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It really depends on each store. I've bought books from independent book stores that catered to stuff I'm into, or otherwise had a wide enough variety that I might legitimately find something new and interesting. It helps when they're also willing to sell used(aka 'cheap enough that buying it on amazon later isn't worth the effort') books. Stores that have free cookies or roaming cats are also a strong plus. Barnes & Noble and the like? Nah, it's the same poo poo in every store and the sections I'm actually interested in might get a single shelf of space each. Then again I'm one of those stuffy people who still prefers physical books to e-books, so I'm in the ever-shrinking market for actual book stores.
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Jan 12, 2018 01:05
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Magius1337est posted:are book stores like record stores in that trendy and hip people say they want them in a city but never actually visit them or buy anything from them? Yes. Or they're used as library reading rooms where you then order online if you want the book. A large part of it is also the reduced living space and increased mobility of the modern generations. We live in smaller places and move more frequently. Books take up space and suck to move from apartment to apartment. Plus a lot of leisure reading's bailiwick has been coopted by ebooks and, to a far greater extent, aimlessly dicking around on smartphones.
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Jan 12, 2018 01:07
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PJOmega posted:A large part of it is also the reduced living space and increased mobility of the modern generations. We live in smaller places and move more frequently. Books take up space and suck to move from apartment to apartment.
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Jan 12, 2018 01:09
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so is retail going to exist for niche products anymore? Seems like with any store that only sells a specific thing it's either got to carry everything for cheap or everyone is just going to go online and buy specifically what they want online I guess its easier to window shop in person
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Jan 12, 2018 01:10
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like I have an older kindle paperwhite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PyNMIauHbQ if I want to read something I just put it on my "book" which is nicer than regular books and it has a backlight and can carry a bunch of books at once, I can resize text and poo poo, only thing it doesn't do well is pictures but anyways even as a casual reader I'd much rather download something from amazon than buy some generic story from a book store just browsing by covers, I'd rather be more engaged in a product that I spent time researching in than buying on a whim it's the same thing with music, why go out and buy cds when streaming is much easier and easier to get into?
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Jan 12, 2018 01:13
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legit thanks for the earnest responses to my shitpost, i know nothing about big american chains and turns out sam walton is surprisingly interestingToxicSlurpee posted:From what I've heard Sam Walton was actually a pretty good guy that treated his employees well, which was part of what led to the success of Walmart in the first place. commonsense is definitely a recessive gene, as is general decency
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Jan 12, 2018 01:15
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Tnega posted:Fun fact: The Sam's Club in Madison (one of the ones apparently closing) is in the same parking lot as a Walmart. The one in Sacramento that’s closing is a few hundred yards from the back of a Wal-Mart as well.
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Jan 12, 2018 01:18
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PJOmega posted:Yes. Or they're used as library reading rooms where you then order online if you want the book. Well here's something interesting, albeit from 2015:  Reading rates in the middle of the scale haven't varied that much in 40 years. But people who read a lot of books had gone way down and people who'd read no books went up a quite noticeable amount. And the rates for young adults hadn't shifted much at all from 2002 to 2012 at least:  There was also a serious effect of people who read a lot of books must be reading a VERY large amount and skewing the averages quite a lot:  In this one I find it particularly noticeable that the median amount of books read is the same for all age groups except the oldest, but the average books read varies a huge amount. ( All these images were from this Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-decline-of-the-american-book-lover/283222/ )
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Jan 12, 2018 01:58
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Donald J Trump posted:legit thanks for the earnest responses to my shitpost, i know nothing about big american chains and turns out sam walton is surprisingly interesting Definitely read about Mr. Sam and the stuff he wrote; he insisted that Walmart employees - all of them - top to bottom - call him "Sam." No title, no last name; just Sam. There are a bunch of stories about him visiting a store, the call going out that a truck came in so people should go help unload it, and him grabbing a jack to help out. He said things like "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." and "The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers." When I worked there there were posters with Sam Walton quotes just kind of everywhere in the back. Very mysteriously that second one vanished off the wall during my time there.
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Jan 12, 2018 02:16
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If he was such a good dude he should have given the company to the workers who made him rich to run as a huge co-op or something rather than his horrible poo poo head kids.
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Jan 12, 2018 02:17
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Haifisch posted:There's one here that's right next door to one, although they have separate parking areas. It's not closing(yet?), though. JnnyThndrs posted:The one in Sacramento that’s closing is a few hundred yards from the back of a Wal-Mart as well. Pretty sure that's be design. Most of the new Walmarts going up in my area have a Sams Club also being built in the same shopping center. Makes logistics a hell of a lot easier and I'd wager all the Sams Club shoppers are regular Walmart shoppers as well. They're complimentary, not competitive.
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Jan 12, 2018 02:22
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I haven't read a book in years but I read a shitload of online short and long form articles every day 
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Jan 12, 2018 02:24
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Baronjutter posted:If he was such a good dude he should have given the company to the workers who made him rich to run as a huge co-op or something rather than his horrible poo poo head kids. I work for a mid-sized company of about 50 people. We operate independently, but are owned by a larger holding group that bought our company from the sole owner a few years ago. I am privy to the financials. I know our debts, our intake and expenses, the profit and p/e ratio, that sort of thing. I know what our company gives to the owners and what the holding company gives back for capital projects and such. I know how much the original owner sold the company for. If you removed the vampire capital and rent seeking, if the company was employee owned instead of that stock paying dividends to the owners, if our company gave its profits to the employees instead of sending it out of state to the holding company, then after taxes, after expenses, after setting aside money for next years capital improvements, we could pay each one of our employees about $700,000 a year.
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Jan 12, 2018 02:39
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Baronjutter posted:If he was such a good dude he should have given the company to the workers who made him rich to run as a huge co-op or something rather than his horrible poo poo head kids. I never said he was a perfect saint, now did I? As far as rich, corporate capitalists go he was alright but he still was a rich, corporate capitalist.
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Jan 12, 2018 03:29
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Sam also did his fair share to dick his workers out of fair pay, especially as Wal-Mart began to really take off. I'm sure the guy had his moments, but the second you start taking money out of your worker's pockets, you're a bad person.
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Jan 12, 2018 04:49
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Tales from an Amazon fulfillment center: I liked the graffiti. Most of the bins holding the items are made of cardboard and it's not like anyone's watching you most of the time, so in the less busy sections you can do whatever with a Sharpie. The drawings tended to be pretty good. Standouts include - An otter holding a heart, and the heart says "keep going!" Someone else wrote "thank you so much, I needed that" next to it. - Agent stick. Someone did a series of panels of a stick figure with a gun doing flips over walls and such, a fairly long series that stretched across three bins. - Some pretty explicit stuff. "My bush did 9/11" was my favorite. And there are some thirsty fuckers in there, apparently, because I saw a lot of "I want to suck a big cut cock," "can I play with your boobs?" (someone wrote "yes  "), "pull my hair and make it hurt," etc.- Less okay: one guy wrote "It's okay to be white" like 30 times throughout the building. This might be the same person writing "Trump 2020, we will make America great again," but maybe the handwriting only looks similar. - "gently caress Bezos" - "Live better, work union," and then someone else wrote an essay telling the other person that if you want better wages and such then you should support Amazon and make sure it succeeds, or whatever. - Some hero was going around and changing the words "dick" and "gently caress" to "duck" and then drawing a little duck nearby to illustrate. The more boring graffiti would get turned into "Duck the stowers  " and "suck my duck "- Tic-tac-toe. Lots of it.
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Jan 12, 2018 08:55
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What's interesting is that some of these closures will completely remove them from some major metro areas. Rochester, NY, Syracuse, NY, Norfolk, VA, Madison, WI, the entire state of Alaska, and probably others will now have zero Sam's Clubs. It's not just Costco that's a problem for them, it's also BJ's on the east coast, which has been steadily expanding. Rochester, NY has 2 BJs, one of which is a new-ish building, the other being a large one opened to succeed an earlier one a couple blocks away (and there are 2 more in nearby towns). The Norfolk, VA area has 4 BJ's and 2 Costcos. Syracuse has 2 BJ's and a Costco. The NYC area has like 3 Costcos and 2 BJ's per Sam's Club. Just to put the scale of this in perspective, they're closing 5 more Sam's locations than they've opened in the past 10 years. This seems like a bad omen for their presence in that store format. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Jan 12, 2018 |
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Jan 12, 2018 09:20
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The one that closed on S West Loop in Houston from the linked tweet on the last page was across the street from a Wal*Mart that opened within the last year and had bren competing with a Costco that is about 5 minutes away and has been there for less time than the Sam's Club but still there for at least 5 years, but I don't think more than 10, just don't remember exactly when it was built.
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Jan 12, 2018 10:10
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:Sam also did his fair share to dick his workers out of fair pay, especially as Wal-Mart began to really take off. I'm sure the guy had his moments, but the second you start taking money out of your worker's pockets, you're a bad person. It just goes to show that the answer to capitalism isn't nice capitalists.
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Jan 12, 2018 15:26
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OneEightHundred posted:What's interesting is that some of these closures will completely remove them from some major metro areas. Rochester, NY, Syracuse, NY, Norfolk, VA, Madison, WI, the entire state of Alaska, and probably others will now have zero Sam's Clubs. Wal-Mart doesn't want to be left behind. That's why the bought Jet.com who was created by the founder of diapers.com and moved their entire Ecommerce division to Sillicon Valley. That's why they're adding big pickup pods to all their stores and putting up pickup only stores in some states where you order everything online and it's brought out to you. That's why they're shutting down the Sam's Club. They need money to invest in Ecommerce and Jet.com to survive long term.
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Jan 12, 2018 15:54
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All of this praise for Costco treating their employees is well and good, but you know who isn't getting treated well enough? The shareholders. http://reclaimdemocracy.org/costco_employee_benefits_walmart/ quote:“From the perspective of investors, Costco’s benefits are overly generous,” says Bill Dreher, retailing analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. “Public companies need to care for shareholders first. Costco runs its business like it is a private company.” I realize the article is from 2004, but I have a strong recollection of this poo poo happening again only a few years ago.
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Jan 12, 2018 16:32
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It also illustrates how loving wrong they are! Costco's generous benefits have clearly benefited the shareholders. It's almost like a natural experiment. The only thing they didn't copy was treating the employees well.
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Jan 12, 2018 16:59
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Everyone quoted in these articles about how shareholders are bitter about not getting "their" share should be dragged into a basement room with a drain in the floor and shot.
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Jan 12, 2018 17:02
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Everyone I know who knows how well Costco treats their employees would love to work there. I'd love to work there. Benefits? Meaningful raises for staying with the company? Not only would I want to work there, I'd be motivated to do well. Almost every retail location I've ever worked has horrendous turnover and no end of labor shortages. Most of the bodies from any given hiring wave are out the door within six months. It's very easy to look at numbers on a page and go, "Whoa! Labor costs are insaaaaane!" The hidden costs of underpaid, unmotivated, pissed off employees, those are a lot harder to see- and it isn't surprising that someone who's never ever worked at a store wouldn't have a clue. Halloween Jack posted:Everyone quoted in these articles about how shareholders are bitter about not getting "their" share should be dragged into a basement room with a drain in the floor and shot. Spin that in a way that makes it seem profitable and they'd probably do it themselves.
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Jan 12, 2018 17:10
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It's analysts substituting an ideology for actual analysis.
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Jan 12, 2018 17:12
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:Spin that in a way that makes it seem profitable and they'd probably do it themselves. Many of them are the ones donating to university programs, or funding think tanks, to influence what the analysts are being taught, making the analysts stupid. They reap what they sow.
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Jan 12, 2018 17:15
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There was some guy a while back with a famous quote that employees treat their customers the way management treats them. Don't remember his name. Johnny K-Mart I think?
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Jan 12, 2018 17:32
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BrandorKP posted:It also illustrates how loving wrong they are! It's amazing how most management treats the idea of labor costs, as only expendable and a place to be cut. Paying someone an extra 40$ a day is literally a drop in the bucket considering how much more efficient a happy employee is.
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Jan 12, 2018 17:50
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BlueBlazer posted:It's amazing how most management treats the idea of labor costs, as only expendable and a place to be cut. Paying someone an extra 40$ a day is literally a drop in the bucket considering how much more efficient a happy employee is. In some cases they've been taught that labor cost is the only cost they have control over. They think all the other costs are fixed. So even though it's only a fraction of thier costs they fixate on it. It's much harder to really look at the processes of the business and improve them or to use metrics to identify where the supply chain can be improved. They don't plan on sticking around either so why do the hard things that really benefit the business?
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Jan 12, 2018 18:00
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BlueBlazer posted:It's amazing how most management treats the idea of labor costs, as only expendable and a place to be cut. Paying someone an extra 40$ a day is literally a drop in the bucket considering how much more efficient a happy employee is. This applies pretty much everywhere. My manufacturing operators in Indiana started at $20+ an hour plus benefits and 1.5X overtime as a default, and some of our more experienced ops or people working on high-risk processes (as in, gently caress up and we lose tens of millions of bucks) would be in the $30+ hourly range. This is for HS diplomas, GEDs, etc. We honestly had the best, hardest-working, and (important in pharma manufacturing) most careful operators I've ever seen. We almost never had problems that could be traced back to operator issues. Fast forward to working at a plant in Pennsylvania. We paid all our operators as close to minimum wage as possible and pro-rate benefit subsidies based on how close they are to full-time hours, in a more expensive area than the Indiana site. We didn't give vacation time for hourly staff. What few benefits they got were trash. Raises were unheard of, OT was paid out at standard rate, and we ran the retail-style "you'll know your schedule when we post it" routine on them. I averaged three operator-related batch failures a week from people straight up not giving a poo poo. What did they have to lose? A harder job than being a gas station attendant that pays the same? Oh darn.
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Jan 12, 2018 18:47
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Halloween Jack posted:Everyone quoted in these articles about how shareholders are bitter about not getting "their" share should be dragged into a basement room with a drain in the floor and shot. BlueBlazer posted:It's amazing how most management treats the idea of labor costs, as only expendable and a place to be cut. Paying someone an extra 40$ a day is literally a drop in the bucket considering how much more efficient a happy employee is.
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Jan 12, 2018 18:57
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MagusofStars posted:Alternatively, force them to work at one of these near-minimum wage jobs full time. After about a week, they’d probably be begging you to shoot them instead. Maybe not. The knowledge of "I don't have to work this poo poo job to survive" goes a long way to make things tolerable. Plus they'll have a home to go back to, and decent health, and a panopoly of factors that stop it from being as absolutely soul crushing as a person in their forties with a GED whose options are beg for hours at their lovely retail job or die in the streets. It'd be a start though.
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Jan 12, 2018 19:02
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Me: "Man, how did people ever think that gulags were productive, and what could have made them wish them on anyone?" [reads any recent article about corporate management] Me: "Oh."
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Jan 12, 2018 19:17
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Magius1337est posted:so is retail going to exist for niche products anymore? Seems like with any store that only sells a specific thing it's either got to carry everything for cheap or everyone is just going to go online and buy specifically what they want online Speaking as a tall person it pretty much already is like that. I cannot find 36x34 pants in most department stores. They stock pretty much every other size but that. And for shoes, unless you’re going to a warehouse store just for shoes all they’ll really have is Nike and Adidas. I was looking for Reeboks and 5 stores in that mall only had Nike and Adidas. Like, what the hell is the point of 5 stores with the same merch at the same price?
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Jan 12, 2018 19:31
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ryonguy posted:Me: "Man, how did people ever think that gulags were productive, and what could have made them wish them on anyone?" I was one of those guys that went to business school, with the intention of doing my best to take care of the family business. What's really weird* is that what I was taught and shown in college less than a decade ago flies directly in the face of all of this bullshit I'm seeing in the corporate world. We have quantifiable proof that treating employees like human beings leads to better environments and better environments leads to more profit. *Weird until you realize that they're all padding their quarterly numbers to maximize bonuses. None of these guys intend to stay with a company through the ebb and fall that will follow their short serving actions.
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Jan 12, 2018 19:42
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PJOmega posted:We have quantifiable proof that treating employees like human beings leads to better environments and better environments leads to more profit. There are Harvard Business Review papers that explictly show the longer an employee remains with a firm the more productive that employee is and the more value the firm gets from that employee. It borders on untenable to argue to opposite. It pisses me off so much.
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Jan 12, 2018 21:02
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BrandorKP posted:There are Harvard Business Review papers that explictly show the longer an employee remains with a firm the more productive that employee is and the more value the firm gets from that employee. After graduating I went into consulting for a time. Mostly small business stuff, people who were suffering during the financial crisis. Those people I understood loving up so readily. They weren't business minded for the most part. They inherited a family business. Or they were really passionate about something so they did the ur-american thing and made a business of it. They didn't know logistics or supplies or what the hell JIT inventory was or agile or waterfall or whatever we were suggesting at the time. Mostly, they were good people who underestimated how utterly crazy running a business of even 10 or 20 people gets. My experience was limited by working with people who wanted consulting. A lot of it was through small business assistance programs in southern California, and while I may have been a fresh faced white college graduate I respected that they probably knew a lot more about their products than I did. That respect went a long way. Some were assholes, but not most. They minimized costs where they could, and many of them tried to cut labor to the bone because that was the immediately apparent cost. Rent was fixed, they didn't have much wiggle room on their supply line. So labor was it. But they were in the trenches, as it were. They knew their employee's names. Bosses were often former co-workers elsewhere with their shop workers. By going in and helping them with inventory, with producrement, it opened up a lot of money to them. Most of them were smart and put it back into the company. Into their employees. These are the places that, for the most part, I can go and visit whenever I make it down south and be greeted as family even if I don't feel I deserve it. The ones that took the money and paid themselves with it? They're gone without exception.
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Jan 12, 2018 21:38
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OneEightHundred posted:What's interesting is that some of these closures will completely remove them from some major metro areas. Rochester, NY, Syracuse, NY, Yep, that's what happened to the one in my hometown. Sam's opened in the early 90s and basically had a monopoly on the wholesale market in the area. As the years wore on that store started to feel more and more dilapidated though, and when a BJ's opened not too far away around Y2K it was like a breath of fresh air: some of the merchandise seemed to be of better quality, the store felt less depressing, etc... Evidently they lost a lot of business to BJ's and when you combined that with the strip mall in which they were located being in the early stages of becoming a dead mall they ended up closing in 2005 or thereabouts. The_Franz fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Jan 12, 2018 |
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Jan 12, 2018 21:58
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Baronjutter posted:
I scrolled by it too quickly and thought this was a photo of an airport baggage claim area.
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Jan 12, 2018 22:44
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Doctor Butts posted:I scrolled by it too quickly and thought this was a photo of an airport baggage claim area. It's like the Soviet version of a Mario Kart level
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