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glowing-fish posted:Its not a gimmick, and its not weird. Southern Ohio does have some pretty rural areas though. They have special scholarships and stuff.
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# ? Dec 17, 2016 18:03 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:15 |
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Nevvy Z posted:Southern Ohio does have some pretty rural areas though. They have special scholarships and stuff. Normally I would apologize for derailing a thread, but... The desire of suburban Easterners to cosplay poor country folks was strong enough that they decided it would be an awesome idea to support a reality show star fronting for a fascistic foreign country. So name a rural part of Southern Ohio.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:02 |
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Nevvy Z posted:Southern Ohio does have some pretty rural areas though. They have special scholarships and stuff. Maybe? I moved from Ohio out west and it's much much different over here. Basically,
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:06 |
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It's almost as if...wait for it.. It's possible to be rural in Ohio as well as rural in Montana. I know this might sound crazy but there is no clear definition between "rural" and "not rural" while some rural locations are more remote than other rural locations. I'm from rural PA. The state has rural areas. So does Ohio. While not deep forested wilderness where the nearest gas station is 37 miles away the are still, in fact, rural. I used to live next to a cow farm.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:28 |
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Listen, that isn't secret information you have, everyone knows that. No one is impressed, just like no one is impressed with people from arizona telling people in alaska that 90 isn't hot or people in maine telling people in florida that 28 isn't cold weather. It's okay for terms to be relative to local norms, you wouldn't even win the title rural anyway if only the most rural person could claim the award. Great avatar/post combination. Anyway, let me talk about why this distinction is important to this thread. The overall argument about what counts as "rural" is a very fluid thing, and if its important for people living an hour outside of Cleveland to feel like they are rural, I can't really say much about that. But this is a thread about Big Box retail. I guess the best way to explain it is through a personal anecdote, which I know is not the best form of argument but bear with me. When I was a kid, and living near Salem, Oregon, there was a small town that was a little closer than Salem. We would go there for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk, as well as snacks. Mostly snacks. It was expensive, it had a small selection, the service was slow, but it was one of our stores. The owner of the store worked there, together with his family. So, the other side to the high prices and bad selection: one day during a bad snowstorm, when we couldn't get out of our house, my mother called up the owner of the store and told him we were trapped, and he took our order for about 200 dollars worth of groceries (in 1980s money) and drove them to us through the snow. That is kind of a marginal case, because even though we shopped at that store, we didn't need to, we would still go to Salem to chain grocery stores (and Fred Meyer) for "real" grocery shopping. But there were times and places when grocery stores were local, and where the owner was at the register, and he could give you groceries if you were low on money, and he could give your kids a part time job, and he could stop and talk and give you some boxes. So as far as a rural retail experience, it means that shopping is a community experience. That is why I say that Walmart and other big box stores are fundamentally an urban experience, because they are impersonal. At most you might know the names of a few cashiers, but that is where it stops.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:28 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's almost as if...wait for it.. My favorite "rural" people are the idiots from Western Washington bucking against the trend of the I5 corridor and embracing ignorance and pretending like city folk don't understand them when they all live in suburban hellholes and are at worst a 20 minute drive from major metropolitan areas. See the Key Peninsula and Spanaway for examples.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:33 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's almost as if...wait for it.. So your counterpoint to my statement that there are many gradations between urban and rural is that there are...many gradations between urban and rural? I guess we will just have to agree to agree. But this thread is specifically about Big Box retail, and one of the topics related to that is how suburbanization and sprawl has kind of disrupted and ended rural communities. And when we talk about Ohio, we talk about a place with a pretty high population density and a lot of Walmarts. Here is a map of every Walmart in Ohio: http://www.allstays.com/c/walmart-ohio-locations-map.htm I poked around at that map, and it seems like the Walmart pole of inaccessibility for Ohio is McConnelsville, which is equidistant between Athens, Zanesville, Cambridge and Marietta. Its about an hour between the four of them. There is nowhere in Ohio where you can't get off of work, drive to a Wal-Mart, shop, and come home and make dinner. From a retail standpoint, the state has been big boxified.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:46 |
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DrNutt posted:My favorite "rural" people are the idiots from Western Washington bucking against the trend of the I5 corridor and embracing ignorance and pretending like city folk don't understand them when they all live in suburban hellholes and are at worst a 20 minute drive from major metropolitan areas. See the Key Peninsula and Spanaway for examples. Like Chehalis/Centralia. I don't consider Chehalis/Centralia to be very rural. But Ohio is basically Chehalis/Centralia, although additionally they are all a weekend's drive from Washington DC and New York City.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:48 |
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I don't think there's anywhere you could live in Ohio where getting to any supermarkets or similar size stores would require a 3 hour round trip by car, at least without massive weather problems or traffic on the route to and from. You can totally end up in that situation in a lot of places out west. It's an entirely different level of rural.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 03:53 |
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Just by definition far far more people live in the "fake" "poser" rural than the true authentic rural that has no people in it. Just basically inherently the number of people that are the one true rural are vanishingly small compared to the people that grow up surrounded by cows and are a 30 hour walk from any city (that is a 2 hour drive because everyone owns cars now) . Almost no one is living in the area with almost no one.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 05:05 |
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fishmech posted:I don't think there's anywhere you could live in Ohio where getting to any supermarkets or similar size stores would require a 3 hour round trip by car, at least without massive weather problems or traffic on the route to and from. You can totally end up in that situation in a lot of places out west. And even that's not particularly rural compared to rural Alaska or northern Canada, where you can actually need a plane or a seasonal road for access to any reasonably-sized town. One of my friends is posted in a place where The Pas is the nearest "urban centre", and that's either an air taxi flight or an eight-hour ride on a freight train away. And even that's probably not the most isolated place in Canada, not by far.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 05:47 |
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Alaska is fake rural, Antarctica is the real thing.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 06:05 |
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I'm going to figure out how to move to Mars, live there alone, and be the most rural person ever.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 06:27 |
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PT6A posted:And even that's not particularly rural compared to rural Alaska or northern Canada, where you can actually need a plane or a seasonal road for access to any reasonably-sized town. Well, of course the truth is that its a sliding scale, and you can always find somewhere more rural. But the problem with that type of sliding scale is that its true in the other direction. Is Queens rural? Because it is right next to Manhattan, and Manhattan is obviously much more urbanized. If someone in Queens started talking about how big city people don't understand the needs of heartland folks, would that make sense? But this thread is about retail specifically, so in my mind one of the major differences if an area is close enough to a transit hub and has a high enough population density to host big box retail. Because whether you live in a city of 2 million people or a town of 20,000 people, your retail experience is going to be pretty similar: you are going to be dealing with a national or at least large local chain, there is going to be standardized products at a relatively low price, the management of the store is going to be impersonal and hidden in the back, there is going to be 10-20 registers, and the store is going to be built off of a highway with a big parking that kind of interrupts the landscape. If I go to the Stadium Fred Meyer on Burnside in Portland, right in the middle of Portland's trendiest urban district, or if I go to the Fred Meyer in Brookings, Oregon (population 12,000), I am going to have pretty much the same experience. (For non-Northwesterners, Fred Meyer is a combined grocery/clothing/hardware/furniture store.) There isn't much of a difference retail wise. There is a much sharper difference in the other direction, when you've gone to a town that has only a general grocery store, where its more integrated into the town's layout (on main street next to the post office and not off on a highway with a gigantic parking lot on the edge of town). So, in a way, going from 2 million to 20,000 is all the same, but then going from 20,000 to 2,000 is a much sharper difference.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 15:53 |
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It's rural vs urban really what makes that distinction though? Big box retail seems much more popular in suburbs then it is in in huge cities. Sure, big box stores exist in NYC, but most folks are going to go to their neighborhood grocer instead. The population is big enough to support all sorts of specialty stores that do one thing really well, so you don't have to go to a regressed-to-the-mean all-in-one supercenter for (cream puffs, pencils, cookbooks, etc).
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 16:17 |
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These stores all have demographic thresholds x number of people in area x. Or X number of people at income Y with education Z in area x. They don't get built without meeting these criteria.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 16:23 |
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:It's rural vs urban really what makes that distinction though? Big box retail seems much more popular in suburbs then it is in in huge cities. Sure, big box stores exist in NYC, but most folks are going to go to their neighborhood grocer instead. The population is big enough to support all sorts of specialty stores that do one thing really well, so you don't have to go to a regressed-to-the-mean all-in-one supercenter for (cream puffs, pencils, cookbooks, etc). Good point! I agree. One of the weird things for me is that living in a small town can be a lot like living in a big city, in a way, because you might be interacting with a lot of small business and independent retail, and those businesses might be built to fit in with the community, instead of the community adjusting to them. There are a lot of small towns in the western states (usually college, resort or retirement towns) where the town can be only around 3,000 people, but it will have a main street with an independent bookstore, an independent stationary store, a local pharmacy and clothing store, etcetera. Its kind of when you aren't in Portland and you aren't in Whitefish that you do your shopping at Border's instead of either Powell's or Aunt Sally's Bookstore. Also when you aren't in Portland and aren't in Whitefish that you are eating at The Olive Garden instead of Cool Joe's Fusion Thai/Italian or Grandpa's Diner. But even in cities, while they don't host the truly super-massive Big Box stores, and they might have a slightly smaller floor plan, and a parking garage instead of a parking lot, there are still a lot of Big Box/Little Box retailers. I don't now about New York City, but when I lived in Portland, right in the middle of the city, I did a lot of shopping at places like The Dollar Tree and Walgreens. I mean, I had lots of unique retail options for unique things, but when I wanted a box of envelopes, I would go to one of those places.
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# ? Dec 18, 2016 16:45 |
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Why does shopping need to be personal? You are merely buying some stuff then going home, if you want to be personal then go see a friend. Besides, I always talk to the nice people at the cash register, one time the cashier gave me free cigarettes That only happen at the big stores, little stores the owner is always watching.
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# ? Dec 30, 2016 19:40 |
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The Limited is closing all of its 250 stores nationwide. It will move to an online model.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 04:45 |
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Don't forget Macys, Sears/Kmart, etc. all continuing to contract after (another) terrible holiday season. 2017 looks to be another terrific year for most retailers...
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 04:49 |
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Horseshoe theory posted:Don't forget Macys, Sears/Kmart, etc. all continuing to contract after (another) terrible holiday season. 2017 looks to be another terrific year for most retailers... Hopefully it'll finally kill Best Buy.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 07:28 |
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OhFunny posted:The Limited is closing all of its 250 stores nationwide. It will move to an online model. American Apparel is probably next.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 08:53 |
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Nonsense posted:American Apparel is probably next. Last I heard Amazon was in talks to buy them out of bankruptcy
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 14:08 |
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Liquid Communism posted:Hopefully it'll finally kill Best Buy. Best Buy has somehow staggered away from being pulled into the abyss the last few years (just like Barnes & Noble), which is bizarre since their profit margins are made on poo poo like cables and not the TVs, refrigerators, etc (which often are loss leaders).
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 16:10 |
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Didn't see it posted, but Sears is lopping off Craftsman and selling them to Black and Decker.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 16:30 |
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CommieGIR posted:Didn't see it posted, but Sears is lopping off Craftsman and selling them to Black and Decker. Good idea to sell off the only remaining profitable areas - spin out the real estate to Seritage, the royalty-generating brand names (i.e, become an Iconix if the storefronts are unsustainable), etc. The best part is Lampert sinking his own funds after stripping a lot of the valuable assets. Guess he's not quite an Icahn, Pickins or Singer when it comes to vulturing.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 16:41 |
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CommieGIR posted:Didn't see it posted, but Sears is lopping off Craftsman and selling them to Black and Decker. Which is baffling because that's pretty much the only reason a hell of a lot of people ever went to Sears. Craftsman tools were really good and they'd replace them for basically ever if they broke. When Sears said "lifetime unlimited warranty" they loving meant it. Granted they were also high enough quality that you'd probably not even need that. They were the tools you bought if you wanted good tools. A few years back they axed parts of that and have been getting increasingly lovely about it. Which can't be helping their bottom line at all. That was one of their big flagship things. You ended up paying more for a Craftsman tool but it was absolutely, totally worth it. You could take that hammer back to Sears 20 years later and they'd just give you a new one. Didn't even need the receipt. Of course a vulture capitalist would look at that and go "lol, nah" only to find out that people were shopping at Sears specifically to get good tools with that warranty. Take away the quality and the warranty and...welp.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 17:41 |
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Yeah, a good cross section of my wrenching tools are Craftsmans I've picked up at estate/garage sales and pawnshops over the years. They're good. Only thing I've managed to break involved a five foot cheater bar and jumping up and down.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 20:51 |
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Liquid Communism posted:Yeah, a good cross section of my wrenching tools are Craftsmans I've picked up at estate/garage sales and pawnshops over the years. They're good. Only thing I've managed to break involved a five foot cheater bar and jumping up and down. The older tools were great, the more recently manufactured ones kinda suck and now that you get a warranty on hand tools from Harbor freight with not too much difference in quality anymore, there is no reason to buy craftsman.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 22:23 |
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therobit posted:The older tools were great, the more recently manufactured ones kinda suck and now that you get a warranty on hand tools from Harbor freight with not too much difference in quality anymore, there is no reason to buy craftsman. Kobalt (Lowes) and Husky (Home Depot) are actually fine too and have similar warranties and generally good prices, especially during sales. I have some older Craftsman stuff and it's probably technically higher quality, but for hobby mechanic/handyman work who really cares?
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 23:14 |
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Sorry to continue the derail, but as someone who works in construction all I ever see nowadays is kobalt/harbor freight hand tools. They make perfectly fine quality tools, and the prices are great. Plus the warranty doesn't matter anyway as you are ten times as likely to just lose,or have a tool stolen than break it. Few times I've broken a tool I just laugh and drop the like 3 bucks for a new one.
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# ? Jan 7, 2017 23:59 |
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Horseshoe theory posted:Best Buy has somehow staggered away from being pulled into the abyss the last few years (just like Barnes & Noble), which is bizarre since their profit margins are made on poo poo like cables and not the TVs, refrigerators, etc (which often are loss leaders). Speaking of Macy's, one of their closures is apparently in a mall near where I used to live that's in the process of converting the mall into an outlet center. Apparently they're having a hard time getting people to give enough of a poo poo any more so their solution is to give make them give a poo poo by just sending prices to the floor, and outlet centers are the only retail sector that's growing. Maybe that's another future in the cards for retail, the end of high-markup "shopping experiences."
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 05:00 |
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Best Buy has become cemented, through services like Geek Squad, as the place to go for paid computer / general electronic help. Not to you or me so much, but a big enough swathe of the general market. Circuit City was trying to do that under their Firedog (I think that was the branding?) service, but the recent recession killed them before they could manage it. Best Buy is also like kind of a last one standing nationally. That gives a certain bulwark against really going down hill. Most similar stores I can think of in a similar domain are places like Micro Center which are nationwide but only a few per area if present at all, or places like Fry's just aren't national. And then assorted fully regional operators, like New York City area's PC Richard & Son. Because of being a last one standing, they do things like having multiple employees in the store being paid for to promote products for a sponsor or whatever. (some random best buy guy might be getting paid by Verizon for instance).
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 05:36 |
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CommieGIR posted:Didn't see it posted, but Sears is lopping off Craftsman and selling them to Black and Decker. On the topic of dying retail chains, I discovered (To my utter fascination) that my rural country town has a Kmart in it. I went in out of a sense of morbid curiosity. It's like more expensive Walmart, too expensive to actually be Walmart, too lovely to be a Target. All the staff were wearing purple shirts with various cringe-inducing and canned slogans on it.
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 05:41 |
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fishmech posted:Best Buy has become cemented, through services like Geek Squad, as the place to go for paid computer / general electronic help. Not to you or me so much, but a big enough swathe of the general market. quote:Most similar stores I can think of in a similar domain are places like Micro Center which are nationwide but only a few per area if present at all, or places like Fry's just aren't national. And then assorted fully regional operators, like New York City area's PC Richard & Son. I thought they were struggling at one point due to TV prices falling and mobile saved them, but mobile is turning hyper-competitive. quote:(some random best buy guy might be getting paid by Verizon for instance).
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 06:12 |
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A White Guy posted:On the topic of dying retail chains, I discovered (To my utter fascination) that my rural country town has a Kmart in it. I went in out of a sense of morbid curiosity. It's like more expensive Walmart, too expensive to actually be Walmart, too lovely to be a Target. All the staff were wearing purple shirts with various cringe-inducing and canned slogans on it. I live real close to a KMart. I only really shop there because of a combination of "gently caress Walmart" (which is like 20 minutes away) and the fact that the only Target nearby is like 15 minutes away and like 50% more expensive than the KMart. I only go there for limited things; the store is dirty, the staff is indifferent and obviously an underpaid skeleton crew, and some things you buy there just aren't good quality. It's fine if I need a new mop, soap, or some Drano or something but other than that? Nope. The Target is much nicer but it's just so far out of the way and way more expensive. Busier but a lot of its business is I assume suburbanites shopping there because those people go to Walmart or KMart. It is however very amazing that KMart still exists at all. That company has been sinking for like 25 years.
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 06:15 |
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I think Lowe's/Home Depot/Ace are in a bit of a different category. They're big box stores but they're been able to expand because they carry a lot of stuff that you either have to have quickly or want to see in person. Plus the whole tool rental thing is a godsend when you need something for one project.
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 06:25 |
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Another factor, albeit circumstantial at best, killing retail is people going into stores and getting very very angry about anything made in China. Craftsman being pawned off the Sears wreck isn't that surprising, their tools haven't been worth a drat in a long time.
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 06:30 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I live real close to a KMart. I only really shop there because of a combination of "gently caress Walmart" (which is like 20 minutes away) and the fact that the only Target nearby is like 15 minutes away and like 50% more expensive than the KMart. I only go there for limited things; the store is dirty, the staff is indifferent and obviously an underpaid skeleton crew, and some things you buy there just aren't good quality. It's fine if I need a new mop, soap, or some Drano or something but other than that? Nope. Buy your cleaning supplies at the dollar store. Seriously. They usually have a whole wall of them and it's all the same drat chemicals.
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 06:35 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:15 |
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Nonsense posted:Another factor, albeit circumstantial at best, killing retail is people going into stores and getting very very angry about anything made in China. Craftsman being pawned off the Sears wreck isn't that surprising, their tools haven't been worth a drat in a long time. The main thing killing retail is retail. A major move in retail as a whole was to care about the numbers this quarter above all else. Retail stores are increasingly run by badly paid skeleton crews. It made the numbers spectacular in the short term but demoralized, overburdened employees not paid enough to care just aren't motivated to help customers. If you have a question it can be impossible to find somebody who knows anything about it. Retail places used to make a point of ensuring that there was somebody somewhere who knew stuff about what was being sold. The hardware department was preferably stocked with people who knew about hardware. Somebody decided that costed too much, ditched those people, and replaced them with less experienced, less knowledgeable people who would work for less. Same went for automotive departments; you wanted to pay for a car nerd so he could actually answer peoples' questions. It's supremely frustrating to customers when you have to search for an employee for 20 minutes before finding anybody, find that nobody on that day knows anything about what you want to buy, and then stand in line for half an hour because upper management decided you needed three fewer cashiers that shift to make his numbers better. Then you find out that the stuff is frequently not in stock because the transportation chain is understaffed, it's buried in a pile of freight somewhere because there aren't enough people to unload trucks and sort freight quickly anymore, or the computer system hasn't ordered any of that for a month and nobody knows why but nobody is allowed to order it manually. Meanwhile the internet knows everything and you don't have to wait in line to buy from Amazon. No loving wonder people's shopping is increasingly Google the information -> buy from Amazon. Buying anything from an actual retail store is just a painful experience now. The interesting thing here is that Walmart has been doing this despite Sam Walton specifically saying that this isn't how you run a store if you want customers to buy things from you.
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# ? Jan 8, 2017 06:40 |