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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:And that's only the medium-high end of the handbag game. Some weird poo poo has been going on with the accessories industry since the boom in the early 2000's. A lot of Asian and Middle-Eastern women joined the market, which horrified the staid old European brands, so they started putting up barriers around their "it" bags to make it harder for non-approved customers to buy one - now there are waitlists and a vetting process and purchase limits. Everyone's afraid of becoming Burberry or Gucci, so strongly associated with tackiness and poor people that they can scarcely use their trademark designs anymore. I'm posting a picture from the Goodwill Bins just to clear my palate after reading all of that:
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# ¿ May 2, 2017 20:02 |
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# ¿ May 14, 2024 23:27 |
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When we talk about the very rich, who are we talking about? Because I think there is some confusion about what the term means. Are we talking about people who are making $200,000 a year and own a million dollar house, or are we talking about people making 5 million dollars a year with 20 million dollar houses? Because those are two quite different groups of people. People in the first are also numerous enough that you can look at them as a class, talk about general patterns. And retail marketers probably do that, market to people in the 100-500,000 dollar a year range. Above a few million dollars a year, most retailers probably don't have a single marketing strategy because that group is going to be too diverse.
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# ¿ May 2, 2017 23:46 |
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blowfish posted:
You can always take your exclusive ballet training and go off to learn real dance on the street, horrifying your father until the break-dancing performance you give using a group of struggling young urban teens makes him realize he shouldn't bulldoze the community center to build luxury high rises.
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# ¿ May 2, 2017 23:49 |
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fishmech posted:Well, for Tide in particular, you're forgetting this: http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/ My grandmother was a millionaire, she probably made several hundred thousand dollars a year (she never told us directly, I just knew that she could buy a house with a cashier's check). She was a writer, wrote several dozen New York Time's best sellers. She raised me to believe that shopping trips to Value Village where you spent a couple hundred dollars were the best way to spend money. Well, and Costco as well. (People in arts/publishing/media/etc. are a very specific subset of rich people, but it is the one I know about) (I am not doing this to brag, just kind of showing the source of my slanted view on these things) (Although it wouldn't take much to guess who she is)
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# ¿ May 2, 2017 23:53 |
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:
To me, I can't imagine really rich people needing to advertise it with consumer goods. I think that level of tackiness is only in underdeveloped places, like the Gulf States, parts of South America or New York City.
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# ¿ May 2, 2017 23:57 |
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Cicero posted:You seem to know a lot about clothing manufacture, so is there any sizable chain that sells well-made non-niche clothes for reasonable prices? Carhartts/Columbia? Although that is outdoor/work clothing. I bought a pair of Carhartts under the idea that 60 dollars for a pair of pants that would last forever made more sense than buying 10 dollar pairs of pants from Goodwill every three months. My Carhartts lasted four months before I ripped the crotch open. I don't know how I managed to do that.
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# ¿ May 3, 2017 04:06 |
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:This is way off the topic of the thread but how would you actually ban MLMs in the USA? What laws at the federal or state level would make a difference? I don't consider it off-topic, since this thread has just mutated to cover all sorts of retail practices. My own answer is that probably the best way, rather than passing new laws, is that most MLMs have enough shady stuff going on at the margins that if the government wanted to prosecute, they could. And it would only take one or two cases, even ones that are settled out of court, to discourage MLMs.
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# ¿ May 6, 2017 22:29 |
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Anubis posted:It might discourage them from getting too large, but that alone won't be sufficient to discourage the people who think they can be rich by creating a loyal group of unpaid salesmen. There will always be grifters, but minimizing the worst abuses of the system would probably go a long way.
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# ¿ May 6, 2017 23:32 |
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OhFunny posted:Ya one store near me tried some automated check outs and took them out due to theft. Where do you live? In Oregon and Washington, I first saw automated checkouts in 1997 as an experimental thing, and now, every larger grocery store has 8-12 of them (2-3 pods, usually with 4, sometimes 6 checkouts each). There are always a few problems with them, but they've mostly been fixed. I thought this was a standard technology, and had been for at least ten years? Is this still catching on in places?
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# ¿ May 9, 2017 14:16 |
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OhFunny posted:New Hampshire. Ah...in general, places on the East Coast are slower to adjust to technology and change. I wonder if that is the same in other East Coast states, like Florida, Arkansas, Wisconsin, etc?
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# ¿ May 9, 2017 18:33 |
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:I'm in Oregon, and I have yet to see a store remove self checkout. Over the past decade every store I go to has either expanded self checkout, or at least updated the machines. Yeah, as I mentioned, this post was originally about the continuing expansion of retail, not its downfall, and I wrote it coming out of Oregon and Washington, where retail is still getting better and faster. I think willingness to adapt to technology is one of the reasons for that. When I left Vancouver, they were introducing the first curbside pickups for online orders to the Fred Meyer in Orchards.
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# ¿ May 9, 2017 19:02 |
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I have a lot of pallet stories to tell, but back to our other story: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/10/news/companies/ascena-ann-taylor-dress-barn-loft-stores-closing/index.html Another line of semi-specialty apparel shops are closing, and the usual suspects are brought up. Interesting note: 250 stores will be closed for certain, but 400 will be closed unless they can renegotiate a cheaper rent. I wonder how much of this is going to be a way for retail stores to bargain with malls and other landlords: because along with the lost rent, malls know that once they lose a certain threshhold of stores, less people come to shop and it is a vicious cycle. Even a store that isn't particularly burdened by rent might be compelled to bring it up as an issue.
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 01:43 |
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I think we can all agree that Minneapolis is cold in the winter, but some of you might not agree with my belief that Minneapolis is on the East Coast.
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# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 03:01 |
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wateroverfire posted:In some cases they overlook it because expats are a separate and exotic species whose ways are not like those of civilized folk and in other cases they make them get in line or get fired, I imagine. That is why I like being an English teacher here! I get to hang out in all the big companies but can still act like a mochilero! But yeah, the work hours here are confusing, because people work so many hours, but things go so slowly. Especially in retail, its weird to think I've gotten used to thinking of a 5 person line as being a short line. And the grocery stores close at 10 PM. All of these work hours, but still things are so inefficient.
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2017 21:00 |
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Lets see if I can turn this great big old ship back on course: With the Sears closings, what do you think is the predicted day for Sears to go (really) bankrupt/cease operations/sell off to Amazon, or otherwise stop existing as a going concern? My own guess is, since we are halfway through the year, that they are going to try to make it to the holiday shopping season, and see if they can somehow pick up business through that period. It would be really bad for malls to lose an anchor right before Christmas. Since that probably won't work out, I am assuming that next January/February will be Sears finale.
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# ¿ Jun 23, 2017 21:57 |
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Horseshoe theory posted:I believe they have a big non-affiliated company (i.e., not one from Eddie Lampert's loans) principal payment due next June or July, so they'll definitely go under by then. I have doubts that they won't burn through their cash before then, so your January or February date is probably more accurate. I'm assuming that creditors and landlords will give them some slack over the holiday period, especially malls, because the malls don't want to lose an anchor. But then afterwards, when the lull sets in, they are going to be in even more trouble. I am also assuming that next January and February is when the lack of retail employment will start filtering through the economy. Unemployment is really low right now, but the continuing retail closures will probably start filtering through the market and become a more central economic story.
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# ¿ Jun 23, 2017 22:22 |
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We have a new business model for failing retail: http://time.com/4846516/hobby-lobby-department-of-justice-iraq-artifacts-smuggle/ Just smuggle stolen culture artifacts as tile samples! And then...uh, well, I don't know what Phase 2 of this Master Plan is.
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# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 01:20 |
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I don't know if this has been covered, but I've read forecasts that the dual impact of Harvey and Irma is going to cause depression in the retail sector in the coming months. It effected a large enough area of Texas and Florida to show up in national figures. My guess is that retailers facing an already difficult holiday season will have this be a tipping point, but that we won't really see the true impact until after the holiday season. I think that a lot of struggling retailers are hoping for one last break, and I don't think it is going to happen. I think the real domino effect of anchor closures leading to mall closures is going to happen in January-March of 2018. It could happen sooner, especially if another hurricane impacts oil and gas production.
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# ¿ Sep 16, 2017 08:21 |
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:All of them? Bankrupt doesn't mean defunct, either now or then. It means the company is allowed to reorganize while its debts are put on hold. In this case, Toys r Us is probably making the case that if they don't pay creditors now, they will be reinvigorated over the holiday season. Probably a lot of retailers are saying that, and when it doesn't happen, January-March of next year is going to be when they go into liquidation bankruptcy, as opposed to reorganization bankruptcy.
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# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 19:58 |
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Walmarts in the middle of nowhere are usually incredibly clean and tidy and staffed by people who don't seem on the verge of self-immolation. I've never seen a Wal-Mart in the middle of nowhere. Like, I would guess 85% of Wal-Marts are on a freeway exit, 10% are on a highway exit, and maybe 5% are not on a major road?
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 02:04 |
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Once again, the Dollar Tree proves itself to be the corvid of the retail world: everywhere and irrepresible: https://qz.com/1102505/the-businesses-amazon-is-most-likely-to-struggle-to-take-over/ I think that Dollar Tree's success is that they are full of things that people don't know that they want, until they get in their. Like, you would not go on Amazon and say "I need a pair of really cheap sunglasses, 2 pounds of spaghetti, a pack of football cards, a Sunset guide to gardening, a matchbox car, a get well card for my aunt, some aspirin and an arizona ice tea" and order those things. Its only within the pristine yet chaotic environs of the Dollar Tree that you realize all the needs you want met for 10 dollars.
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 02:11 |
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Xaris posted:i think he's referring to middle of nowhere as "(far) outskirts in the unincorporated area of (X town/city, possibly small <20k place) to avoid taxes/cheap land" One thing that I've learned from D&D is that most of the United States can't imagine a level of rurality too small to have Walmart. Like, exurban freeway exit is as small as it gets.
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 02:13 |
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This is curious to me: when people talk about non-chain and small retail, they are usually talking about boutique retail, which is usually thought to be aimed at hipsters or urbanites who like unique stores within walking distance. Chain retail, especially big box stores, is usually seen as the provenance of "rural" areas. Wal-Mart and McDonalds are taken by some to be the hallmarks of small town America. So the idea that there are places too small and too rural to be served by chains is something that people don't consider. And in a way, they shouldn't, because its a pretty small percentage of the US population. But it is there. A few weeks ago, I took a look at this route: the 350 miles on US-395, going from the California border to Pendleton, Oregon. (About the same as the 340 mile distance between Cleveland, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky). In that 350 miles, someone would pass four supermarkets. (Two Safeways, and two Thriftways). They would pass one national pharmacy chain (Rite-Aid, in Burns). They would pass three Napa Auto Parts (In Lakeview, Burns and John Day). There are True Value Hardware stores in Lakeview and John Day and a Parr Lumber (Northwest Chain) in Burns. There is a Subway Sandwich station in each city, two Dairy Queens, and one McDonalds. Along with the gas stations, that is going to be the only national or even local chain businesses in that 350 miles of road. Everything else is either small local business, either appealing to tourists, or just cheap diners for local residents, independent grocery stores, or a book or craft store a retiree runs as a project. Its funny, because to a lot of people, the gaggle of freeway intersection businesses, the Walmart, the Home Depot, the Flying J Truck Stop, the combined Taco Bell/Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Cabelas, have all become synonymous with what "Small Town America" means, and people forget that there are still places where you can drive for 8 or 10 hours, and all you are going to see is local businesses and that a Dairy Queen is going to be a sign of the "big city" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_RAp-_OHRQ
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 02:43 |
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fishmech posted:You'll still see them out in real nowhere places in their original home territory, especially around Arkansas, though those stores are being closed increasingly more as time goes on - they're simply not profitable. All of the full nationwide expansion of Wal-Mart has sought the easiest places to service, usually as close to freeways as possible and if not then on a major highway leading to one relatively close by when that's relevant. Well, that is why I posted the video below: we are using very different definitions of "nowhere". Nowhere isn't a town of 3500 people 30 miles from a town of 30,000 people. Nowhere is a town of 300 people, 50 miles from a town of 2000 people, where you have one general store that is also the gas station, post office and diner. The difference is that the first group of towns is at some level, a market segment that major corporations spend time and money trying to reach. It might be 10% of the population, but exurban counties of 10-30,000 people are a big enough market segment that it makes sense to invest in them. They are close enough to distribution centers, and they have population densities, that it makes sense to invest money in them. There is also probably specific research directed to them. Somewhere in Cabela's corporate headquarters, there is a binder called "Appealing to the Vanity and Insecurity of the Aging Male in Exurban Counties" But there is a section of the US, maybe 1-4% of the population, that is pretty much off the radar as far as chain retail goes.
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 03:20 |
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fishmech posted:Don't forget NY has 2.3 million rural people, Pennslyvania has 2.7 million, and virginia has 1.9 million. I know! Some of those people live in such distant places, you can barely hear the freeway! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 15:43 |
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Like, I know that for practical purposes, the 1-4% of the US population that lives outside of the scope of chain retail can pretty much be ignored in terms of looking at retail in the US as a whole. We don't really have to look at Jim's Diner and General Store for this discussion. Cabela's, and Donald Trump, very rightly sensed that when marketing to "rural" residents, you are marketing to people who are close to urban supply centers, live in towns large enough to support a specialty store, and that probably support their "rural" image and lifestyle with a bog standard job working for a big company. I get that part. I get that the very fact that these people living a pretty standard suburban lifestyle is why companies like Cabela's, and politicians like Donald J Trump, are so good at marketing to their insecurities by selling them a cartoon version of what "rural" is. This isn't a surprise. My point is just to remember that, just like there are still some "health food" customers who are shopping at local co-ops, and not at Whole Foods, there are rural people whose towns aren't Walmart and McDonalds. Of course they don't make a big difference in the market as a whole, but its nice to remember they are there.
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 15:53 |
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blowfish posted:Nowhere isn't a town of 300 people, 50 miles from a town of 2000 people, where you have one general store that is also the gas station, post office and diner. I know this is a joke, but if you had to guess where the highest selling Kroger store was, where would you guess? Probably not Fairbanks, Alaska. But that is where it is: https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2016/12/05/fairbanks-loves-fred-meyer-and-the-sales-numbers-prove-it/ Basically, people who do live in the Alaskan Bush don't have a lot of options for shopping, so they go to Fairbanks, sometimes only a few times a year, to stock up. Its also the largest Fred Meyer store in the country, at 230,000 square feet.
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# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 16:39 |
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Squalid posted:Why are you putting the word rural in quotes. Rural has a well defined meaning used in a technical sense by the census bureau and other government agencies. Your bizarre and idiosyncratic use of the term conforms neither with the technical definition nor common use. Real answer: Companies like Cabela's, and politicians like Donald J Trump, have rural as a category that might not match up with demographic definitions of the Census. Both of them are marketing to $75,000 marketing managers in the suburbs as if they are really backwoods truckdrivers. Its a pretty good ruse: everyone involved believes it, including the people in this thread. glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Oct 16, 2017 |
# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 17:00 |
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Morbus posted:
That wasn't a Washington Post article, that was a medium article, it was written by me. Which I guess if I am trying to point out that my belief makes sense and is not just my personal windmill to tilt at, isn't a point in my favor. Anyway, here it is: https://medium.com/@mnharris/there-are-two-rural-americas-720b382bf092 glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Oct 17, 2017 |
# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 00:32 |
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Squalid posted:Obviously, but glowing fish doesn't get to arbitrarily redefine words to suit his arguments. And he especially shouldn't go around anally enforcing his interpretation of the correct (which is wrong by any reasonable interpretation) usage across the forum. Since this is the retail thread, though, my definition makes sense. Say it is 7 PM on a Sunday evening, and you realize that you need new pillowcases, a complete DVD collection of McGuyver, and a digital camera. Whether you live in Rockville, Maryland or Lohman, Missouri, this experience is going to be pretty much the same: there are Walmarts and Targets within a 20 minute drive, you are going to go there and have anything you can possibly normally want, available 24 hours a day. You come home, watch 4 hours of McGuyver and realize that you could really go for some Taco Bell, and also your wife bought the wrong toothpaste the other day, so at 2 AM you go to back to town and pick up some Taco Bell and the good toothpaste. Etcetera: as long as people have 24/7 (or at least 18/7) access to the same chains that offer anything, the distinction between rural and suburban seems pretty meaningless. There is also a weird horseshoe theory thing going on, as applied to retail. Because one of the things about very rural locations and urban locations is that is where independent and non-chain businesses form a large part of people's retail experience. That is where independent stores, personalized attention and community integration are the most important. In a town/area of less than 2500 people, you probably get your coffee at Joe's Coffee Shack, where Joe knows how you like it ordered and asks about your dogs. From 2500 to 250,000, you are in the suburban zone: you go to Starbucks (probably by car), and its like every Starbucks everywhere. Then about 250,000, you get back into cities, where you have an old brick stone front coffee shop and Daphne knows how you like your Fair Trade tea and she tells you about graduate school.
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 01:33 |
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FistEnergy posted:I enjoyed this very much, thank you. Maybe I should make my points by articulating them better and providing evidence, and not just by trying to troll people? And thank you, I am glad you liked it.
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 01:47 |
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WampaLord posted:So you go on Amazon and it shows up in the mail, no matter where you live in the country. Within the last two or three years, yes. I agree that services like Amazon are going to further erode the differences. At a certain point, the difference between urban and rural will perhaps be erased, because everyone will be telecommuting and having things delivered to the door. I also don't know how Amazon Prime works. How much do people pay for things on it? Is it really possible to have an entire day's shopping delivered to your door step anywhere, at no additional cost? I'm not really B, so I don't have much practice with it, I've only ever really used it for ordering drugs, when I was in the US. Why do I keep on hammering on this point, to the annoyance of some? Someone originally said "Walmarts in the middle of nowhere", and I pointed out that was kind of an oxymoronic thing to reference: Walmart doesn't operate in the middle of nowhere. Its a little like this famous picture: Look at all those destitute, lower middle class people, scraping by on $260,000 dollars! Whenever I hear someone talk about how their freeway exit town is so tiny, its like hearing someone talk about how $260,000 dollars is middle class. I will never apologize for pointing out that yes, there are actually are people who are more rural and more poor than that. (I know the difference is that $260,000 is not anywhere close to the median, while Peoria, Illinois is pretty much the median point of the urban/rural continuum. But still, there are a lot of places smaller, and they shouldn't be totally forgotten.)
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 03:34 |
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exploded mummy posted:he has a long history of gimmick posting in the Trump thread with this exact shtick and has been probated over it previously It didn't start as a gimmick, but I did give into temptation when people said, for example, that Connecticut is a neglected region of the country. It is not a gimmick and it is an important point. I was not one of the people who ever believed the claims that Trump voters were acting out of "economic anxiety". I also never believed that Trump voters were "rural", in the sense that they were people who were concerned with issues like infrastructure investment or farm policy. Its not like the residents of Butler County, Ohio (middle class suburb north of Cincinnati, and (I believe) Trump's biggest vote getting county in Ohio) voted for Trump because he promised to finally build a bridge across the old ravine so that Jim's Market could finally get fresh milk every day. Its an interesting and important point that the anti-establishment rebellion we are supposedly in has never extended to people wanting to give up globalization in the form of Walmart, McDonalds and massive freeway interchanges. And in fact, for some people, those things are a SIGN of rebellion, because you know, coastal elites won't eat at McDonalds.
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 15:53 |
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Inescapable Duck posted:I recall the thread about rural poverty was about 10% opiates epidemic, 80% arguing over the definition of 'rural', 10% unironic 'We should just let them die'. I used to order 2 pound bags of poppy seeds off of Amazon, receive them at my home in Montana, and then make a smoothie out of poppy seeds. I would get super energetic. One day I went for a 75 mile bicycle ride, trying to find this complete town that Frank Lloyd Wright designed. Only the town was never built, but I wanted to examine the site.
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 15:56 |
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WampaLord posted:So your entire loving gimmick is "No one can claim to be rural unless they're like the 1% of most rural people?" You must live in a shack away from all society to be considered rural by glowing fish. Or on a real mountain, I guess. People can claim to be rural. And depending on the situation, it makes sense in some contexts and not in others. If you have an acre of property and manage to raise food for your self and maybe enough for a farmstand, that is rural, but if that is 1000 dollars a year and you work as an account in an office park in a suburb, than the rest of your life isn't very rural. As far as this retail thread, the definition of rural depends on a person's access to retail. A lot of it has to do with my personal history. I grew up, from 2 to 8, in a small town (about 3000 people) about 30 miles from Portland, Oregon. One of my first memories, when I was 3, was of the new Safeway being constructed. That gave us two supermarkets, with the Safeway being the first national chain. When I was a kid, there was that super market, a McDonalds, a Chevron station, and a True Value hardware store. We walked to the locally owned grocery stores, and went shopping at the local shops, and if we wanted something more, we had to go to "the mall", about 10 miles away. So I would say that was rural, especially because the highway hadn't been widened yet. There were good and bad things about it, like there is a small town friendliness, but also the selection was bad and the produce was probably gross. But it was very different from how it is now. Now that town has 5 times as many people, and it has a Safeway, an Albertsons, a Fred Meyer, a Walmart Super-Center, a Walgreen's, a Dollar Tree, Starbucks, Little Caeser's, Taco Bell, etc, all at the intersection of two six lane highways. I think that is a big change from a rural retail environment to a suburban/exurban one. When the retail in a town is dominated by national chains, with the attendant big box construction and ignoring of local community needs, that is suburban not rural. Its a very big tangible and intangible difference. And yes, very little of the US doesn't have that. I remember the change happening in like 1990, with maybe the 20% of the country that was still functionally rural, where people still shopped at "John's Levis" and "Al and Ernie's Market", shrinking down to maybe 2-3% of the country that still had that kind of small town shopping experience. And of course now, everything is going to change again.
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 16:21 |
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WampaLord posted:That's not what globalization means. Walmart depends on global imports. Walmart is a international corporation. McDonalds depends on global food imports, I am guessing, and is also an international corporation. Those big, big freeway interchanges depend on the United States having a big supply of never-ending cheap oil supply from around the world. I know that a lot of people mean "globalization" to mean different things. But I think for a lot of people, they really do think there little midwestern town with a Walmart and McDonalds is a sign of heartland independence, and not a sign of the United States' dependence on global supply nets and financing. People want to pretend they are Pa Ingalls going to Oleson's Mercantile while their actual environment is planned, executed and supplied from corporate headquarters in distant cities. And is all dependent on that oil lasting forever...
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 16:26 |
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WampaLord posted:That's not what globalization means. Its not a real small town. Read what I wrote. It was a small town, in a way, before the spread of Walmart and Taco Bell, and before the two lane highway that people kept on dying on was replaced by a four/six lane highway.
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 16:27 |
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got any sevens posted:Did you find it? Did you stop making the smoothies? I found the location of it, and I stopped making the smoothies because I moved out of the US. Poppy seed smoothies are really tasty, but due to the shifting amount of alkaloids in the seeds, they can be unpredictable.
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# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 16:28 |
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Motronic posted:If your big box stores are anything like ours I'm always willing to pay more at a real lumber yard (event though I typically end up paying the same or less) just so I don't need to spend 15 minutes sorting through piles of poo poo wood in the store to find the 6 2x4s that are both straight and don't have gigantic knots right in the middle of them taking up 1/3 of the meat of the lumber. I inevitably read this in Nick Offerman's voice. glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Oct 19, 2017 |
# ¿ Oct 19, 2017 20:03 |
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# ¿ May 14, 2024 23:27 |
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WampaLord posted:Look, I'll give you Walmart and McDonald's, but a national highway system is literally the opposite of globalization. It's an American creation to benefit America exclusively. It was done with American labor and American money. It has literally nothing to do with globalization. Well, remember that that "American money" that builds and maintains the United States highway system comes from the United States running up a national debt. That is letting alone the oil imports that are needed to maintain America's driving habits. If you forgot, you wouldn't be alone in forgetting that paying for and maintaining a national freeway system is not something that has been done through the practice of rugged individualism and entrepreneurship. It is a gigantic federal bureaucracy that redistributes money, and that money comes from international sources. The oil to pay for those shopping trips requires an interventionist foreign policies, to say the least. One thing that is curious to me is that I have seen anti-globalization leftists try to at least come up with some sort of answer to questions of economic production, even if they leave a lot of questions unanswered (not everyone can pay 5 dollars a pound for organic spinach from the local co-op). but I've seen at least some attempts at the production of food, bicycles, computers, tools & hardware, in ways that avoid globalization. I honestly don't know if there is a conservative anti-globalization equivalent. Like conservative anti-globalists don't really have an alternative to their current lifestyle, and as much as some of them are "preppers", that seems mostly a hobby where they buy expensive hardware. And then, once they are done talking big about how they can survive the apocalypse, its back in to the 8 MPG truck to the local Target because they bought cinnamon waffles and not the pumpkin spice ones their wife wanted.
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# ¿ Oct 19, 2017 20:34 |