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glowing-fish posted:So do we have a list of which retail outlets are doing well, which ones are having problems, and which are almost/totally gone. I mean probably lots? It's a massive sector of the economy, we can't list every single retail store. The ones that are failing were over-extended in real estate and/or sold absolutely garbage products. The stores that don't have those problems are doing fine.
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Apr 9, 2017 17:23
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Don't forget to post a dog. Edit: nevermind looks like that's on the way out.
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Apr 9, 2017 17:37
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Costcos main business is actually sitting on stock and logistics in bulk, they make their money on sitting on the products in the warehouses, they just found a way to sell out of them at the same time at a profit.
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Apr 9, 2017 19:06
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RuanGacho posted:Costcos main business is actually sitting on stock and logistics in bulk, they make their money on sitting on the products in the warehouses, they just found a way to sell out of them at the same time at a profit. How does that work?
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Apr 9, 2017 19:11
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:How does that work? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costco#Sales_model quote:Costco focuses on selling products at low prices, often at very high volume. These goods are usually bulk-packaged and marketed primarily to large families and businesses. Furthermore, Costco does not carry multiple brands or varieties where the item is essentially the same except when it has a house brand to sell, generally by the Kirkland Signature label. This results in a high volume of sales from a vendor, allowing further reductions in price, and reducing marketing costs. A typical Costco warehouse carries only 3,700 distinct products, while a typical Walmart Supercenter carries approximately 140,000 products.[6] The unspoken secret sauce of this from what I understand talking to people who have worked both in the closest warehouses and their corporate office, wholesale purchases in huge quantities let them leverage said stock to other retailers. Not just small businesses. On the micro scale, they work as a re seller for small businesses and make decent margins on the products they sell in the warehouse but if another part of the retail chain goes "poo poo we need 70 more pallets of kitty litter" Costco can and apparently does step in and make margin on that too.
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Apr 9, 2017 22:42
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When everybody else is trying to be lean there is money to be made when they bugger up and run out of inventory and need to get it quickly.
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Apr 10, 2017 01:42
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https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/851040113467555841 Welp. Also the video in the linked Bloomberg article is worth watching, hedge fund dude basically saying every retailer was reporting that this was just a merchandising problem and they were fine with their footprint at the end of last year, then the weak holiday hit, and now all of them are talking about shrinking, and they're talking about "sales recapture," a.k.a. canning weak locations that are near enough to another location, and that with every retailer thinking the same thing, weak malls are going to get really screwed really fast. Also predicts JCPenney needs to close another 100 locations, and that there are "about 50" smaller chains (I'm guessing mid-mall stores and regional chains) that are on the brink of bankruptcy. glowing-fish posted:Wal-Mart and Target, because they have a wide range of merchandise, and a lot of it is low-cost and perishable. The only things I've heard doing well are "fast fashion" retailers (H&M, Zara), off-price retailers (TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Burlington Coat Factory, Ross), and outlets. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 01:45
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OneEightHundred posted:Target is reportedly doing mediocre right now. It's easy to link this to how crushingly poor people are now, and I don't want to downplay that, but in the women's clothing retail space it's significant that these are close to the only brick-and-mortar stores that carry the sizes women are buying. If the average American woman is a 14 and stores only carry up to 12 they can't really act shocked that sales are down. Not as much is written about men's clothing options in extended sizing, but my impression is it isn't quite as bad because the "normal" range is bigger. A statistically-average dude can buy work clothes at the Gap, while a statistically-average woman can't. We tie a lot of baggage to clothing and body size and this of course isn't the place to get into that. It's not really my battle to fight anyway. But I can't think of too many other industries where people are walking in cash-in-hand saying "I want to buy X" and retailers are going "gently caress you, we only sell Y."
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Apr 11, 2017 02:02
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How on earth do stores stay in business only carrying up to a 12? Ok that's apparently a UK 14 but that's still, well, like only selling up to size M.
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Apr 11, 2017 02:07
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Not really as impressive as it sounds when you remember that the great collapse in coal mine employment happened much farther back, and retail employment is absolutely huge. We had a peak of 798,000 employed in coal mining in 1923, decline to 500,000 in 1945, 150,000 in 1960, a minor resurgence to 250,000 by 1980, falling back to 90,000 by 1995 (for an about 20 years ago mark) and then back down to about 70,000 today. Meanwhile there were ~4.9 million employed in retail in 2015. fishmech fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 02:14
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OwlFancier posted:How on earth do stores stay in business only carrying up to a 12? Because you don't want your brand to be associated with anything but thin, attractive people, so you just make it impossible for anyone else to wear, of course! fishmech posted:Not really as impressive as it sounds when you remember that the great collapse in coal mine employment happened much farther back, and retail employment is absolutely huge. That point is less about making the retail losses seem huge, and more about properly trivializing the coal mining job losses, which have become some sort of irritating cultural touchstone.
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Apr 11, 2017 02:45
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OwlFancier posted:How on earth do stores stay in business only carrying up to a 12? It's extremely common for women's clothing stores to effectively only carry XS and S. One of the few retail clothing success stories of recent years is Brandy Melville, which literally only carries one size. Not "one size fits all," one size. And it's roughly equivalent to an American 2. Don't ever let anybody tell you markets are rational.
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Apr 11, 2017 02:48
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PT6A posted:Because you don't want your brand to be associated with anything but thin, attractive people, so you just make it impossible for anyone else to wear, of course! If memory serves part of that is because the easiest body type to design clothes for is "very thin." Models tend to be very petite so everything is designed around them. Of course most women aren't model thin. Very few are. Women come in a wider variety of builds then men do and men's fashion tends to be all the same no matter what shape the man is. It's far more homogeneous; every guy probably owns about the same style of suit no matter if he's a rail thin 5'0" guy or a 7'0" tall guy who weighs 500 pounds. Same with like everything else. Jeans, t-shirts, sweaters, whatever...just make it in a size the guy can put on and he's good to go. Women's clothing is a bit more complicated. What looks good on a thin woman probably won't look good on a large woman.
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Apr 11, 2017 02:52
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:It's extremely common for women's clothing stores to effectively only carry XS and S. One of the few retail clothing success stories of recent years is Brandy Melville, which literally only carries one size. Not "one size fits all," one size. And it's roughly equivalent to an American 2. But who buys them if they don't fit anybody? Where is the customer base? I don't expect markets to be rational but I can't figure out how you can have national chains of stores making things that nobody can buy because nobody has any use for them, it'd be like me setting up the leaky bucket store for all your leaky bucket needs. I expect markets to do things badly but a brick and mortar, nationwide store chain that only sells clothing for a small fraction of the population seems financially impossible. I don't spend a lot of time in women's clothing stores but the ones I do see stock up to at least a UK 16 and that would be a bit on the restrictive side, a lot of them go up to 20. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 03:02
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:It's easy to link this to how crushingly poor people are now, and I don't want to downplay that, but in the women's clothing retail space it's significant that these are close to the only brick-and-mortar stores that carry the sizes women are buying. If the average American woman is a 14 and stores only carry up to 12 they can't really act shocked that sales are down. Not as much is written about men's clothing options in extended sizing, but my impression is it isn't quite as bad because the "normal" range is bigger. A statistically-average dude can buy work clothes at the Gap, while a statistically-average woman can't. It's sounding like the main difference is just that they're able to differentiate themselves by price from what is an extremely overcrowded sector. Another thing I'm wondering about is how much Internet-fueled price research has to do with this (not clothing, but retail problems in general). The whole idea of loyal customers willing to come in to a familiar store and buy something at full price is completely boned. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 03:03
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OwlFancier posted:But who buys them if they don't fit anybody? Where is the customer base? There's also the thing of the truly massive, incomprehensible wealth disparity in our society. Brandy Melville sells to well-off teenage girls who want to dress like they're on instagram. There aren't very many rich people, in terms of pure numbers, but they are so rich that you can get by selling only to them, and pretend the 99% don't even exist. Not to say BM clothing is expensive - it's roughly on par with H&M. But the store locations and the sizing are excellent gatekeepers. And the clothing industry is so ruled by trends, especially teen clothing, that it can make sense to just run a cheap line of (ugh) "festival basics," and grab all the allowance money you can before the kids get bored and move onto something else. Black Milk, are your ears burning? So hey, paint your leaky bucket "millennial pink," prop a latte on top of it and photograph it next to an issue of Kinfolk, see what happens. OneEightHundred posted:I can't speak for H&M/Zara, and I could be missing something important, but off-price retailers are just surplus inventory liquidators, so they're not getting anything special and have extremely unstable selections, so I'd expect any selection-related problems to be even worse there. That was the original idea but it's less true these days - as we were discussing earlier (I think it was in this thread at least), a lot of designer brands have un-advertised budget lines they manufacture specifically for places like TJ Maxx, in cheaper fabrics and usually a slightly larger size range. You can't get a size 16 pair of pants in a Calvin Klein boutique but you can find them all over your local Marshall's.
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Apr 11, 2017 04:12
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Is this retail collapse happening to a similar extent everywhere? Are the UK and Canada seeing similar waves of bankruptcy?
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Apr 11, 2017 04:24
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Some fashion specific stuff about Zara: http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/dec/15/inditex-spain-global-fashion-powerhouse http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/magazine/how-zara-grew-into-the-worlds-largest-fashion-retailer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1 It's older articles, but it's case studies that got used in my logistics in the supply chain classes. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 06:12
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CityLab has an article on the retail meltdown: https://www.citylab.com/work/2017/04/whats-causing-the-retail-meltdown-of-2017/522600/ tl;dr - People are simply buying more stuff online than they used to, America built way too many malls, Americans are shifting their spending from materialism to meals out with friends (and other 'experiences')
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Apr 11, 2017 11:17
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Slightly off topic but regarding fast fashion. This article in newsweek talked about the environmental consequences. http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/09/old-clothes-fashion-waste-crisis-494824.html which brings us to recently H&M Is Going Green By Making Clothes Out Of Poop
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Apr 11, 2017 14:10
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PT6A posted:Because you don't want your brand to be associated with anything but thin, attractive people, so you just make it impossible for anyone else to wear, of course!
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Apr 11, 2017 14:43
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I'm not an expert - I'm actually posting this stuff hoping experts will come in and explain it to me, because it's really interesting - but my impression is that we're in kind of a weird point in economic history in general, where investor cash is a lot more important than sales. You can suck at what you do, or sell it for vastly below break-even (Uber), and you're still a "success" because investors gotta invest. I guess I was thinking by "success" you meant "had a functioning business" not silicon valley "success". It's real weird to see that mindset get ported over to something as mundane as brick and mortar retail, though I suppose it illustrates how stupid it is. Also the scale of America and its wealth segregation probably makes that kind of targeted selling easier. sleep with the vicious posted:Is this retail collapse happening to a similar extent everywhere? Are the UK and Canada seeing similar waves of bankruptcy? The UK recently lost BHS which was a fashion/homeware retailer but that could honestly be because the guy in charge of it was a loving moron who walked out the door with a bunch of money rather than actually running it properly, there was a bit of a scandal about it. Also BHS sells old lady clothes and middle aged lady homewares. Not really a fashionable shop. Otherwise I don't think we really have much of a skinny people only clothing market, most stores carry 16 and some up to 20, and we've had an expansion of plus size clothing stores like very, simply be/jacamo etc. General retail I think a bunch of supermarkets are downsizing a bit and moving away from massive superstores and more towards smaller, more convenient, more spread out stores. I think TESCO was in a bit of bother a while back with it having so many different business arms. But the cheap and cheerful retailers seem to be doing better than the posher "middle class" trendy ones like Sainsburys. Everywhere is downsizing because the UK economy is in the toilet but I don't think anywhere major has folded yet, except stuff like record and electronics stores and stuff where the market has been completely wiped out by online. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 14:51
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I have the opposite problem people are discussing, where are all the clothes for skinny dudes. In the states seemed like the only B&M place that was worth bothering with was Uniqlo, which is odd since there are a fair number of Asians stateside these days.A Buttery Pastry posted:I'm pretty sure they haven't invented clothes that can't be worn by ugly people.
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Apr 11, 2017 15:44
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Cicero posted:I have the opposite problem people are discussing, where are all the clothes for skinny dudes. In the states seemed like the only B&M place that was worth bothering with was Uniqlo, which is odd since there are a fair number of Asians stateside these days. Yea I have the same problem where if something fits me it's usually styled for a highschool/college aged guy.
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Apr 11, 2017 19:57
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:especially teen clothing Teen clothing? Not trying to sound dumb here but what is that? Was it a thing 10 years ago? I grew up in a lower middle-class and... aesthetically conservative family, and all I remember is jeans and t-shirts, with an occasional jacket for the colder months. Is teen fashion like that goth stuff they sell at Hot Topic or something?
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Apr 12, 2017 03:55
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Cicero posted:I have the opposite problem people are discussing, where are all the clothes for skinny dudes. In the states seemed like the only B&M place that was worth bothering with was Uniqlo, which is odd since there are a fair number of Asians stateside these days. seriously. I'm pretty sure today's XS are yesterday's Mediums. I had to buy XS scrubs and even those kind of hang off of me.
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Apr 12, 2017 03:59
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Teen clothing? Not trying to sound dumb here but what is that? Was it a thing 10 years ago? I grew up in a lower middle-class and... aesthetically conservative family, and all I remember is jeans and t-shirts, with an occasional jacket for the colder months. Is teen fashion like that goth stuff they sell at Hot Topic or something? Teenagers have existed as a marketing demographic since the fifties. Jesus Christ, dude.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:12
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Teenagers have existed as a marketing demographic since the fifties. Jesus Christ, dude. Well, I am a guy, so my teenage years were mostly just "this JC Penney shirt looks okay, grandma", but I do remember that most girls seemed to buy clothing mostly at departments in department store? Like, maybe for some girls, that was JC Penney's, and for others it was Nordstrom's, but I don't remember as many specific teen fashion stores.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:26
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American Eagle, Abercrombie, and Aeropostle are the teen stores that I remember from HS and college. e; I think they are considered 'teen stores' idk.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:50
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I like the big box stores that have furniture in them so I can lay down on their nice couch and pretend that I can afford nice furniture.
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Apr 12, 2017 19:32
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glowing-fish posted:Well, I am a guy, so my teenage years were mostly just "this JC Penney shirt looks okay, grandma", but Department stores have "juniors" sections for teen girls and variously-named teen boy departments with usually much more low-key signage, because as Grand Prize Winner demonstrated, admitting you know anything about clothing, absolutely anything at all, makes your penis fall off. There are hundreds of teen fashion boutiques. In addition to what was named already, there are the giants like Forever 21, H&M (some of their clothing is aimed at working adults but anybody going query: what is a teen doesn't get to split hairs with me here), Charlotte Russe, The Buckle (RIP I think?), PacSun, Diesel, Lucky Brand, pretty much anything mid-mall that's not a candle store.
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Apr 12, 2017 19:50
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Teen clothing? Not trying to sound dumb here but what is that? Was it a thing 10 years ago? I grew up in a lower middle-class and... aesthetically conservative family, and all I remember is jeans and t-shirts, with an occasional jacket for the colder months. Is teen fashion like that goth stuff they sell at Hot Topic or something? Do you live somewhere with a 6th form college? If so, all the people you see wandering around dressed very strange, those are teens, wearing teen clothing. Also if you still have your wardrobe from back then, you can look at it and realize that you also dressed very strange.
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Apr 12, 2017 23:41
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e: this post was stupid and contributed nothing. Thanks for naming those stores. I never really budgeted any money for clothes growing up so I wasn't really familiar with them. Southern california is a shirts-optional kind of place. Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Apr 13, 2017 |
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Apr 13, 2017 00:01
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CheeseSpawn posted:This article in newsweek talked about the environmental consequences.
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Apr 13, 2017 04:17
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Southern california is a shirts-optional kind of place. Ok yeah, so it's every day clothes from what you saw pretty much everyone wearing.
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Apr 13, 2017 04:42
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So retail is in free fall for some partially unknowable reason and the retail sector employs more Americans, percentage wise, than ever before: has there been anybody talking about how this could lead to Bad Stuff?
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Apr 13, 2017 10:24
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:So retail is in free fall for some partially unknowable reason and the retail sector employs more Americans, percentage wise, than ever before: has there been anybody talking about how this could lead to Bad Stuff? quote:The reality is that overall retail spending continues to grow steadily, if a little meagerly.
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Apr 13, 2017 11:03
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One of the first things a corporation does when it's spooked by bad reports is cut labor costs, and those jobs don't come back.
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Apr 13, 2017 11:38
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Actually, companies hire people when demand is high enough to necessitate additional employees. The more you know!
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Apr 13, 2017 12:10
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Cicero posted:Actually, companies hire people when demand is high enough to necessitate additional employees. The more you know! When business is up after a dip companies are usually pretty down to paper over labor needs with "seasonal" or temporary workers, yes. Then, very begrudgingly, part timers if they absolutely have to. These employees have very different jobs than all the full time workers who got shitcanned during the downturn. Speaking of retail especially.
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Apr 13, 2017 12:36
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