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As someone who leased commercial property for many years, I would like to point out that there are a whole bunch of ways that commercial landlords get properties leased out without technically lowering the per-square-foot charges appreciably. Free rent for the first three months, 'free' modifications and improvements to the property to suit your particular business, screwy ramp-ups in the rent where you start out at x-per-square foot and it doubles after the first year, then doubles again after the second year, so the overall cost-per-square foot over the life of the leases doesn't look so bad to the existing tenants. Also, it's dependent on when the existing leases expire and the potential difficulty that a current tenant would have in moving - if you have a lot of custom modifications to the building(high-voltage power, etc.), or you're doing retail where the lost-customer cost to move is so high that you'd lose money to move. Landlords know this and keep it in mind when negotiating. The point of this post is that -if- landlords borrowed money recently to buy the property, they -will- get it leased, one way or another, or they're in deep financial poo poo. If the landlords own it outright and are more interested in the ultimate rise in property values, plus the tax writeoff, they're less driven to get it leased.
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Jun 4, 2017 17:54
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Unless you're a longshoreman or some edge case like that, unions never seem that great until you lose them or take a nonunion job. Even a crappy union offers some protection for management bullshit.
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Jun 8, 2017 14:54
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Those CHEP and PECO(the red painted ones) pallets are worth a significant amount of money when you take them back to a pallet distributor, I used to haul loaded 53" trailers full to the brim with pallets to avoid deadheading.
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Jun 9, 2017 13:15
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TyroneGoldstein posted:That's GenX and they were not hippies. If anything they were the people that came of age at the tail end of the disco era into the early punk rock era of the early 80's. Those people are not hippies. Yes and no. That's my generation, and poo poo was beginning to hit the fan but we didn't know it then. In the cheap parts of the country the good union manufacturing jobs were already gone or going, and in the pricy parts of the country the great run-up in property prices had already started thanks partly to the absolutely hosed-up inflationary spiral from the mid-Seventies to the mid-Eighties. If you got in early, like the late Boomers did, you were ok, inflation made your house payment get cheaper every month, but the early X-er's didn't have the money to buy homes because the interest rates were so high - you couldn't get a loan. Mortgage rates were over 10% until ~1989. It wasn't nearly as hosed as it is now for Millenials, but it was considerably more difficult to get ahead than our parents had it and the mass media hadn't yet acknowledged it so it was considered a personal failure. Like you said though, we just kept trying to do poo poo like the Boomers because that's all we knew.
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Aug 23, 2017 13:27
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The dying mall fairly close to my house took an old Dillard's anchor building and turned it into a Winco, grocery store which isn't really 'high-end', but has the full deli, butcher etc. The layout is really weird because the original building had multiple small entrances, as many mall-end anchor stores do, but the only place wide enough to put the row of checkout registers is the side where the store meets the mall. So they walked off all the entrances and you have to walk down a tunnel lined with carts to get to the 'front' of the store, where you can turn left into the mall or turn right into the grocery store. It's very odd, but I'm just happy to have a Winco close to the house. It took them a long time to renovate the building, I think adding all the cold storage and loading docks was a pita. The old store had like one lovely loading dock and now they have three good ones.
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Oct 28, 2017 16:11
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I've done plenty of grocery shopping at the crack of dawn with actual cashier service, but I also come from a community that gets up early to be productive so maybe it's just a difference of work ethic.  Except I think it's massive stimulant abuse in the case of my community.
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Nov 4, 2017 20:55
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Magic Hate Ball posted:That makes slightly more sense. Yeah, those are the only ones I've ever seen around here. No way could I do a full shopping trip on one.
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Nov 5, 2017 21:18
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Xaris posted:
Safeway went utterly to poo poo when that Romney-esque private capital firm bought them a few years ago, the updated stores have a terrible selection of actual food. All the effort is toward coffee bars, fancy deli items and endless rows of wine; the food is shoved into a tiny section in the middle. And, as you mentioned, staffing is horrid, there is never enough checkers no matter when you go. My parents live in Santa Cruz where there are literally no supermarkets but Safeway. There's Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, but if you want to do a complete shopping trip, you're stuck with Safeway. They were always a bit expensive, but much of the foodstuffs are 2x as much as the Winco I shop at, and the service is far worse.
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Nov 5, 2017 23:43
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Nah, the owner(s) of HD are raging loving Trumpsters and babble right wing talking points all the time. I've never had store security follow me around, but all the other lovely things ring true, especially their abysmal lumber quality. I always drive across town to Lowes, Home Depot can suck it.
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Nov 7, 2017 01:02
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I thought adding a little sugar to bread dough feeds the yeast and doesn't really flavor the finished product? I generally only eat sourdough bread and occasionally rye, so I don't get the USA BREAD IS CAKE thing, although that cheap white Wonderbread poo poo is truly awful.
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Nov 14, 2017 03:36
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I've spent 20+ looking for good MCM furniture for cheap to furnish my old home, and I'm pretty much done, but holy loving ballsacks it's a lot of work and hassle. I could have easily put in OT at work and just bought top notch stuff from somebody like Midcentury Mobler compared to endless hours looking at utter poo poo that some greedy idiot is trying to pass off as MCM. Anyone who just blithely handwaves 'oh, it's cheap and plentiful' is living in some magical fairyland that I've never been able to find. Even in the Midwest, there's like acres of lovely 'shabby chic' crap for every piece of MCM. That said, MDF is terrible for furniture unless you assume it's disposable when you move.
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Nov 23, 2017 03:05
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His Divine Shadow posted:Speaking of retail. This weekend we did our yearly Christmas shopping, which entailed going into the city and a lot of the more "upscale" shopping malls downtown, and drat it's such a depressing place to visit. This is bougie paradise apparently, glitzy shops and restaurants and all that kind of stuff people are supposed to like and want from life. Except me apparently. To me everything felt wrong, or crass, like I was in some kind of 80s movie about future capitalist dystopian societies. A pervading, dread sense of "keeping up with the joneses" perhaps how I'd describe it. Horrible feel to the place. I hear you on that one, about 20-25 years ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, the same thing happened to me and I've never been able to look(or shop) at those huge 'upscale' shopping centers the same way again. Christmas shopping in general is sort of depressing for me, it just seems like so many people frantically trying to purchase poo poo for other people just because they have to. I mean, for everybody looking really hard for a nice thoughtful gift for someone special to them, there's ten people frantically shoveling poo poo into carts to meet obligations. I know it sounds like Holden Caulfield, but there it is.
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Dec 4, 2017 13:59
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Xaris posted:The one really cool crazy-eclectic fanstasy-scifi book store we had is sadly closing up after 41 years. I used to drive 45 miles to go to Dark Carnival. 
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Jan 6, 2018 04:54
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Just a quick look at the list of stores closing tells me that a huge number of the now-shuttered Sams Club are relatively close to existing Costcos. Wonder if Wal-Mart is getting their rear end kicked, financially, anytime they go head-to-head with Costco?
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Jan 11, 2018 22:04
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BrandorKP posted:There used to not be Costcos in a bunch of places. Sams was more competing with BJs or more often nothing. Sams basically was a ripoff of Costco, but Costco was more regional. Costco has been becoming more national and kicking Sams rear end. I noticed this too, I used to drive semi-trucks hauling Kirkland paper products all over the US and Canada, and they were opening new stores and expanding their range at a pretty quick pace. I kinda snickered about all the Sam’s Clubs in the Seattle area closing, guess they gave up even attempting to compete on Costco’s home turf.
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Jan 11, 2018 23:08
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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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The issue with Amazon’s shipping is that they’re regressing - I’ve had more problems with their in-house shipping in the last six months than all the years I’ve used UPS/Fedex/USPS. I know they’re trying to save money, but they need to do a better job with training and procedures, or give up doing it themselves.
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Jan 15, 2018 20:44
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Radio Shack did this for at least 30 years as well - they’d have these hosed up little stores that were full of things nobody wanted and bereft of items in demand, then ‘promote’ some poor schlub to manager. Since nobody bought anything, Corporate gave the stores no employee-hours, and the manager would have to be there from 10am to 9pm mon-fri, 9am to 6pm on weekends. The managers would do this for a few months, quit, and the whole process would happen again.
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Jan 27, 2018 19:01
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Winco owns Yup, and they’re employee-owned, too!
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Feb 18, 2018 20:25
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Safeway used to(and I’m talking like 25-30 years ago) be the slightly high-end grocery and Lucky was the cheap-but-lovely supermarket in the Bay Area. Alpha Beta sucked but they were the only one open 24 hours. Now Safeway prices are obscene compared to WinCo and their service is execrable. Every one of them is severely understaffed and their selection of food is terrible because their store is filled with non-grocery poo poo, like multiple aisles of wine, snake-oil supplements, florist, huge coffee shop and eat-in deli. But in many areas Safeway is all that’s around, so you’re stuck with them.
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Feb 19, 2018 06:15
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Safeway’s service has gone absolutely to poo poo since Cerberus bought them.
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Mar 19, 2018 13:09
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Neo Rasa posted:Subway would be fine if the sandwich content wasn't contained between the worst bread ever. The bread alone brings it down to aggressively mediocre. That’s my bitch as well; before Subway was a thing, Togo’s was the general choice for sandwiches where I live, and they have good bread. Then the Subway Juggernaut came about and really put the hurt on Togo’s - I guess a lot more people were toothless and/or lacked salivary glands than I thought. Now there’s like five different sandwich places near my work - Firehouse, Panera Bread, Togo’s, Jersey Mike’s and Subway. Nobody goes to Subway any more.
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May 5, 2018 21:00
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Bend is also a giant haven of old Californians who sold their lovely Bay Area houses for big bucks and moved there, so I’m sure part of it is just an old clientele who’s used to renting movies and too old/confused to navigate streaming menus.
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Jul 17, 2018 12:58
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I have no goddamn idea how anyone could postulate that things aren’t far worse for the bottom 50% of people compared to 50, 60 years ago in the US. In 1965 my dad, a 22-year old blue-collar union worker, bought a perfectly nice little house on one salary and the payment was 27% of his wages. Blue Cross medical insurance was provided by his employer for his entire family. Out-of pocket cost for him was $0. This was a very typical scenario for people in his socio-economic-geographic situation.* That house is now $490,000. Do you think a 22-year-old HS graduate could possibly buy this house? Could a 22-year-old without a degree even make enough money to provide health benefits to his family if all other expenses were free? I dunno, but it would be close. *its also why Baby Boomers are generally infuriating and insufferable when they talk about present-day opportunities and difficulties, but that’s another topic.
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Sep 25, 2018 01:11
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Halloween Jack posted:
I’m well aware of this - redlining was utterly hosed - but home ownership among black families has fallen back to it’s pre-civil rights numbers. http://www.nareb.com/african-american-homeownership-falls-50-year-low/  It’s not even illegal now, just unattainable.
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Sep 25, 2018 02:01
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Slanderer posted:It's hard to conceive of how lovely the bottom 20% had it in 1950 when their experiences have been so thoroughly omitted from our societal memory. That’s a really good point.
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Sep 25, 2018 02:09
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pseudanonymous posted:Thank god there's no way that study had any inherent bias. That’s what I was thinking as well. I want to know what the tolerance is on prescription strength - are the glasses .001% off, and that’s how they’re getting the 28% number, or are the prescriptions seriously hosed up? The cynic in me guesses the former.
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Dec 5, 2018 23:45
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JustJeff88 posted:Things like this really reinforce my growing suspicion that The Glorious Free MarketTM cannot solve the growing residential housing crisis either.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:03
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I was rooting for JC Penny’s too, the perpetual sale thing is bullshit.
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Feb 8, 2019 01:58
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Pakistani Brad Pitt posted:I remember driving by Dress Barn when I was a kid and thinking it was a terrible business strategy to imply your female customers were cows. I’m shocked it’s lasted this long.
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May 23, 2019 04:57
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Is in-person Black Friday even a huge thing anymore? I feel like I’m not seeing the line-lunacy like I used to, and the ‘deals’ seem to be both lame and also extends to online sales and/or the whole Thanksgiving weekend, making the whole ‘line up at 3am’ thing kinda superfluous.
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Jun 26, 2021 11:49
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:I wish the closest winco to me wasn’t a 30 minute drive each way. I’d like to support what they do but that’s a haul. There’s a rumor one is opening up in my town though, and I hope it’s true. Winco is the poo poo, they opened one near my house and it’s wonderful. Nearly all canned and packaged goods are exactly 1/2 of Safeway prices, and their bulk food area is phenomenal. Wanna buy five pounds of ramen packet seasoning? Gotcha covered. The fact that it’s employee-owned makes my socialist heart proud.
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Feb 2, 2024 04:07
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Yeah, I went into a Target the other day(the ‘nice’ Target as opposed to the ‘slightly ghetto Target’ on the other side of town), and EVERYTHING pharmacy-related was behind glass, like $2.00 band-aids and $2.50 generic ibuprofen. Meanwhile, three aisles over, the $25 makeup products were right there in the open. Of course there were no employees anywhere around and no button or anything to push in order to get someone to unlock the Asprin Gates, so I did what any goon would do - cursed under my breath, went home and ordered my stuff from Amazon. I will say, this will either bite them in the rear end - the normally bustling area was eerily vacant and the shelves were full, or they’re trying to get out of that market entirely and are looking for an excuse to do so.
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Mar 3, 2024 01:45
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