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Most stores have already cut front-end to the bone, and self-checkout tech is trash right now with the scales that need human intervention half of the time. The only way it's going to become more efficient is with technological or procedural changes, the lowest-hanging fruit is probably customer bagging and possibly even a bring-your-own-bag policy. Beyond that is full-cart checkout tickets, kiosks, and the return of the catalog/showroom store. Most retailers are lazy as gently caress about changing their point-of-sale tech though, whereas Amazon clearly couldn't be more excited.
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Jun 19, 2017 14:42
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All I know about rock being dead is that there's a big heavy metal resurgence going on. Black Sabbath, Anthrax, Slayer, Testament, Iron Maiden, Exodus, Black Label Society, Lamb of God, Mastodon, Avenged Sevenfold, Disturbed, Five Finger Death Punch, and Volbeat all had their highest-charting albums in the US within their past 2 releases and most broke the top 5. The type of rock that was popular when Bill & Ted came out was kind of toast by the time Nickelback was popular, and I can't find a year without at least one rock album hitting #1, including 2016 which had 3, so I guess not everyone listens to Drake ft. Rihanna ft. Justin Bieberlake ft. Autotune yet. BUT as far as how this pertains to the original thing which is capitalism kind of blowing up, here's a good piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/the-cheapest-generation/309060/ Millennials have no money because they're spending it all on student loan debt, also most of the job growth since the recession has been low-wage low-hour jobs and Gig Economy poo poo with no stability or benefits. They want gadgets instead of cars and houses, they're renting out Zipcars and Uber instead of driving, they're either not buying houses or buying tiny houses, they're buying everything used and flipping stuff to other people instead of throwing it out. Maybe the retail bubble is just the first step of the whole consumption machine grinding to a halt. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jun 23, 2017 |
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Jun 23, 2017 07:14
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When I said "tiny houses" I meant smaller houses, esp townhouses and small ranch houses, not the movement about throwing a mattress in a toll booth and calling it a house.
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Jun 23, 2017 15:51
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axeil posted:I can't explain it, but these videos are possibly one of the saddest things I've ever seen on YouTube. axeil posted:edit: I wonder if in 20 years instead of people fetishizing coal miners they'll be fetishizing retail workers in a mall. Malls can't really exist without something else driving the economy, outside of a few rare tourist destinations.
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Jun 24, 2017 08:35
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ToxicSlurpee posted:There are entire chains of stores that do things like sell their jeans at cost but put them aaaaaaaall the way in the back so you have to walk past literally everything else to get there.
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Jul 8, 2017 05:22
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http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/10/technology/amazon-smart-home-services-geek-squad/index.html?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool Amazon announces home installation services, Best Buy stock down 7% WampaLord posted:Like, all of this is a huge field of study called Marketing. It's not just some weird conspiracy theory. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jul 11, 2017 |
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Jul 11, 2017 04:15
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:They had all the research in the world telling them the immediate future (aka now) was going to be marked by a growing distaste for grease n' sugar among the precious middle-class consumers they're desperate to win back, but they just can't figure out a way to reach them and still be McDonald's. I'm gonna guess that Wendy's strategy of just jackhammering the word "fresh" was probably a better idea.
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Jul 11, 2017 08:34
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Whats so special about all-cotton compared to other fabrics
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Aug 26, 2017 06:36
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OwlFancier posted:I got on well with my granny as yeah, basically everything she drilled into me as a kid (aside from casual racism) is pretty applicable to my life today, cut costs where you can, don't waste, and never ever borrow if you can possibly avoid it. she would be about 75 now but grew up dirt poor in postwar britain so she still had stuff like rationing.
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Aug 27, 2017 09:10
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OwlFancier posted:Yeah to me that's a sign of having too much money if you don't notice that a chunk of it is missing every month. It's the same type of mentality failure that makes debt so dangerous (and why every salesman negotiating financing tries to frame things in terms of monthly payments). But the bigger point is that there's a lot of cumulative expense from mundane expenses that adds up, and a lot of business models are shifting towards making purchase more mundane and more frequent so the cost is less obvious. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 18:06
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hobbesmaster posted:As I recall you also get a discount on insurance for the monthly payments? So it is (or was?) actually cheaper to do the monthly payments than buy outright if you wanted to get applecare/equivalent. There are two other subtle but important aspects to things switching to services: People don't like to give up stuff that they're used to, and a service guarantees that the only way to avoid that disruption is to keep the money flowing. The other is that it completely kills second-hand markets, so none of the costs can be recouped and none of the cost can be avoided by buying older product. Sometimes it makes sense, it's probably for the better that a bunch of stuff is popping up to rent stuff for one-time use rather than buy it, use it once, and have it sit in storage forever, but it's not going to be good if Millennials turn out to be the generation that hits 65 and has no assets. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Aug 29, 2017 |
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Aug 29, 2017 05:29
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Toys R Us has been under pressure from a lot of different factors. They were having a hard enough time competing with Wal-Mart, they didn't invest in online sales, they went from the #1 video game retailer in the US to less than 1% of sales, interest is shifting away from toys and towards electronics, and of course Amazon consumes all.
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Sep 20, 2017 04:57
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BarbarianElephant posted:If Amazon gets too expensive, there are certainly competitors. Walmart springs to mind currently, for a lot of the random poo poo you can get on Amazon. As a thrifty housewife, I recommend Walmart online for buying soap'n'stuff. Also anecdotally, I've been trying Wal-Mart's in-store pickup thing lately and I'm 4 for 4 on it being a total clusterfuck.
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Oct 11, 2017 05:56
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I think a more curated competitor to Amazon that didn't make you wade through hundreds of pages of counterfeit crap would do really well. The current rich-people retail trend is really aesthetically-consistent house brands - Trader Joe's and Whole Foods have been doing that for years, but there's Muji for housewares, The Ordinary for skincare... this trend will move to the middle class before too long and even though Amazon has AmazonBasics, their shopping experience is much more cluttered than trends dictate. The price/selection/convenience tradeoff probably still holds in general though, and on the selection axis, Amazon has a ridiculous amount of product overlap. There are 2000 different products listed under M/M HDMI cables.
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Oct 11, 2017 06:36
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glowing-fish posted:This is one thing that robots can probably do easily, and while it won't totally eliminate the job of shelver, it looks like another thing that is going to chip away at labor demand in the retail sector.
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Oct 30, 2017 07:01
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got any sevens posted:https://www.axios.com/an-unanswered-conundrum-why-are-employers-not-raising-wages-2505931443.html?utm_medium=linkshare&utm_campaign=organic Magic Hate Ball posted:edit: related - here's an archive of K-Mart in-store music tapes from the early 90s. Mmm, muzak.
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Nov 5, 2017 02:02
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Magic Hate Ball posted:The people who shop at stores that play 90s soft rock are the same people who shopped at stores that played 90s soft rock, probably. I could believe a lot of possible explanations. It could be that the 90's were just an unusually good decade for inoffensive shopping music, it could be that the stores are about as motivated to update their music playlists as they are to upgrade their POS systems, but the most dangerous explanation is that younger customers don't shop there any more.
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Nov 5, 2017 04:01
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Saeku posted:Small stores seem to be surviving the current storm better than chains, likely a combination of less leverage and emotional appeal. Successful stores selling non-essential items are about the shopping and service experience as much as the product, and mom & pops have the edge because right now "local" and "authentic" is trendier than corporate. But the world needs fewer stores-as-local-colour than it did stores-as-sources-of-goods, and if this big-box apocalypse continues it's going to have a depressing effect on wages & working conditions throughout the sector. Chain stores have McJobbed the poo poo out of those positions. Nobody expects sales staff to know anything any more, and they're not really willing to tolerate price increases to get better sales staff either. If that's what it means to be a retail store, then what they offering over vending machines and online orders any more? Especially if they're still boosting prices to pay for the rent in a dumb shopping theme park mall?
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Dec 3, 2017 08:09
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WampaLord posted:This idea of "I can't enjoy myself for long if I am not working" is the attitude that confuses me so much. Why do you think that? What about "work" makes you happy? Didn't you just admit that you'd be totally fine without work and doing hobbies instead? I don't agree with the idea that "computer-touching" is more noble than manual labor, but in the mass market, all jobs are just placeholders for when there's a machine to do it. The computer-touchers in the financial industry are high on the list of people that will soon be jobless. If you want to talk factory-town anecdotes, my hometown had a 60,000-job hole blown through it because Eastman Kodak invented digital photography and then sat on it because they didn't want to cannibalize their lucrative film business. That put a lot of engineers and "computer-touchers" out of work too, and I've met people that wax poetic about film emulsion, but the only reason those jobs existed in the first place was because people wanted something that they have a better way of getting now. The death of industries to efficiency gains brings new possibilities and new industries, and there will always be work. Get rid of all the jobs we do today and we'll dump all of our time and money into immortality research or spend a few trillion dollars to film the next Marvel Cinematic Universe installment on Mars. Saeku posted:Mall stores can't really get away with this because modern malls are unpleasant to be in and un-aspirational. Apple pulls it off well with their design and experience and does great B&M numbers even though their products are completely fungible, so the experience is the only reason to go B&M. Charismatic staff are integral to the model, and labour costs are recouped in additional sales generated by hands-on service. The success of Apple stores can't be separated from the fact that they're small and focused on a highly successful high-margin prestige brand, and there are clearly a lot of product lines and categories where a high-service model just isn't going to work because of the margins and price pressure. I guess the point is that while the McJob-ification of the work has turned a bunch of retailers into completely-disposable middlemen, that doesn't mean there was a viable business model without doing that. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 19:13
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So are there any rollups on how good/bad Black Friday was for B&M this year? Online is up by 18% vs. last year, but can't find anything on traditional retail. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Dec 4, 2017 |
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Dec 4, 2017 02:52
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boner confessor posted:the juxtaposition of number 9 and 10 is especially awful - "i am responsible for my own education" while people recieve all of their mandatory education before the age of majority, and right after that "i am a product of my choices, not my circumstances" oh well i guess i should have chosen to be born to a family which values education who lives in a well funded school district, whoops Some of it's just wishful thinking, like yeah it'd be really nice if you could library card your way out of poo poo jobs, but self-study to most HR departments means absolutely nothing. (There are also a slew of positions where, in different ways, college education functions more as a "no poors" filter than an actual qualification.) OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Dec 4, 2017 |
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Dec 4, 2017 05:13
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Kind of weird that Toys R Us is doing bad even while Disney is revving the Star Wars/MCU merchandising machine into overdrive, but it sounds like Babies R Us has turned into a boat anchor, and the rest of the toy business is getting drained by video games, which Toys R Us was once the biggest retailer of, but has since lost most of their market share.
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Dec 21, 2017 04:59
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there wolf posted:The only Fry's near me took over an old furniture store and didn't bother redo any of the interior so it's this amazing 90's time-capsule of tray ceilings, decorative tile floors, and assorted columns. I think setting up in an actual crypt would feel less foreboding.
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Dec 22, 2017 00:32
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Where I'm at we have Potbelly, Penn Station, Quiznos, Firehouse, and Which Wich, all of which are solidly better than Subway. Maybe Jimmy John's and Jersey Mike's are better if you can put up with the chewy tasteless white bread. Subway is just a completely tasteless lowest common denominator. I thought the $5 footlong thing was supposed to be a short-term promo, and I've been hearing noise about franchisees hating it since it first started. It's not just that turning a price into a meme makes it hard to do anything with price, but that they did it with the biggest sandwich so it's hard to upsell. Pekinduck posted:Yeah, I think subway got huge by giving out franchises like candy but not bothering to make sure they were sustainable. I guess it could be worse, there are places where I can stand in the parking lot of a Waffle House and see another Waffle House. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Dec 24, 2017 |
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Dec 24, 2017 03:23
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One I could never figure out was that Fresno had two Sports Authorities, a big-box sporting goods store, across the street from each other. One, Two. Oh yeah and there's an REI in an adjacent plaza too. Going by their history, I'm guessing one was a merger leftover that they rebranded instead of closing for some reason. Sports Authority went under though, so now one's a Dick's and the other's a farmer's market. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Dec 24, 2017 |
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Dec 24, 2017 04:33
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Now I can't stop noticing Mattress Firms, and just realized there's an intersection in Durham with 3 of them, and one of them is in a building that didn't exist a year ago, so it can't be a buyout...
OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Dec 27, 2017 |
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Dec 26, 2017 22:39
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Re: Papa Johns, keep in mind that on top of corner-cutting on their product while still being significantly more expensive than both of their main competitors, Dominos revamped their pizzas for the better and backed it with a big marketing push, and Pizza Hut did a big menu expansion with all of the crust customization stuff.
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Dec 30, 2017 04:13
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boner confessor posted:they take that poo poo real seriously, it's Lawsuit Town. which is why it's so incredibly annoying for foodservice workers when someone says "I'm allergic to..." when what they really mean is "I don't like..." because having an allergen on a ticket includes extra work to have fresh pans etc. which is infuriating when someone says they're allergic to tomatoes, please leave tomatoes off the burger, then they put ketchup on the loving thing. or how a kajillion people somehow became allergic to gluten in 2007 and suddenly they're all concerned about the carb-soaked pasta being gluten free. if you can't eat gluten, dont come to a loving pasta joint aagh people  ... in other words, it's probably made on the same flour-caked table as every other pizza. They've really done a great job of threading the needle of hopping on one of the dumbest food fads ever while also avoiding even the rare incidental benefit. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Dec 31, 2017 |
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Dec 31, 2017 07:07
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boner confessor posted:reminds me of folks who complain about how some restaurant or another always fucks up their order. because i'm like, i see a few possibilities here: There are some other interesting ones, like Pizza Hut will gently caress my order up 80% of the time if I order online instead of calling them on the phone and give them specific instructions because their "default" for hand-tossed is to add the butter-garlic poo poo. The problem is butter-garlic shows up as a line on the ticket, "no crust flavor" doesn't, so the employees get confused and put the butter-garlic on it anyway.
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Dec 31, 2017 07:40
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Fried chicken breading is basically grease and carbs with very high surface area.
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Dec 31, 2017 09:26
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dont even fink about it posted:It's not that everyone has fake Celiac's, it's that Americans have figured out that they're eating too much wheat--often real lovely wheat--and it makes them feel like poo poo.
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Jan 1, 2018 00:50
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Cassava flour might be more nutritious, but the amount of cassava we produce / eat in the US is basically negligible. The whole "gluten free" thing is just the low-carb craze with all of the substance sucked out of it.
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Jan 1, 2018 01:49
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I think a good way to sum up the problem is that pushing for "Celiac-safe" rather than "gluten-free" would be more useful and more responsible at the expense of exploiting food fad idiocy, which is of course why hardly anyone does it.
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Jan 1, 2018 02:20
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Mozi posted:This is truly cutting to the quick of the retail collapse of 2017.
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Jan 1, 2018 02:36
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Expectations are built into the stock price, so to an extent, price changes can reflect whether the outlook is improving or worsening more than whether it's good or bad. It also depends which one you're looking at and how far back you're looking. Macy's, JCPenney, and Bon-Ton are still down significantly since a year ago and Sears is a zombie. What Wall Street is expecting to happen is basically a big wave of closures and mall doom, but that the stronger retailers will survive at better-performing locations as they update their in-store experience and improve their online presence.
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Jan 3, 2018 11:53
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/macys-announces-5000-job-cuts-more-store-closures/ar-BBHRtZV Also on cue, Macy's closing 7 more stores and cutting 5000 staff.
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Jan 5, 2018 01:40
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Xaris posted:I give them props and they did a good job trying to hang in with there their own ereader and embracing ebooks more OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 06:48
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got any sevens posted:Pirating games is still the hardest, you also worry about patches and vid card compatibility, etc. Freakazoid_ posted:cool kids should just listen to sea shanties in general. Horseshoe theory posted:Still not sure how Trans World Entertainment (the parent company of f.y.e. and several other chains) is still in business, to be honest. boner confessor posted:stores that only sell books are done. barnes and noble already has a media section, but really the more likely future are physical media stores that sell books, movies, music, etc. for folks who want to have tangible media vs. digital media I think it's just going to come down to the same thing with all of these media stores: They can work at a certain size and in certain markets, but the opportunities are shrinking. There's probably going to be a place for book stores to exist in 2018 and beyond, but as a big-box store, and in as many locations as B&N has, probably not. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jan 7, 2018 |
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Jan 7, 2018 07:22
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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 wrinkle in the Costco doing everything so much better theory is that BJ's isn't really anything special and they're still outcompeting Sam's Club in their territory for whatever reason.
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Jan 13, 2018 04:38
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