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Peachfart posted:Whole Foods is overpriced garbage from a company that hypes GMO fears so maybe the Amazon acquisition will help things. Whole Foods is strange in that it's generally overpriced but their 365 product line items are (sadly) often among the cheapest options in my area. However Whole Foods fresh produce is super-overpriced so I don't see how this acquisition helps Amazon in the area where grocery stores maintain a large advantage over online shopping. I guess we'll see!
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Jun 16, 2017 18:09
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BrandorKP posted:Another article on Sears and Lampert BlueBlazer posted:As someone else in logistics, the story of Sears must be sad to watch. The constant stream of Sears deathwatch articles are one of the unexpectedly satisfying parts of this thread. As a traditional retailer Sears was probably going to be under pressure no matter what due to competition from Walmart + online retailers and consumers generally having less disposable income. It's the know-it-all hedge fund star trying to recreate Galt's gulch and driving the company off a cliff in a highly public manner that makes it all so compelling. Too bad about all those people losing their jobs.  This most recent article makes it clear Lampert understands his Randian experiment has failed and is trying to recoup as much of his investment as possible cannibalizing what remains of the company and real-estate shenanigans. A set of related quotes I thought were interesting: quote:In recent years, Mr. Lampert has played the role of Sears Holdings’s primary banker, collecting fees while providing loans to the operations side of the company. As a result, Mr. Lampert’s hedge fund and other entities hold a significant portion of Sears Holdings’s debt, in effect making him one of the company’s biggest lenders. The bulk of that debt is secured by property or inventory. Alternative Endings Seen for Sears and Its Hedge Fund Chief quote:The liabilities on its balance sheet top $13 billion, including more than $4 billion of debt or debt-like obligations and nearly $2 billion more earmarked for pensions. I'm guessing pension holders aren't prioritized very highly during corporate restructuring.
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Aug 22, 2017 15:03
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Baronjutter posted:But as a side effect no one has any money for retail, everything's invested in housing. And the bubble drives retail leases up because the previously cheap land that 1 story retail building was on is now worth 4x as much because you could jam a 50 unit condo building on it instead. Don't worry the new condo building will have some shiny new retail units on the bottom, but the lease will be 3x as expensive and they are more than ok keeping them empty until they find someone who will pony up. I will never understand this, it's like opportunity cost doesn't exist for commercial real estate owners. AFAIK the owners in these situations are holding-out for the mythical tenant who will accept a long-term lease and can pay the outrageous rent (ie a bank branch), but there are prime-storefronts that have been vacant for years in my not-cheap area and it's unclear how the math works out.
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Nov 28, 2017 19:16
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BarbarianElephant posted:K-Mart in Manhattan has a garden department. Most people in Manhattan have a balcony at best, and if they are rich enough to have a real yard, it is teeny-tiny and a landscaping firm deals with it. Passing through Penn Station frequently I can confirm the K-Mart there is also as depressing and abandoned as you can imagine. I'd always assumed they only held such pricey locations due to lucking into some kind of decades long-lease signed long ago and were now paying well below market value. Looking into it apparently they're just vanity projects championed by clueless executives: The New York Times posted:... Volume! This was back in 1996 if you needed more evidence that K-Mart's problems didn't begin with Lampert.
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Jan 5, 2018 21:21
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State controlled liquor monopolies are a fascinating glimpse of what greater government control over the commercial sector could look like in a socialist economy. The results are mixed, for example in Ontario the govt liquor distributor is the LCBO and provides a selection and prices that compare favorably anywhere I've been in the US. Somehow the LCBO generally provides a wider selection of beers than the provincial Beer Store, which until recently strove for the "depressing warehouse" shopping experience. On the subject of this thread I'm surprised that Amazon can't sell liquor online in my current jurisdiction (NY state), it's exactly the sort of mass-produced non-perishable commodity where they should be able to destroy conventional retail. There are of course other online distributors that deliver here but they are somehow more expensive than the stores.
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Mar 15, 2018 23:59
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:By every single reasonable metric, average standard of living has gone up in the United States for the last 50 years. Even for people in the bottom 20%.  (Squints) The 50% contribution vs time does have an overall average positive slope so this is correct. Nocturtle fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 19:49
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Holdings of wealth is not even close to the same thing as standard of living. Quoted in the USA TYOOL 2018. Also note the posted plot does NOT show wealth share but actual wealth. But anyway we're in agreement. In addition to the very large increase in net wealth for below-median Americans over the past 50 years there are also similarly large increases in total income for the lower quantiles:  There's a lot of complaining about the immiseration of the middle class but it's not supported by the data. On topic the demise of Sears is fascinating as will the inevitable post-mortem. At some point Lampert switched from trying to create a Randian-inspired utopia to naked looting.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:14
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