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This is the rare instance when making more profit sounds like it also makes a job more satisfying to do. I'm fascinated. I had only heard of modern inventory practices in negative ways - "just-in-time inventory" is what people tell me to blame when the drat store doesn't have the drat thing I came there to buy. I like the idea of retail being skilled labor. I think we have better jobs and a better society when it is. Not credentialed - we need more jobs that don't require a college degree imo, but dealing with someone like your dad is going to beat out the internet for me every time.
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Feb 21, 2017 06:35
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Inventory optimization isn't necessarily an issue of where decisions are made, Wal-Mart has a very strong emphasis on it despite central decisionmaking. The paradox of chain stores is that their whole thing is offering a consistent shopping experience in different markets, but now there's a question of how to balance the benefits of a consistent brand identity and economies of scale with being able to adapt to those markets. Not being as top-heavy is one way, but most of them have been becoming more top-heavy because unskilled labor is cheap, and more sophisticated data analysis might be better at discovering local trends than low-level employees anyway.
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Feb 21, 2017 06:55
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:This is the rare instance when making more profit sounds like it also makes a job more satisfying to do. I'm fascinated. I had only heard of modern inventory practices in negative ways - "just-in-time inventory" is what people tell me to blame when the drat store doesn't have the drat thing I came there to buy. I like the idea of retail being skilled labor. I think we have better jobs and a better society when it is. Not credentialed - we need more jobs that don't require a college degree imo, but dealing with someone like your dad is going to beat out the internet for me every time. 13.85 is what he gets paid per hour (the last time I asked). He makes in nominal non inflation adjusted income what he did in the late seventies. His current job, he took 33 years ago to get health care for my birth. If I screw up at work you'll read about it in the news. If I screw up I'll kill people and do hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. My job is significantly less stressful than my father's. The mangement ideologies that are running things now do not value skilled labor in retail. They will change thier ideology or automation will kill thier model. The best outcome would be skilled well paid retail labor. I don't know how to make that happen.
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Feb 21, 2017 07:46
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OneEightHundred posted:Inventory optimization isn't necessarily an issue of where decisions are made, Wal-Mart has a very strong emphasis on it despite central decisionmaking. There's actually no such thing as "unskilled labor." Granted one of the biggest issues Walmart is facing is that their employees just aren't motivated. Sam Walton even said "the way you treat your employees is the way they'll treat your customers." Walmart has been becoming increasingly lovely since he died as has retail as a whole. Fast food as well. That's been a big problem in basically any industry that hires low-wage employees in America; they make so little they just plain don't care. Customer service is suffering as is that consistent shopping experience.
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Feb 21, 2017 14:17
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ToxicSlurpee posted:There's actually no such thing as "unskilled labor." The problem is also not just that they don't care, it's that caring has no effect because all of the details are dictated by corporate offices and aren't up for discussion. They see store-level decision making as a liability and actively suppress it. Fast food is probably the worst offender in that regard. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Feb 22, 2017 |
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Feb 22, 2017 02:52
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OneEightHundred posted:You can call the term a misnomer if you want, but the point is to drive wages and churn costs to the floor by making the positions as replaceable as possible. Sam Walton may have been too idealistic since Wal-Mart has been driving other department stores under for a while by undercutting the poo poo out of them. The model of treating employees like raw material might be immoral, but it certainly works, and I don't see it improving when the Internet is driving things even more towards self-service. That's also just a problem of increased industrialization and automation as well. Unless you have a particular set of specialized skills these days your labor just isn't nearly worth as much as machines have been doing at least part of the job for ages. The biggest pressure is that it just plain takes fewer people to run a store. It used to be inventory and ordering stock was done by hand on paper. You had a bunch of people who just counted things and wrote that poo poo down. Now a computer does it all and one person just fixes the errors.
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Feb 22, 2017 03:27
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ToxicSlurpee posted:You had a bunch of people who just counted things and wrote that poo poo down. Now a computer does it all and one person just fixes the errors. They still have employees count in most grocery stores. Even though the computer already generates a count from the informant collected at POS . Especially for liquor and lottery. They might be regulated depending on the state.
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Feb 22, 2017 05:49
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You notice it's never Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, or Williams-Sonoma that's closing stores or going away. It's names familiar to lower-middle class families of the 70s/80s. As Nevada is a weird-rear end tourist trap of a state that also borrows from the nearby regions as far as retail brands go, we have all kinds of weird poo poo coming and going all the time. Some chains treat us as part of Utah/the Midwest, othertimes we get California. Sometimes a brand from far away sets up a lone outpost in Vegas just to get tourist dollars, etc. About the biggest change I've seen were the loss of SoCal's Robinson-May about ten years ago to Federated Department Stores. This has caused double Macy's stores in some malls still to this day, and yet they STILL won't stock furniture except in one odd showroom in a more industrial part of town. Vegas also lost it's Bloomingdale's on the Strip, which was walking distance from numerous luxury hotels. It became a Dick's Sporting Goods which seems odd because I can't imagine how many people buy runner gear or tennis equipment in that area. Bloomingdale's probably just became squashed between Neiman-Marcus and Nordstrom in the same mall, and a Barney's New York built across the street. Our billionaire's mouthpiece of a newspaper recently noted that there's a bunch of empty big boxes. I noticed the other week that the Circuit City that I bought my PS3 at lawwwng ago is still an abandoned Circuit City. But I also saw abandoned Circuit City window decorations on a building on Van Ness in San Francisco around 2014, so I figured even in wealthy cities it's been a problem. EDIT: My favorite, most  retail story is what happened when Albertsons bought Safeway in Southern CA/NV. The FTC declared that the two chains would monopolize some areas by having stores too close to each other, so a number of stores were obligated to be sold. They were sold to a VC-funded expansion of Haggen, a tiny little pacific northwest grocer that went from about 5 stores to 250 stores overnight.Haggen would do remodeling and rebranding to the stores while they were open, often overnight, and take over. As such, Albertsons knew when the stores were going to handed over and had some idea of what they were going to do when operating. So when the stores opened, Albertsons put out ridiculous deals. When we looked at them, the store was repainted but the groceries were far more expensive than they were as part of the big old chain. Haggen eventually filed a lawsuit, alleging that Albertsons raised prices on things before Haggen took over so when Haggen "kept the same price" the customer coming in would see the same groceries on the same furniture with a higher price. Who knows whether all their accusations were correct, but Albertsons definitely showed some signs of cut-throat competition with the opening week coupons to their alternative stores, etc. Haggen collapsed in debt in about six months and closed their stores, laying off everyone. Many of their closed locations were purchased by Albertsons and reopened, so they achieved the regional grocery monopolization that Obama's FTC was seeking to avoid in the first place. God bless America. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Feb 22, 2017 |
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Feb 22, 2017 06:58
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's also just a problem of increased industrialization and automation as well. As an example, I used to work at a computer store where all of the merchandising was done store-level. It wound up becoming experiment-driven to a large extent, like a clip strip of TrueImage boxes at the end of the hard drive aisle became a staple because it was just tried one week and it was selling multiple copies per day so it stayed. There are a lot of chain stores where doing that is impossible, the only thing anyone can do is take orders from above. I don't know how well giving more responsibility to lower-level employees would really work though compared to discovering opportunities through more sophisticated data analysis.
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Feb 22, 2017 23:34
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Craptacular! posted:Albertsons bought Safeway in Southern CA/NV. When these chains buy each other, they each have thier own set of rules. Albertsons runs one way, Kash n Karry ran one way, Food Lion runs another way, etc. It sucks for the employees because they have to learn new the new systems each time. Also they love to lay off and rehire to reset benefits if they are allowed to in the particular state.
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Feb 23, 2017 05:07
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Craptacular! posted:haggen Holyeeee poo poo i hope they teach that story in bussness school. I just googled it and and albertsons ended up buying them wholesale. You wanna talk art of war? Machiavelli? Look no further than that crater of a company.
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Feb 23, 2017 06:32
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incoherent posted:Holyeeee poo poo i hope they teach that story in bussness school. I just googled it and and albertsons ended up buying them wholesale. You wanna talk art of war? Machiavelli? Look no further than that crater of a company. My favorite part is that they sued Albertsons for a billion dollars over anti-competitive scheming designed to handicap them, which certainly seemed plausible as one of the people living halfway between a store that was sold and a store that was kept (the coupons I mentioned, that Albertsons knew exactly the morning each store would open since they'd only be closed for a couple hours after they ceded ownership, etc). And then in the end they settled for $5.75 million. Haggen held people up for benefits, was accused on social media to have given store managers or anyone who wasn't UFCW incredibly long and difficult hours, and neither union or non-union workers were spared by waves of layoffs, which then led to them being sued for disability discrimination when an employee with a development disability was laid off. It was an incredibly fast rise and fall that made the story of other grocery failures like Fresh & Easy seem long and drawn-out. And yes, at least a couple of the stores in this region went back to Albertsons, not because of the buyout you mentioned, but because Albertsons stepped back in and took the locations back in late 2015 and had to hire a whole-new staff. Just as like it was planned. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Feb 23, 2017 |
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Feb 23, 2017 06:56
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BrandorKP posted:Also they love to lay off and rehire to reset benefits if they are allowed to in the particular state. Jesus Christ that should be illegal on a national level. What the gently caress?
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Feb 23, 2017 19:19
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/02/24/jc-penney-store-closures/98344540/ Down go 130 to 140 J.C. Penny stores. Which is 13% to 14% of it's locations.
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Feb 25, 2017 16:49
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Great Metal Jesus posted:Jesus Christ that should be illegal on a national level. What the gently caress? is what the gently caress.We might not have worker protection but at least we have super ultra freedom.
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Feb 25, 2017 18:15
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Now a computer does it all On this note, I work for a certain large chainn supermarket, and the cash office in each store usually has one full time clerk as well as other trained part timers to fill in as need be. They are now killing that position because new systems installed take a whole days worth of work down to 3 hours. On the plus side, at the last contract negotiations, the company agreed to create a certain amount kf new full time positions over the baseline in the next 2 years. On the negative side, there is now a salary cap of $18.50 an hour for new FT employees 
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Feb 25, 2017 18:38
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Amused to Death posted:On the negative side, there is now a salary cap of $18.50 an hour for new FT employees
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Feb 25, 2017 18:42
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BrandorKP posted:They still have employees count in most grocery stores. Even though the computer already generates a count from the informant collected at POS . Especially for liquor and lottery. They might be regulated depending on the state. We count at least once a year every single thing in the store in every single chain I've ever worked in, and for high error stock (stuff that gets nicked a lot) we do it on a monthly basis at least. Normally I just do it whenever anything looks wrong. Having the computer is really just a substitute for having a big binder full of numbers, the computer keeps track of the numbers and gives them to you and anyone else who needs them when you ask it. You still have to actually put the numbers in yourself. I feel like it's the EPOS that does the correcting and I do the actual counting. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 15:10
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OwlFancier posted:We count at least once a year every single thing in the store in every single chain I've ever worked in, and for high error stock (stuff that gets nicked a lot) we do it on a monthly basis at least. Normally I just do it whenever anything looks wrong. Well the thing is before computers, you'd easily be doing the total store count once a week instead of once a year, and the high error stock might be getting checked daily. It adds up to a lot more work. Because without barcodes and computers in the register, you wouldn't have an ongoing tracking of products as they sell. Cashier wasn't carefully noting down each item as they sold them.
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Feb 27, 2017 16:26
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fishmech posted:Well the thing is before computers, you'd easily be doing the total store count once a week instead of once a year, and the high error stock might be getting checked daily. It adds up to a lot more work.
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Feb 27, 2017 16:30
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fishmech posted:Well the thing is before computers, you'd easily be doing the total store count once a week instead of once a year, and the high error stock might be getting checked daily. It adds up to a lot more work. Well that's sort of what I mean, the EPOS corrects regularly and that enables less counting, but you still do a lot of counting.
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Feb 27, 2017 17:53
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Well they want eventually for that EPOS to collect data that can generate orders in real time down the entire supply chain. Straight up someone buys a microwave in seattle it lets the mine in Brazil know to dig up more iron ore type things. Or even from the rates predicting the raw materials orders ahead of time and so forth for all points in the supply chain.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:40
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OwlFancier posted:Well that's sort of what I mean, the EPOS corrects regularly and that enables less counting, but you still do a lot of counting. It means a lot less manual counting and a lot more automated ordering. It's a massive overall reduction in the manpower needed for bookkeeping. Instead of weekly counts and filling out order forms you just let the computer do 95% of the work and have humans fix the mistakes and shrinkage.
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Feb 27, 2017 19:11
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Apparently for all the talk of K-Mart being a shittier Wal-Mart or Target, Target isn't doing well either: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-target-results-idUSKBN16719S One thing I've seen blamed for that: Shoppers moving out of suburbs, resulting in a lot of underperforming locations.
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Mar 2, 2017 17:07
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OneEightHundred posted:Apparently for all the talk of K-Mart being a shittier Wal-Mart or Target, Target isn't doing well either: As they mention in the article though, they've been doing a lot of expansion into urban area which has to be costing them a lot to start up. When I moved to Boston in 2015, there was only one Target store in the city, and that was in a traditional big box strip mall. They've since brought in two stores of modified design, one inside a new office building on multiple floors and another on the commercial strip of traditional city stores near Boston University. They're also building several more stores of similar designs in dense areas of Cambridge and Somerville. Not sure how it's going to work out, but they sure are more convenient for people without cars.
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Mar 2, 2017 17:27
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So, it looks like hhgregg will be sinking completely into oblivion shortly - they got delisted a few days ago and have already announced the closure of around 40% of their stores before even filing for bankruptcy, which seems inevitable at this point.
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Mar 3, 2017 03:27
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hhgregg was as profitable as Best Buy (in percentage terms at least) until their sudden implosion over the past 3 years, which as far as I can tell is due to 2 things: One is that their sales are down 21% since 2012, probably because they only sell 2 product categories and one of those categories (TVs) has tanked in price. They're an electronics retailer without a mobile department. Best Buy's are down too, but only 9% and they're still making money. The other is they posted $70M worth of writedowns largely due to a bunch of former Circuit City locations turning out to not be worth what they paid, most of which are now closing. Oops. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Mar 5, 2017 |
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Mar 5, 2017 02:48
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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-radioshack-bankruptcy-idUSKBN16G06J?il=0 RadioShack is filing for bankruptcy again 2 years after doing so for the first time. Will close 200 stores.
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Mar 9, 2017 06:51
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BrandorKP do you think that all the complicated analysis you posted last page basically boils down to "people on the ground, if they're paid enough to care and are being paid attention to, can better respond to consumer trends that arise organically"?
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Mar 9, 2017 10:24
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:BrandorKP do you think that all the complicated analysis you posted last page basically boils down to "people on the ground, if they're paid enough to care and are being paid attention to, can better respond to consumer trends that arise organically"? That's my opinion. Further I would say the current thinking on supply chain management, some of the text books on the subject, say that. And they stress organizing the business in a way to move that information from those employees upward to management. When they do these things businesses make more money. That's craziest thing to me. Treating employees poorly, not retaining them, and not listening to them loses a business money.
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Mar 10, 2017 07:04
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Gordmans filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, although they're planning to liquidate inventory and assets, so it's effectively Chapter 7 on a store-based form (and presumably continuing as online-only given the Chapter 11). *Cues up "Another one bites the dust"*
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Mar 14, 2017 09:11
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JC Penney's announced 138 store closings: https://www.boston.com/g00/news/business/2017/03/17/here-are-the-138-jc-penney-stores-that-are-closing From the areas I know of, many of these JC Penney's seem to be pre-shopping mall main street JC Penney's in smaller towns.
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Mar 18, 2017 19:24
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So I saw Amazon now offers 1 day shipping to prime members. Are we going to see a further downturn of retail as we know it with other providerbeing forced to mimic the same behavior
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Mar 18, 2017 22:00
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glowing-fish posted:JC Penney's announced 138 store closings: Lush is killin' it around here and all JC Penney's had going for it was Sephora.
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Mar 19, 2017 04:52
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LeoMarr posted:So I saw Amazon now offers 1 day shipping to prime members. Are we going to see a further downturn of retail as we know it with other providerbeing forced to mimic the same behavior
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Mar 19, 2017 17:43
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LeoMarr posted:So I saw Amazon now offers 1 day shipping to prime members. Are we going to see a further downturn of retail as we know it with other providerbeing forced to mimic the same behavior That's been available for a few years in many areas, assuming you're talking about just plain getting 1 day delivery instead of 2 day delivery as your standard free delivery with Prime. Mostly depends on where you're situated relative to their shipping facilities. Some of those same areas also make your default free shipping into same-day (so long as you order by like 2 PM that is), and that's even more dependent on how near to a facility you are. In a further subset of those areas, they have free 2-hour delivery on a limited subset of the site's stock too. Mostly food and office supplies, but some electronics and other random items.
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Mar 19, 2017 21:30
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http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/sears-flags-going-concern-doubts.html Sears has finally said what we all know. quote:Retailer Sears Holdings, which has struggled with years of losses and declining sales, warned on Tuesday about its ability to continue as a going concern.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:34
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So they're going to firesale everything
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Mar 22, 2017 03:40
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OneEightHundred posted:Inventory optimization isn't necessarily an issue of where decisions are made, Wal-Mart has a very strong emphasis on it despite central decisionmaking. I have to be a bit vague due to my job but I work for a major company that does a lot of business with Wal-Mart and other big box retailers. You will be shocked to know how many things corporate want to do but can't get done because of local market issues or low-level employees not able to do things correctly. Even basic things like trying to get mannequins merchandised with the correct outfits is still a constant struggle today. Now flip that around and compare that to ecommerce sites that are able to throw up the ssome touched up banner with the perfect look. Just as long as the ecommerce company has someone with a strong PoV and quality control they are going to get the right look there and the brand feels tighter. Wal-Mart or any other big box retailer can't do that. What happens to the promotional stand in a store after it gets ran over by a stampede in the store? Do they throw it out or wait for a new one to arrive? It's a mess. Think about all the bullshit returns that big box retailers deal with while ecommerce sites like Amazon doesn't. You can basically walk into any Wal-Mart and claim you bought something and return it and it's no problem. Wal-Mart stores are full of poo poo that was never purchased by Wal-Mart corporate, some random person decided to return it there and they may have very well bought it from somewhere else. Still to this day this surprises me this happens but I promise you this is 100% the situation in stores. People just return stuff and employees don't get paid enough to care to deal with it, they just take it in even though that inventory never existed. Wal-Mart is playing catch up in the ecommerce wars. They just opened up Wal-Mart.com to any supplier and a ton of people are returning things to Wal-Mart stores even though the item they purchased on Wal-Mart.com was never in Wal-Mart inventory, the piece was supplied by a Wa-Mart.com marketplace seller. So sure they made 10-20% on the sale.com but eat 100% of the return and have to sell it on a discount rack for nothing. I think in the next few years you are going to see the same trend that happened in (traditional) retailing happen online. Instead of a bunch of different boutique sites, you are going to see a bunch of big websites that act as marketplaces. When you purchase an item on Amazon.com, Wal-Mart.com, Crate and Barrel & NewEgg you may or may not be buying an item that was physically purchased from those individual sites. That product you are buying may very well never have been in their warehouses and is provided by a marketplace partner. Essentially, instead of individual brands selling things on their own, they looked to retailers that had the foot traffic to drive people to buy their things, now brands may get pushed to these big traffic websites that act as market places to curate their products to their visitors to sell. Enigma89 fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Mar 22, 2017 |
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Mar 22, 2017 03:46
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Amazon already has many items listed by third party merchants, but even those are often fulfilled from an Amazon warehouse. The experience between that and Walmart's e-commerce offerings is tremendous, saying nothing of the customer service experience difference between the two companies.
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Mar 22, 2017 04:02
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