sure this is something Sam's Club has rolled out nationwide at this point and it's pretty great. I have no idea why Amazon decided to go with a more complex solution for the same end result. I find it kind of interesting that phone apps are basically doing an end run around things like self checkout and touchscreen fast food kiosks. From a UX perspective, "grab thing off shelf" is a lot better than "grab thing off shelf, pull out phone, rotate object until code is visible, align phone camera to code". Only a small annoyance, but one that you have to repeat times however many things you buy. That said the Sam's Club system still sounds way better than lines. Cicero fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 5, 2016 |
# ? Dec 5, 2016 17:32 |
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Inferior Third Season posted:This sounds loving terrible. Now instead of a cashier going one-by-one through my things at a checkout register, I'll have to do it myself at my car when loading it up to make sure I didn't get charged for something I picked up but didn't set back in place just perfectly enough for the sensor. "Now instead of giving your list to the grocer and chilling while he got your goods for you from the shelves behind him, you have to trail round this huge cavernous store with a wheeled trolley picking things up yourself, then having them scanned one by one at the door. Sounds like a nightmare!"
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 18:29 |
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BarbarianElephant posted:"Now instead of giving your list to the grocer and chilling while he got your goods for you from the shelves behind him, you have to trail round this huge cavernous store with a wheeled trolley picking things up yourself, then having them scanned one by one at the door. Sounds like a nightmare!" It is. Grocery shopping loving sucks, and the stores are designed to make things hard to find so you have to spend longer in the store looking around, increasing the odds of impulse buys.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 18:35 |
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Death Bot posted:I've linked it every time this convo comes up, but there was a paper written that concluded that if Wal-Mart increased their internal minwage to 12/hr, the annual cost passed on to the average shopper was under $100. So each full time worker would make more extra in a week than the average shopper would spend extra in a year. Walmart actively avoids paying anybody at all. I worked for them a few years ago and when the recession hit they did their best to cut hours to the bone and get rid of anybody making more than ten an hour. Benefits also instantaneously became prohibitively expensive. Now they absolutely will not start new people full time. This is entirely geared toward making the Walton kids rich. They won't raise wages like that unless they're forced to. Walmart is an evil, evil company.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 19:49 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Walmart actively avoids paying anybody at all. I worked for them a few years ago and when the recession hit they did their best to cut hours to the bone and get rid of anybody making more than ten an hour. Benefits also instantaneously became prohibitively expensive. Now they absolutely will not start new people full time. This is entirely geared toward making the Walton kids rich. They won't raise wages like that unless they're forced to. And in a normal market economy, they couldn't get away with that, because other competing retail outlets would attract workers away. However, Wal-Mart is a monopsony for labor (a monopsony is the counterpart to a monopoly, the sole buyer), and so can pay workers below what they would earn in a competitive market. Apart from all of the moral issues, this is kind of one of the biggest problems in economics: centralization leads to economies of scale, which saves money, but also can lead to anti-competitive pricing, which loses money.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 21:07 |
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Sylink posted:I hope the general poverty is helping push consumerism down the toilet. Buying poo poo is a soulless experience and I've tried to minimize personally. Its like that lovely cube city from the Reboot cartoon plopped down in every suburb forever. I mean maybe also some people just like pretty things and don't have the money to spend on vegan organic ethically sourced natural homeopathic tat so instead they go where they can afford?
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 22:06 |
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# ? May 4, 2024 10:35 |
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Wal-mart and costco are 'soulless expressions of consumerisum', sure, but they are cheap, and they are places where a small amount of money buys a lot more food than at a more local socially concious place. Everything may be cheap, lower quality, and not use socially aware manufacturing, but saving money and buying in bulk is why people shop there for food and everyday clothes perishables. At Wal-mart, getting the stuff needed for basic hygene, nutrition, and clothing is accomplished easily and cheaply, and so money can be saved for stuff that is more artisinal and less 'consumerist' Food, Clothing, and Hygene are things that every human needs, and Wal-Marts and similar places make it easy to get those things with less resources spent. Sustainability and other things are not issues for a person looking to stretch a paytheck further via getting low-priced food and soap.
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# ? Dec 5, 2016 22:23 |