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BrandorKP posted:My wife has to shop children's petite for clothes. To get a good pair of boots that have good treads she has to look at boys. To get really high quality work pants I buy used women's pants (red ants) I agree with all of that. I think that will to some degree always be a problem if companies continue to style garments around a particular demographic or body type and then just randomly adjust various measurements hoping that it fits SOME body type out there in the general population. Regardless of the trend, I think that is just a fundamental flaw for anyone without a personal tailor. That is an interesting topic problem to solve. e: BrandorKP posted:"because that's what happens when you pick a single demographic and mass produce a select style for them" Agreed. CmdrRiker fucked around with this message at 06:28 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 06:26
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Oh no, snowflake is bored. Pack it in, everyone. You have now made more posts than there were tights posts. Do you police every two-post derail on the forums or just the ones you find beneath you. I love how overinflated you think my ego is. Please carry on.
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May 16, 2017 06:28
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BrandorKP posted:"because that's what happens when you pick a single demographic and mass produce a select style for them" Yeah, it's important to remember this narrowing in on a tiny slice of customers (you used to be able to buy clothing for someone other than spindly teenage girls and golfdads, you really did) coincided with an absolute cratering in quality and a deranged pricing landscape, with ten dollar fast fashion, perma-discounted anchor store drabwear, and mainline boutiques that tripled their prices in order to seem "aspirational" leaving shoppers roaming the mall having no idea how to correlate cost with quality or even how much to budget for, say, a work wardrobe or kids' back-to-school. People were effectively pounding on the doors of brick-and-mortar shops, cash in hand, saying "I would buy from you if you'd sell me something I want" but they didn't, so people took their business to the internet and here we are.
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May 16, 2017 06:30
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A toxic social change that has aided this problem of "no one being happy regardless of what they're doing" is the body shaming that goes along with it. The horrid and obvious one is the fat shaming for women not fitting into a size 6 or less, but another one that I have noticed to a way lesser degree is the skinny shaming too. This might be limited to my personal experience, and I haven't researched it yet, but I do see a fair amount of it on my social media feeds. Women will sometimes berate the slender women body type with all sorts of pejoratives and unsavory descriptions. I'm not saying that it is a unique social problem, or as onerous as the fat shaming, but something that I have definitely noticed to be tapped for discussions of "clothes don't fit me because I'm not a stick without any boobs that throws up my food! wahh" e: grammar CmdrRiker fucked around with this message at 06:42 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 06:39
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Mr.Radar posted:TechCrunch has an interesting article on what makes Amazon so different from their competitors and why they will likely continue to eat the rest of the retail sector:
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May 16, 2017 07:00
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http://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-sears-and-kmart-stores-closing-2017-5 Sears is quietly closing even more stores than they announced they would. 28 Kmart/Sears stores have been closed on top of the 150 announced in January.
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May 16, 2017 07:14
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Cicero posted:This is a good article, the main thing I disagree with is that I think it would be very difficult for retail incumbents to catch up, tech-wise. Yeah on the surface it sounds simple enough, Walmart has enough money so surely they can just buy/acquihire whatever they need right? But I think being competent in consumer-facing technology to the extent that Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc. are would require a massive cultural change for a company like Walmart, and even if that culture exists in, say, a startup they acquire (like Jet), usually that kind of culture gets obliterated in short order after the acquisition. Walmart is also stingy as gently caress. They'll look for a way to do tech cheaply while the most successful companies (yes I know they also have a history of trying to underpay but really to the extent of Walmart) get that you have to shower the best devs in cash or somebody else will. Walmart wants to do everything the Walmart way which doesn't work well for tech.
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May 16, 2017 07:46
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BrandorKP posted:My wife has to shop children's petite for clothes. To get a good pair of boots that have good treads she has to look at boys. To get really high quality work pants I buy used women's pants (red ants) Are you a woman? I've never heard of men being unable to get high quality work pants and having to buy used women's pants.
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May 16, 2017 14:19
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Cicero posted:This is a good article, the main thing I disagree with is that I think it would be very difficult for retail incumbents to catch up, tech-wise. Yeah on the surface it sounds simple enough, Walmart has enough money so surely they can just buy/acquihire whatever they need right? But I think being competent in consumer-facing technology to the extent that Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc. are would require a massive cultural change for a company like Walmart, and even if that culture exists in, say, a startup they acquire (like Jet), usually that kind of culture gets obliterated in short order after the acquisition. Amazon is also in a weird semi-permanent transition period. They are not an especially profitable company, but they are an extremely valuable company. Amazon's shareholders have given Jeff Bezos an extreme amount of freedom and care to run the company however he wants. At some point, they are going to demand that Amazon start turning a real profit that is in proportion with its market share. Basically, Amazon investors all assume that Amazon is going to take over the world at some point and raise prices. But they are letting Amazon do a bunch of money losing ventures and slashing prices to the bone to expand market share. This is good for consumers, but at some point everyone else is going to go out of business or Amazon is going to start requiring more profits. Amazon would lose almost all of its cash on hand if it had two bad years (or one extremely bad year) in a row because the margins are so razor thin.
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May 16, 2017 14:22
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BrandorKP posted:My wife has to shop children's petite for clothes. To get a good pair of boots that have good treads she has to look at boys. To get really high quality work pants I buy used women's pants (red ants) And I can never find pants shorter than 30 inches, when 27/28 would be perfect for me  same with waist, some brands the 31 is too tight but the 32 is like clown pantsAnd i loving hate using amazon, the website is so cluttered and laid out poorly and they try to pull 'gotchas' all the time, plus their ceo being a douche and the company culture rampantly taking advantage of cheap labor and women. got any sevens fucked around with this message at 15:04 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 15:00
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Dameius posted:Thinking about malls and conspicuous consumption, you have places like The Galleria in Houston which attracts significant international customers. For The Galleria it is the wealthy and elite from Latin America, mostly Mexico, who'll fly in once or twice a year to be seen conspicuously consuming for a few days before flying back home. Though I don't know how strongly that trend is holding up these days, it used to be such a regularly occurring thing, dropping enough money into the local economy, that it'd get mentioned every now and then in the local news. Houston in general always takes me at least a day or two to adjust when I travel there based on how shockingly upper class it can feel, especially coming from a much smaller and shrinking rust belt city. We however have a larger mall than the Galleria, which has caused controversies based on how little taxes they have had to pay our city while bleeding the downtown area dry of any consumer related development. There are a few luxury stores at the mall yet I find them usually empty. Those that are spending money there are most likely not from this area.
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May 16, 2017 15:17
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Amazon is also in a weird semi-permanent transition period. Surely you mean the investors would demand they spend less on the various pie in the sky projects, not raise prices? That's Amazon's whole strategy for over a decade: they've managed to get to profitable, now they plow most of that profit into expansions and gambling on things like new TV shows, or new gadgets, rather than relying on doing the same thing on business credit as others do. Often those things fall through, like the Fire smartphone did, other times they work out. Amazon could instantly turn a larger profit for a year simply by pulling back on the reinvestment.
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May 16, 2017 15:18
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CmdrRiker posted:A toxic social change that has aided this problem of "no one being happy regardless of what they're doing" is the body shaming that goes along with it. The horrid and obvious one is the fat shaming for women not fitting into a size 6 or less, but another one that I have noticed to a way lesser degree is the skinny shaming too. This might be limited to my personal experience, and I haven't researched it yet, but I do see a fair amount of it on my social media feeds. Women will sometimes berate the slender women body type with all sorts of pejoratives and unsavory descriptions. I was in a sporting goods store the other day and holy poo poo when did make mannequins get so jacked? I mean, I consider myself to be in pretty good shape, but to get to the level of swole they were exhibiting would take years of training and/or steroids.
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May 16, 2017 15:29
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sitchensis posted:I was in a sporting goods store the other day and holy poo poo when did make mannequins get so jacked? I mean, I consider myself to be in pretty good shape, but to get to the level of swole they were exhibiting would take years of training and/or steroids. The recent years fitness culture has pretty much amplified the problem for both genders.
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May 16, 2017 15:32
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/05/16/rue21-bankruptcy/101742150/ Rue21 has filed for bankruptcy. They may avoid liquidation due to securing support for its debt-cutting plan from creditors and not bleeding to much cash. It's already in the process of closing 400 of it's 1,179 and will likely close more.
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May 16, 2017 21:19
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OhFunny posted:https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/05/16/rue21-bankruptcy/101742150/ So far there haven't been any retail closures that I've missed. The job loss is serious, of course, but Rue21 is yet another clothing store that sold poo poo products
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May 16, 2017 22:00
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Amazon is also in a weird semi-permanent transition period. Amazon re-invests its profits and thus never shows a massive profit; but it's responsible for half of all Internet commerce by value. This is not inexplicable, it is good business; what you are supposed to do with a company. The objective should not be to bust out the best monetary shareholder value every quarter, that's the ethos of doomed companies. They don't need to keep physical storefronts and the associated overhead, which allows them to destroy brick and mortar retail (what use they see in opening their own brick and mortars for anything but grocery is beyond me; seems like a silly experiment by a company with a lot of assets to burn on such things). Their only serious retail competition are companies with a grocery component, because their online format just can't deliver the same value there.
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May 16, 2017 22:16
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Yeah, stock companies have three ways of providing a return on investment to their shareholders. The first is dividends (directly giving out profits to shareholders), the second is share-buybacks (inflates the stock price artificially by shrinking supply) and re-investment (expanding the business). Amazon is doing the third. Remember kids, a lack of declared profits on a balance sheets doesn't necessarily imply that a company isn't making money.
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May 16, 2017 22:22
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dont even fink about it posted:Amazon re-invests its profits and thus never shows a massive profit; but it's responsible for half of all Internet commerce by value. This is not inexplicable, it is good business; what you are supposed to do with a company. The objective should not be to bust out the best monetary shareholder value every quarter, that's the ethos of doomed companies. They don't need to keep physical storefronts and the associated overhead, which allows them to destroy brick and mortar retail (what use they see in opening their own brick and mortars for anything but grocery is beyond me; seems like a silly experiment by a company with a lot of assets to burn on such things). Retail space will be cheap. They probably will make enough money there to pay for the fact that they're fantastic advertising and also keeping other competitors out of spaces
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May 16, 2017 23:02
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Cicero posted:This is a good article, the main thing I disagree with is that I think it would be very difficult for retail incumbents to catch up, tech-wise. Yeah on the surface it sounds simple enough, Walmart has enough money so surely they can just buy/acquihire whatever they need right? But I think being competent in consumer-facing technology to the extent that Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc. are would require a massive cultural change for a company like Walmart, and even if that culture exists in, say, a startup they acquire (like Jet), usually that kind of culture gets obliterated in short order after the acquisition. They're always buying the newest and hottest tech, then half-assing the implementation, which adds to the poo poo heap of legacy. So sure, they buy the New Hotness analytics. But they never hook up half the systems to it. So New Hotness doesn't see half the sales in the company and half the company doesn't see its analytics. Especially Bob, who is the Merchant for department 5, he doesn't like the way it calculates X because it drops his numbers. Particularly in retail is the way things are. There is a hosed up culture where the manager or merchant of an area has immense power and very little oversight, as long as they hit the bottom line. So stupid, short sighted decisions are common. When I was at BB corporate there was about 20 systems that could create a new sales transaction and almost 30 that consumed them. It was a rat's nest from a decade of silo'ed thinking and management. We're talking 15-20 year old systems just sitting around because a couple of people still used them for something and no one would pay to move them to a new system. Big retailers are obsessive over cutting costs, that is their entire business model. And sooner or later the person who is best at cutting costs gets promoted and put in charge of things that shouldn't be cut. And poo poo goes bad in a hurry. I always hope things like WannaCry will make people realize that old systems are a potential liability that needs to be managed. But 10 years of hacks being nightly news hasn't done it so nothing will. Xae fucked around with this message at 23:09 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 23:06
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Xae posted:Getting new tech into old companies is difficult, but keeping it up to date is impossible. The Culture and Organization are not setup to allow it. A couple years back when I was doing retail management for another company, the BB system crashed when I was in line and I was like "Yeah that's fine, POS's are always terrible, mine is really bad too." Girl just looked at me and goes "Ours is from 1997."
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May 16, 2017 23:09
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One of the major UK supermarkets just updated its stock control handheld terminals. Initially they rolled out an updated version of the old model which looks like an old 1990's brick phone with a laser on the top and a big pistol grip, the new version had better scanning and a faster screen, it was quite good. Now they've gone with what is essentially an android phone with their incredibly ancient stock control system, built into an app. So you have all the joy of an on screen keyboard with all the clunk of what must be something like a 20 year old stock control interface. On the plus side they scan even better, on the downside they will also scan QR codes and then dump the web address into the SKU number input and crash the device.
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May 16, 2017 23:10
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Gumbel2Gumbel posted:A couple years back when I was doing retail management the BB system crashed when I was in line and I was like "Yeah that's fine, POS's are always terrible, mine is really bad too." The "Revolutions" project should have replaced all POS by ~2010. But before that, yeah it was ancient as gently caress. Interestingly they had a Matrix themed IT unfucking going on while I was there. "Matrix" was an overhaul of their reporting back end. It was started, stopped, unfunded then restarted 3 times. "Revolutions" was the POS system. "Reloaded" was their Inventory system overhaul. It died an undignified death because... Now their inventory system was some Retek Customized Frankenstein from hell poo poo that was from the mid 90s. That thing was a goddamn abomination. It was still running Oracle 8 in ~2010 and they had no plans to upgrade it because it had been customized so heavily and so poorly that Oracle refused to even bid on upgrading it. Like the project should be studied as an example of What The gently caress Not To Do. Edit: All POS in the main Chain. Any of the store-within-a-store poo poo was all separate. Double Secret Edit: Everyone Read this: http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/ Xae fucked around with this message at 23:19 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 23:12
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Amazon seems to do a really good job of remembering that you need customers to make money. Everything they do revolves around selling more stuff to more people, usually by making it extremely easy and fast to buy things. Prime was a game-changer, because suddenly it became so quick to buy pretty much whatever you want and have it shipped anywhere. Want to buy a gift for someone that lives across the country? Select a gift-wrap option, have it sent right to their door in 2 days, and you're done. Are you drunk as gently caress and think of something you want to buy? Thanks to the app, you can be sitting at the bar and your drunken impulse purchase will arrive in 2 business days without having to enter a credit card number or anything like that! Oh, hey, I can upgrade to one-day shipping for free on an order over $25? Guess I'll add on another book or whatever to get it over that threshold. The Marketplace system also works a treat. Now that everyone shops on Amazon for everything, you can attract additional sellers to handle specialized products. You keep a cut, and they're grateful for the increased business. They have no need to worry about a market being too small to generate demand for a specific product, because your market is now any Amazon customer you're willing to ship to.
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May 16, 2017 23:21
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PT6A posted:Amazon seems to do a really good job of remembering that you need customers to make money. Everything they do revolves around selling more stuff to more people, usually by making it extremely easy and fast to buy things. Prime was a game-changer, because suddenly it became so quick to buy pretty much whatever you want and have it shipped anywhere. Want to buy a gift for someone that lives across the country? Select a gift-wrap option, have it sent right to their door in 2 days, and you're done. Are you drunk as gently caress and think of something you want to buy? Thanks to the app, you can be sitting at the bar and your drunken impulse purchase will arrive in 2 business days without having to enter a credit card number or anything like that! Oh, hey, I can upgrade to one-day shipping for free on an order over $25? Guess I'll add on another book or whatever to get it over that threshold. I wasn't sleeping well so I got blackout curtains delivered to my door in 18 hours. For $28. I wouldn't even have been able to go out after work and get them to my home that quickly.
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May 16, 2017 23:25
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Can anyone tell more horror stories of ancient franken-tech in retail? Sounds fascinating.
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May 17, 2017 00:47
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Pharohman777 posted:Can anyone tell more horror stories of ancient franken-tech in retail? Sounds fascinating. My final retail company had me using a shared account to Windows to Citrix into a remote desktop in another location to use 2 different web based POS's, outlook, and another web based inventory program. Each mouse click took roughly 10 seconds.
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May 17, 2017 01:48
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Pharohman777 posted:Can anyone tell more horror stories of ancient franken-tech in retail? Sounds fascinating. It's all ancient as gently caress. I did some work with restaurant POS systems, and the poo poo there was just... whew... Everything gets such inertia behind it that no one can ever tear it all down and do things the way they're supposed to be done. Even the fancy tablet-based systems are still backed, in a lot of cases, by receipt printers that are shipped by default with serial ports. And god forbid you try to tell a restaurant person that the thing they've been using for the past ten years, hacked together and running on Windows ME, isn't the best option! Oh, and the security holes. On the system that was finally decided upon, it was trivial to recover the admin code if you had access to the server -- which was, of course, neither physically- nor properly password-secured. Not that it mattered, because the admin code was regularly shared between employees as necessary. I guess that's not really ancient franken-tech, though. I can only imagine how bad it gets when you have an entrenched piece of custom software doing things, as large chains must.
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May 17, 2017 02:39
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Pharohman777 posted:Can anyone tell more horror stories of ancient franken-tech in retail? Sounds fascinating. Our ordering system(at least in regards to our own warehouses) is basically late 80s style Apppleworks and will most likely remain that way for god knows how long. The fact we're a big company I imagine prolongs this for the fact the current system keeps on chugging along and updating to something modern will be some kind of logistics nightmare
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May 17, 2017 02:49
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PT6A posted:And god forbid you try to tell a restaurant person that the thing they've been using for the past ten years, hacked together and running on Windows ME, isn't the best option! Or, I guess, they maybe bought it off the last failed restaurant that was in that space
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May 17, 2017 05:40
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PT6A posted:I guess that's not really ancient franken-tech, though. I can only imagine how bad it gets when you have an entrenched piece of custom software doing things, as large chains must. If you ever go into a apple store to buy something, their handhelds are still on some ios 5 monstrosity (and they're iPhone 4's or some such).
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May 17, 2017 05:50
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http://www.al.com/business/index.ssf/2017/05/gymboree_could_close_up_to_350.html Looks like Gymboree will be the next retailer to file for bankruptcy. Could close up to 350 stores.
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May 17, 2017 06:01
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PT6A posted:It's all ancient as gently caress. I did some work with restaurant POS systems, and the poo poo there was just... whew... A major retailer didn't replace their token ring network equipment until the mid 2000s. Mid 2000's all passwords for their photo lab systems for both Kodak/Naritsu and Fuji were stored in plaintext ini files. The system that authorized returns for a major retail client of mine in TYOL 2010 was built in 1998 and slated for decommissioning in 2005. When the hardware failed the day after Christmas and returns had to be processed manually the "solution" was the fire the entire team for failing to keep the system running during "Holiday Freeze" and pretend it never happened. A major retail client of mine tried fool PCI compliance by "hiding" the column in the database that stored Credit Card numbers. A retail client I did E-Discovery work for used to FedEx DVDs containing personal information of their customers their lawyers. They didn't want to pay the fees the outside firm wanted to host an FTP site. So they burned the data to a DVD then FedEx'd it, unencrypted. A different retail client I also did E-Discovery work for was too cheap to purchase me a DVD burner. I burned DVDs containing detailed financial records and account numbers on my personal laptop to save them $50.
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May 17, 2017 06:23
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Are you a woman? I've never heard of men being unable to get high quality work pants and having to buy used women's pants. I am incredibly hard on my work clothes because of my profession. Shoewise I wear out redwings in about a year. I might climb a couple thousand feet of vertical ladders and encounter god knows how many nasty chemicals in one day. Carhartts and Dickies, I just blow right thorough them. I wear my goodwill stuff on days that I'd prefer to throw my clothes out, rather than contaminating my washer. The men wearing red ants is a thing. I actually started looking for them used in the recommendation of another man who does similar work. Several of the mens "work" pants brands have begun to reduce thier quality recently. Some of it can be traced to pressure from retailer to reduce thier prices.
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May 17, 2017 06:24
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Pharohman777 posted:Can anyone tell more horror stories of ancient franken-tech in retail? Sounds fascinating. As of five years ago, cashiers rung up everything by hand, the company did not use UPC's for anything, and their department heads still had to do item-by-item, line-by-line checks on their stock in every aisle, and during every week, in order to complete store-wide merchandise orders. It was absolutely surreal to see that in person. I mean...I hate to do the Current Year thing but for gently caress's sake this was happening in 2013.
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May 17, 2017 06:32
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:This is good for consumers, but at some point everyone else is going to go out of business or Amazon is going to start requiring more profits. Amazon would lose almost all of its cash on hand if it had two bad years (or one extremely bad year) in a row because the margins are so razor thin.
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May 17, 2017 06:33
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Crazy Ted posted:I used to work a Hobby Lobby for half-shifts on Saturdays and some days during summer while I worked in education, basically just for shits and giggles since it was two minutes from my parents house and I'd go over visit frequently. They still do this. The best is if something doesn't have a price tag since they don't even use the upc at all in the system. I had to stand and wait for 15 mins for a manager to try and find the item I had and its price but none of them had one on it. I finally negotiated a price and the cashier typed the price in under whatever department it was. Apparently this is because the hobby lobby owners believe upcs are the mark of the devil or somesuch.
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May 17, 2017 09:50
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So, what's the next retail chain that's ready to swandive into the abyss?
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May 17, 2017 10:08
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Horseshoe theory posted:So, what's the next retail chain that's ready to swandive into the abyss? Didn't Radio Shack die, try to revive itself with Carlos Mencia in their commercials, and is now about to die again?
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May 17, 2017 10:10
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One thing I've noticed here in Austin is that dead retail space has helped our restaurant boom. For example, there's this nearly-dead strip mall I occasionally go to (as a local theater rents out some space there for rehearsals). The strip mall was >50% vacant for years and the biggest store there was a Dollar General. Now this super-trendy conveyer-belt sushi place open up there and the parking lot around it was full (the first time I ever saw more than a half-dozen cars in the parking lot). There seems to be another restaurant or two going in there as well, based on the construction I'm seeing in some of the empty units. Meanwhile, I had to go to the nicer mall near the suburbs to pick up something at an Apple Store (basically the only reason I've stepped foot in a mall in years), and there were a lot of noticeable vacant spots.
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May 17, 2017 10:12
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