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I'm surprised K-Mart is dying, in Australia it seems to be doing perfectly fine, though that may be attributed to regional management. They did completely stop stocking video game products, which I'm not sure quite how to interpret. Early stage of the decline?
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Jul 13, 2017 16:53
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Comstar posted:K-Mart in Australia is part of Westfarmers- aka Coles/Bunnings/Kmart/Target/Random Coal Mines. Everyone's hoping that Harvey Norman, insanely overpriced regional furniture and computer chain that whines the loudest about people being allowed to shop on the internet, will be turbofucked overnight.
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Jul 16, 2017 16:30
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As with most downturns, I imagine the dying malls are the ones based on marginal business models and locations, which the successful ones are popular and well-run enough to have enough customers even in a downturn, and able to trim sails if necessary.
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Jul 17, 2017 16:38
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A lot of 'millennial' stereotypes make sense when you word filter it to 'rich young people'. Nobody cares what the other 99% of the generation is doing.
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Jul 20, 2017 06:00
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Likely. Basically any internet service that's willing to have a sane interface and actual infrastructure gets a practical monopoly so goddamn fast if it's first in its niche.
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Aug 1, 2017 15:56
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Straight White Shark posted:Well, yeah. It's expensive to build and maintain a giant indoor space. That's the whole driver behind the shift to open-air shopping centers. High-end luxury chains are able to hack it indoors because those are the only consumers who are still willing to pay premium prices for a climate controlled shopping experience. I recall malls in the Philippines and probably other places do well when they're basically self-contained public air conditioned spaces. Heck, when I lived in a house with lovely air conditioning I used to become a mallrat during the summer just to get out of the heat.
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Aug 2, 2017 10:52
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Sounds like with front businesses a lot are technically functional and open, but do the bare minimum to just seem poorly run at worst. Probably because a full business that never opens is suspicious and a target for burglary and/or vandalism, and running one properly takes money and effort (though some fronts may do that anyway) but they probably let people slack off because it doesn't matter, and it's a bad idea to mistreat your employees if you're doing anything illegal. (and they aren't)
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Aug 3, 2017 11:41
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Krispy Kareem posted:I remember people suspecting Amy's Baking Company of Kitchen Nightmares fame of being a front. It was just too terribly run and the husband apparently had suspicious business ties. Seemed to me when a bored-to-insanity mob housewife decides she wants to play baker.
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Aug 3, 2017 13:51
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Jastiger posted:Lop i remember that Radio shack thing. It was so..meta? Is that the word? Watching this ad, which i think was pretty funny, but knowing it wasn't going to get a single person to go to Radio shack. Just...why would you buy the most expensive ad time ever if you're going down like that. Possibly so they at least go down memorably. Who knows what the internals of a dying company is like, acceptance, frantic struggling, or full on delusion.
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Aug 4, 2017 16:46
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Barudak posted:Its hilarious, actually. Tippy top people, especially boards of directors, just disengage/leave so it gets run by the dumb motherfuckers who think they can be the one to turn it around either due to loyalty, desperation, or a belief itll pad their resume. That explains a lot. Krispy Kareem posted:You can also use that to your advantage. IBM built a beautiful skyscraper in Atlanta and then almost immediately sold most of it. People were still calling it the IBM Tower long after Big Blue left the building. It certainly doesn't work the other way around. Pretty sure people still call 'AAMI Stadium' Footy Park to this day.
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Aug 4, 2017 17:55
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This is Australia, those things might well be great marketing. I'm reminded of the pizza place ads in City of Heroes; 'Made Fresh by Made Men'.
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Aug 6, 2017 07:33
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I'm reminded of how Twitter refuses to properly moderate despite being infested with bots that may have had serious consequences on the last American election because they desperately don't want to lose users, let alone admit that a huge chunk of their account numbers are bots and alts.
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Aug 12, 2017 04:49
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Iron Crowned posted:The secret that no one knows about donations, especially clothing donations, in the US is that the vast majority of it gets packed in bulk and sold of to African countries. One African country actually had to ban American clothing imports so they even had a chance at developing a local textile industry.
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Aug 21, 2017 16:01
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Not surprising. Can you imagine actually working at K-Mart?
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Aug 25, 2017 18:23
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Sic Semper Goon posted:Really old people and the exceptionally stubborn? And the terminally lazy. FilthyImp posted:Actually, now that you mention it, when I went back the following week there was nothing there... I was picturing more day drinking on the job. I assume no one else cares/everyone else is even drunker. Just re-enact Drunk Bakers every day.
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Aug 27, 2017 05:57
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More and more of the EB Games (Australia's Gamestop branch) around here are almost fully half game merchandise and toys. (though physical sales are still going strong here since so many people still have crap internet. Mine certainly hasn't been cooperative today) I think they've started their own ThinkGeek dedicated merchandise store which shares space with the downtown one. A little ironic given I recall in my old home town the local Toyworld was one of the main places selling video games, though they eventually phased that out when bigger stores started opening up. (which in turn started phasing out games sales after EB Games showed up) I think Amiibos and the increasing amounts of official video game merchandise might have given the game stores a new lease on life, or at least prolonged them. Well, in places where Amiibos aren't shortstocked and impossible to find.
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Aug 29, 2017 09:37
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Physical video games aren't going away until absolutely every one of their customers can be guaranteed to have fast, reliable internet and credit cards. The market definitely is shrinking into dedicated stores, but they're going to be around until then.
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Aug 29, 2017 17:22
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Sir Lemming posted:This is already more people than it should be, though. Regional America, Australia, and pretty much the whole emerging developed world beg to differ. And of course, children whose parents don't let them have the credit card. The Xbox One's online-only DRM got rightly laughed out of the room because it shut them out of entire markets.
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Aug 30, 2017 07:39
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Cowslips Warren posted:The fact there are no Pokemon Funko makes me sad. You're just going to have to settle for going down to the nearest nerd store and buying whatever combination pleases you of the piles of merchandise they made for the nearly 900 of the buggers (plus alternate forms) they have now. Not possibly on topic, but I loosely recall my city's general Japan import/anime and video game speciality store used to be the dusty nerd basement you'd expect the first time I visited years ago, then next time I didn't recognise the place because they remodelled in a sleek, white tiled store with generous floor space, for its small size, glass display cases and an Apple Store-like aesthetic. As far as I can tell it's doing pretty well.
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Aug 31, 2017 07:12
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TRU is definitely the kind of business that's gonna get hosed pretty hard by Amazon; plastic blocks, ponies and cars are gonna be the same whether you buy them from the mall, from Amazon or from a store, and people having less money means there's gonna be less impulse buys of the kind that sprawling speciality stores benefit from. They can't really offer anything you can't get anywhere else.
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Sep 9, 2017 04:53
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Boywhiz88 posted:See, that's where LEGO started to lose my interest. I wanna see the cool crazy stuff they come up with, not Harry Potter set piece #50 or Star Wars vehicle #83 They never stopped making their own stuff too.
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Sep 10, 2017 19:05
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They definitely went way too all in on Lego Batman stuff. And I say this as someone who has a proud collection of Z-list villain minifigs. The Eraser has his own freaking custom head! And then Zodiac Master, March Harriet, and Mime, freaking Mime. Kinda weird that despite having the other Alice in Wonderland themed villain, The Mad Hatter was conspicuously absent from The Lego Batman Movie and associated merch. Trying not to step on Disney's toes?
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Sep 11, 2017 07:55
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I think Lego's explosion of licensed stuff might have been encouraged by tons of fans on in the internet building replicas of anything and everything out of Lego. Clearly the demand was there. Though maybe not as much as people think. I think a lot of the Simpsons minifigure blind bags were shelfwarmers.
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Sep 13, 2017 05:45
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Don Gato posted:The lego documentary that as far as I can tell has been removed from Netflix had a pretty good summary of why lego were doing so poorly. IIRC a huge part was because they massively expanded into every market possible, but only the lego sets themselves were making money and everything else turned into a pit you tossed money into. Then they cut everything but the legos and aggressively started selling licensed sets, and causing many a tantrum when a parent wont buy their child a lego Death Star. Maybe that last part was only applicable to me, I'm sure my mom still curses when Lego got the star wars license in the late 90s. I loved that game except the drat thing would always crash on this one mission and I could never get any further. I recall the Time Twisters line which was painfully obvious even to the Inescapable Duckling that it was an attempt to clear out unsold parts.
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Sep 13, 2017 11:21
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well why not posted:Slizer/Throwbots sold very little (i had a Slizer and can't recall ever seeing anything else about them), but Bionicle was pretty successful, right? I almost had the full Slizer collection, but you'd be right. No one remembers RoboRIders between them, but Bionicle did relatively well until it was unceremoniously dropped. (and then rebooted, apparently?) Always been an odd middle ground between action figures and Lego Technic with those.
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Sep 13, 2017 13:56
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I liked the Lego Batman movie, if only because oddly enough it's an interesting take on the Batman mythos and character; asking whether Batman can be a happy man. Though that's for another thread. Z-list Batman villains are still the best.
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Sep 14, 2017 05:03
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Big stores seem to be the most vulnerable mostly because they sold the widest variety; both common and niche stuff. But now you can get the common stuff anywhere and the niche stuff more reliably on the internet. I can't wait for Amazon to open Australian warehouses, our price-gougeriffic local retailers deserve to die.
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Sep 19, 2017 16:23
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Most carts back in the day were pretty standardised too, I'm fairly sure. Custom carts tended to be super expensive to make and often hosed over by publishers with short print runs. (the original Shantae comes to mind) Unless they had the console publisher's backing.
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Sep 20, 2017 17:23
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Halloween stores are an important part of the political progress, mask sales have predicted the winning Presidential candidate for years now.
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Sep 29, 2017 11:01
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With his specialties being fireworks, and possibly ninjutsu. I think they gave a lot of his traits to Vamp and/or Fatman.
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Oct 1, 2017 10:47
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Have to wonder how different the internet might look if early adopter ad companies hadn't poisoned, shat and dumped radioactive waste in the well.
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Oct 4, 2017 09:21
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FilthyImp posted:Like, absolutely the AR benefits to a bunch of tasks would have been good, but that was secondary to disrupting your reality. And the fact that no one considered the privacy concerns was a biiiiiig oversight. It's Google, you say that like it's a bug, not a feature.
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Oct 10, 2017 05:07
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Professor Shark posted:Speaking of, how are comicbook companies doing these days? I assume that some of them are fine because of Disney and whatever, but I feel like actual comicbook sales must be doing lovely these days Mostly subsisting on life support as IP farms, putting out a mix of pandering to their remaining fans and ill-considered fads and attempts at relevancy in the 'how do you do, fellow kids' vein to attempt to appeal to an audience that can barely even access the things while alienating the abovementioned rusted-on fans. A few of them, IDW mainly, specialise in licensed comics that are basically supplementary material for nerds. (Archie used to, but it seems they canned all their licensed stuff to focus on... Archie being dark drama or something, I dunno)
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Oct 10, 2017 11:53
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All speeds from 1 to 25 miles! I kind of want to drive one. It must be something like the old timey version of a mobility scooter.
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Oct 15, 2017 08:11
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Sic Semper Goon posted:I'm gathering that "noiseless" should be taken with a quarry load of salt? Presuming that it can't be heard after you've already gone deaf from driving other cars of the era.
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Oct 15, 2017 08:26
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ZakAce posted:This principle also works the other way: malls are doing very well in Asian countries (and Australia), where it gets boiling hot and / or humid in the summer. Never underestimate the power of air conditioning. Can confirm, I used to become a mallrat in the summer when I lived in a cheap house with poor air conditioning.
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Oct 16, 2017 05:37
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We had to clean out our front-loader's rubber flange thingy with vinegar recently. Also I found a ballpoint pen in there.
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Oct 24, 2017 06:08
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I've lived with and used front loaders, top loaders, and even an old fashioned twin-tub with a built in dryer. (which a couple of kittens got stuck in once for a couple of days. They were fine, just they and the dryer needed a wash afterwards) I figure front-loaders are popular for being easier to use, load and unload (reaching all the way down when you're old, young or short can be difficult and all) and small enough to fit in people's increasingly limited living spaces, while top-down ones have higher capacity and are more stable. People probably just buy whatever's convenient for them at the time.
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Oct 24, 2017 07:55
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I figure with zaibatsu type megaconglomerates between the difference in management, design philosophy, supply chains etc. it's gonna be basically a crapshoot when and which of their products are the best on the market, cheap crap or overpriced crap at any given time.
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Oct 25, 2017 09:19
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Soon they'll be part of... ...the penny stocks.
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Oct 27, 2017 17:30
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