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glowing-fish posted:I went into a Barnes and Noble last year, and it seemed they were kind of trying to combine an "experience" with just a place to buy things. So you have books, toys, displays and a cafe. So it kind of offers a "service" as well as just a product. Its a keen bit of marketing, but I don't know how successful it will be on two grounds: This isn't actually new, for what it's worth. I used to go into B&N to just sit down at the cafe and read over a decade ago. I think you're right that this kind of "experience" doesn't justify the existence of a huge retail store, though. In the specific case of B&N, I could pretty much get the same thing if Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks offered some sort of in-store ebook lending system that I could access on my phone or tablet.
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Dec 4, 2016 19:59
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La Brea Carpet posted:Sam's Clubs around me are already doing a similar thing. You scan the item barcode on your phone as you shop. You pay from your phone and show the phone receipt at the door like you would a paper one. It's a pretty painless process, except for getting the barcode on a giant box of something to scan right. I'm pretty sure this is something Sam's Club has rolled out nationwide at this point and it's pretty great. I have no idea why Amazon decided to go with a more complex solution for the same end result. I find it kind of interesting that phone apps are basically doing an end run around things like self checkout and touchscreen fast food kiosks.
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Dec 5, 2016 17:24
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Liquid Communism posted:Sure, if you are willing to absolutely trust Amazon's product descriptions to be 100% accurate. I'm not sure that this argument works for books. You can easily make a chapter or two of an ebook available to try, and that's about as much information as you're going to get from just quickly skimming through something in the store. The point I was making was that I wasn't really a "good" B&N customer - I'd buy a coffee or two and basically treat the store like a library. Now I don't go into B&N at all, because I can just take my phone or iPad to a coffee shop and read there.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:07
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PT6A posted:A lot of delivery services here are either quite expensive, have a terrible/incomplete selection of products, or rely on you being at home at an arbitrary time to accept the delivery. I don't know, I just live in a random nowhere suburb in CT and all the grocery stores nearby have some form of delivery service and they're all fine. It's pretty much exclusively how I buy groceries now. None of them are particularly expensive, and they all either have their entire selection available online or you can call to request unusual items for your order. Having to be around for delivery is kind of annoying, but they'll give you a list of open delivery times and provide an hour delivery window, so it's not all that bad. Picking an hour window where I'll definitely be home is no worse than setting aside an hour to drive to the store and actually shop.
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Dec 6, 2016 23:26
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therobit posted:The older tools were great, the more recently manufactured ones kinda suck and now that you get a warranty on hand tools from Harbor freight with not too much difference in quality anymore, there is no reason to buy craftsman. Kobalt (Lowes) and Husky (Home Depot) are actually fine too and have similar warranties and generally good prices, especially during sales. I have some older Craftsman stuff and it's probably technically higher quality, but for hobby mechanic/handyman work who really cares?
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Jan 7, 2017 23:14
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PT6A posted:So, I was shopping for a TV today and I want it ASAP because I'm a useless, impatient manchild. How many places do you think had the TV I wanted (or a similar model at a similar price) in stock, anywhere in the city/province, and indicated so on their website? If you were looking for a particular model then I'm not sure that this is really all that surprising. The last time I bought a TV at a brick and mortar store was over a decade ago, and even then I had to wait something like five days to go back and pick it up because I wanted a specific model and I didn't want the floor model.
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Mar 23, 2017 09:34
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OwlFancier posted:I don't get what this high end retail is doing, why its customers buy things, what fulfillment they get out of it, how it fits into their social lives, it seems so utterly disconnected from my experience of consumption-as-leisure. You're looking at this from the wrong side of things. It's not that the handbag isn't worth the money, it's that the amount of money we're talking about is effectively valueless to the person spending it. I don't worry about the difference between a cup of coffee that costs $1.00 and one that costs $1.50 because that $0.50 has more or less zero value to me.
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May 2, 2017 22:46
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OwlFancier posted:The whole idea of "I can have this but you can't" just... doesn't work in my social circles. I don't know if it's poverty related or not. There's sometimes "I can have this because I got lucky" but flaunting wealth would get you kicked out fairly sharpish because nobody likes a snob. I can't help but feel it's a deeply miserable thing to build social interaction around and it's difficult to jam into your brain that it could be economically sustainable. Though I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised that institutional victimization is profitable. We're really just talking about a form of conspicuous consumption here, and that's honestly a thing at most social levels. The vast majority of people who buy high-end luxury cars don't actually care enough about cars to get any real, practical value out of them compared to something a little more reasonable, but people do it anyway because it sends a clear signal about social status. High-end fashion isn't any different. You might not realize that someone is walking around with a $5k handbag, but you also aren't really the intended recipient of the social cues that person is sending.
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May 2, 2017 23:44
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Jack2142 posted:At alot of Albertsons and Safeways in the Northwest they actually started pulling out the automated check stands in recent years. While I don't have stats I guess from talking to people at stores they break more often, are slower increase theft rates etc. Stats for self checkout deployment are actually really hard to come by, but everything I've ever found shows a steady increase in adoption over the last several years. I'm only mentioning this because "[some store] near me is rolling back their self checkouts" is a thing I've seen people say for, like, probably a decade, but it doesn't actually seem to be the case in aggregate. Anecdotally, several stores near me removed their self checkouts a few years ago and now they've almost all brought them back. Stats like this make me thing that self checkouts definitely aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
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May 9, 2017 20:35
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fishmech posted:Yeah these are all over the place in the US too. Most people don't seem to want to bother with them though. The Sam's Club near me lets you do this, but with your phone instead of a handheld scanner. I haven't bothered and I don't know how popular it is, but there always seem to be a few people shopping that way on the rare occasion that I'm in Sam's Club.
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May 12, 2017 05:10
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Is that fixable? I mean, I want it to be, it's not a rhetorical question, but everybody always says the margins are crazy thin in food service. I sometimes think about ways to fix the fact that kitchen workers can never take sick days, and it seems like even if there were a pool of temps to draw from, kitchen team dynamics are so crucial that you can't really slot someone in just for the day. This is only very tangentially related, but home health care aides (another job that pays very poor wages on par with retail work) have a similar issue. Calling in sick generally means that a client who may not be able to function independently won't have anyone in the house that day, and even if another aide can be scheduled to fill that slot on short notice there's still the problem of that person not knowing the client, where food or other items are in their home, etc. I deal with this a lot since I'm a secondary caregiver for my grandmother, and it's extremely common for her to end up sick because an aide who really shouldn't have been there wasn't able to call out for the day.
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May 30, 2017 22:11
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Aliquid posted:Does anywhere have progressive property taxes? I.e. a "standard deduction" of the first 500sqft then rates tick up from there Wouldn't you want to use assessed value for a progressive property tax scheme rather than square footage?
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Jun 5, 2017 17:22
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Please don't get into a tism fight with the literal dumbest guy on the forums, I can't take it. They are walking-focused, that's what all the bullshit decorative swirly paths are for. They just don't reside in walking-focused communities, because: America. And pretend someone not-fishmech just made a broad, unprovable assertion like "they are rarely smaller" and sic nega-fishmech on him, because there is absolutely no metric for that and I don't want to see pages of this dumb thread disappear behind a wall of "jerk detected!" when OOCC desperately tries to clack his two brain cells together trying to chase you and your goalpost around the field. This whole discussion seems kind of strange. There's really no practical difference between an outdoor faux street and indoor lanes in malls. Like, this is just a street with a roof over it and a focus on vertical space:  A "lifestyle center" with pedestrian only streets wouldn't be any more or less walking-centric, while one that allows people to easily drive between stores would be more car-centric. I don't understand how this is even an argument. Both are, as you say, car-centric in practical terms since they're almost always built in locations that you have to drive to. That's what really matters.
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Jun 13, 2017 21:55
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mandatory lesbian posted:it is absolutely blowing my mind people are arguing that the ones who actually go outside and walk around a mall are more goony then the people who never leave their home to get stuff Lots of people just don't see shopping as an experience, which is why this always end up as a point of contention whenever this topic comes up. I try to get out as much as humanly possible because I work from home and need to escape my home office to recharge, but I still really hate shopping and will generally choose to do literally anything (even work!) to avoid it. People who don't see shopping as an enjoyable experience are still relevant to the topic because stores actually serve the practical purpose of being a place where you buy stuff, whether you like being inside of them or not. It is legitimate goony to jump from "this person hates shopping!" to "this person must hate human interaction!" tho
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Jun 14, 2017 23:28
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hobbesmaster posted:This future they describe is decades off if its even possible. Which parts do you believe aren't possible? The only thing that's pie-in-the-sky in that article is the idea of fully automated delivery. Everything else either exists right now or could exist if there was demand for it. The quote at the end of the article nails it, in any case: quote:“The bigger and more profound way that technology affects jobs is by completely reinventing the business model,” he said. “Amazon didn’t go put a robot into the bookstores and help you check out books faster. It completely reinvented bookstores. The idea of a cashier won’t be so much automated as just made irrelevant — you’ll just tell your Echo what you need, or perhaps it will anticipate what you need, and stuff will get delivered to you.” People are worried about unmanned stores run by robots, but that seems like a kind of silly idea. If you don't want to deal with a person then just order whatever you want online. You can do this right now. Hell, you can even order fast food this way if you really want to. edit- I wouldn't be surprised to see something like automats make a comeback, though. People really liked them and the primary cause of their decline was a combination of payment difficulties and an inability to compete with fast food restaurants that paid employees bottom of the barrel wages. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jun 18, 2017 |
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Jun 18, 2017 20:10
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OwlFancier posted:What's an automat?  Fast food restaurants that were popular before real fast food restaurants. They were kind of set up like huge vending machines with human machinery behind the scenes. The thing about automats is that they were mostly an urban thing, and once "real" fast food showed up they couldn't compete with the super low wages, convenience of drive-thrus, and ability to expand out into the growing suburbs. There were also apparently payment issues since the technology to take bills rather than coins wasn't widely and cheaply available at the time. Eatsa is pretty much a modern day automat with a lovely techbro startup flavor. MiddleOne posted:Japan has a bunch of circumstances (service employee shortage, extremely high retail space costs and a coin-centric cash-culture) which make vending machines more lucrative than in other countries. I wouldn't count on them making a big return splash in the West just yet. I don't really disagree with your overall point here, but in fairness it's been a while since I've seen a vending machine where I couldn't pay with a card or my phone.
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Jun 18, 2017 21:23
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:Nah. Not yet. For starters, what about WIC? Most of the people on food stamps have no idea what they can buy. What about coupons? People read them wrong all the time, and they'll argue until they get what they want. Alcohol? Cigarettes? What about stupid assholes that want to stand there and argue with the computer kiosk because they're drunk, pissed, or lonely? Not sure why you're responding to me since I thought I pretty clearly implied that I don't think the fully automated grocery store is something that's coming or that there's any real demand for, but also most of the problems you're talking about here are extremely minor. The reason I highlighted that quote from the end of the article is because it's way, way more realistic about how technology changes things. You don't automate retail, you just have fewer brick & mortar retail locations as more people buy things online. Food stamps are a non-issue in that case, because you can easily have people check a box and then just show them items that are purchasable. Coupons? Why bother? You can provide people with codes and/or discounts that are just associated directly with their accounts. None of this is going to eliminate retail or cashiers, but it's already having a very real effect that's going to continue to narrow the retail customer base from "people who need to buy things" to "people who want to be in a store." The last step is probably going to be widespread, relatively cheap same day delivery. That's the point where ordering something online in the morning and having it delivered is potentially faster than just picking it up on your way home in the afternoon. edit- For what it's worth, I actually do think that something like Amazon Go is the future, but it's a future that's still pretty far off and retail will probably be completely eviscerated by online sales long before partially automated stores are a common thing. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jun 19, 2017 |
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Jun 19, 2017 04:12
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MiddleOne posted:I don't know about the rest of the world but in Northern Europe, in an effort to cut labour costs, fast-food chains are implementing ordering kiosks on masse so we're already heading in that direction too. It's happening in the US too, but not on a wide scale (yet). Most fast food and fast casual chains have gone hard into online ordering, though, which is more or less the same thing without the physical in-store hardware.
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Jun 19, 2017 06:26
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:This type of loss is what is used to justify the prevalence of food deserts in "high theft" areas. He's literally the reason kids in London are getting scurvy in 2016-2017. I wasn't going to comment on this stupid tangent, but this is actually a really lovely take and you should feel bad about it. The fact that some companies will use petty theft in "bad" neighborhoods as a justification for not servicing those neighborhoods does not make it a reasonable justification. It isn't the fault of the hypothetical criminals that this happens, it's the fault of the real companies making real decisions.
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Jun 19, 2017 21:52
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BarbarianElephant posted:I do give a gently caress about people stealing just for shits and giggles. Shops factor shrinkage into their prices, not their profit margins. So why don't you blame the shops for this?
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Jun 20, 2017 02:21
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BarbarianElephant posted:You are driving at some sort of gently caress capitalism message? Nope. What I'm saying is that there are basically three actors in this situation: 1) The thief, whose individual actions are largely meaningless unless we're talking about some kind of high volume serial shoplifter. The collective action of many thieves is obviously a problem. 2) The shop owners, who choose to pass the cost of theft onto consumers. 3) Non-thieving consumers, who can't really affect anything in this situation. If you're going to complain that theft costs you money, then blaming individual thieves makes no sense. I realize that's not satisfying. (this isn't intended to be a defense of shoplifting, which is obviously a lovely thing to do)
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Jun 20, 2017 02:30
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:By this same logic, you can't be mad at anyone for who they vote for or donate money to because a single vote or donation never tipped an election. You're probably picking the wrong person to take this approach with, because I've got posts in the Trump thread arguing exactly this. I'm happy to call individuals out for their lovely opinions that lead them to vote for lovely people, but I don't think you can lay the blame for an election outcome on individual voters at all.
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Jun 20, 2017 02:38
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:But the collective individual voters are the ones who decide the election. All you're really saying here is that problems on a large scale are difficult. The point that I'd argue (maybe? I don't know exactly where you're disagreeing with me, to be honest) is that these aren't problems that you can solve from the bottom-up, by influencing the actions of individuals. You aren't going to convince all thieves everywhere to stop stealing by whining that they're costing you more money. If enough people are stealing for it to be a wide scale problem then there's a reason for that that's larger than any individual thief. That said, I think this is a bad comparison anyway. A core part of the point that I was making is that the there's someone in this interaction (the shop owner) who has drastically more power than anyone else involved. That's not really true of an election that's wholly decided by the collective actions of an electorate.
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Jun 20, 2017 02:43
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:You're defending a dude ringing up non organic food while taking organic stock. There is literally no response but to increase price as an owner to meet revenue. I'm not defending anyone. I haven't been responding to Helio's posts at all because I don't really give a poo poo what he does. I do think stealing is lovely (and even said so a few posts back), but I also don't really care about some random guy on the internet who does it.
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Jun 20, 2017 03:19
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This is only tangentially related, but something to keep in mind when talking about moving is that the average person will only move about 11 times during their life, but 6 times by the time they turn thirty. In other words, most people are going to move more before they turn thirty than they will for the entire rest of their lives. Also, the wealthier you are, the less likely you are to move often. White people also move less often than other demographics, but that probably goes along with white people being wealthier on average. Anyway, point is that moving a lot is really something you do when you're younger and poorer and less as you get older and wealthier. If that's becoming less true (the younger part, at least) now, then that's probably having a lot of knock on effects in other areas. Moving around for work or because rent is too expensive isn't something that people in their thirties were really expected to do in the past.
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Jun 23, 2017 18:04
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big trivia FAIL posted:Depressed in that a fresh-out, no experience programmer is going to earn $60K, and someone with a few years under their belt is going to earn $90K instead of 150/200 respectively in San Francisco, but you can actually buy a house and support a family on that single salary, since literally everything is cheaper. Because... everyone is a programmer? Like, this is a pretty weird response when the median salary for a developer is close to or above the national median household income. Developers are fairly well paid wherever you go in the US. That doesn't say anything about wages for everyone else. I mean, of course you can buy a house when you're making more on your own than a full-time, dual income household.
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Jun 23, 2017 18:45
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Your kids are tiny still so you might not have thought about this yet, but do you and your wife think about intentionally raising them to be non-consumerist? I don't have kids yet but a lot of my friends do and there's definitely a noticeable trend towards shutting out all possible forms of advertisement and even not taking them on shopping trips where they're likely to ask for things. And gift-free birthday parties are a (welcome) trend around here. Your friends are really cool. That's seriously a great trend, and I hope it's something that's happening on a wider scale.
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Jun 23, 2017 19:34
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glowing-fish posted: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. It depends. Low wage work is insanely plentiful right now, especially if we're talking about part time jobs or jobs with unreliable hours. I think the retail collapse would have to speed up noticeably for it to have a real impact on employment, although I wouldn't be surprised if it starts dragging wage growth down even farther.
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Jun 23, 2017 23:25
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mandatory lesbian posted:also, everyone reccing cold brew is weird, i hate cold coffee i didn't realize its apparently some kind of delicacy or something You don't have to drink cold brew cold. You're making concentrated coffee and you can dilute it with boiling water to make it hot (or just heat it up) before drinking.
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Jul 31, 2017 17:16
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fishmech posted:Entry level Chromebook models are much cheaper. $350 gets you a basic laptop at Best Buy or Wal-Mart or the like, like this very popular Dell. Computing is very cheap these days: Hell, Best Buy occasionally has i7 Acer convertible laptops on sale for around $600. Screen size, resolution, and overall build quality are really the only reason to spend $800+ on a laptop these days. If you're okay with a larger screen that's "only" 1080p and you don't care about having a nice glass touchpad or aluminum case then you can get some pretty beefy hardware in the $400-600 range.
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Aug 4, 2017 23:19
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Cicero posted:There are plenty of other reasons too, but yes for most people cheap laptops are perfectly fine. I'm honestly not sure what those reasons might be, and I'm saying this as someone who's typing this post on a laptop that was around $2000 new. $800 will buy you a laptop with an i7u, 16gb RAM, and possibly a discrete graphics card. That's more than functional as a desktop replacement, even for a lot of professional work. You need to spend more if you absolutely need something like a 7700HQ, but hardly anyone really needs specs like that on a laptop. A lot of higher end laptops are only really notable because they cram high-spec hardware into relatively compact/light packages.
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Aug 5, 2017 08:06
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Xae posted:Median salary for 25-35 year old is 40k/yr. Which means half of them are making more than that. Reality says that an entire generation is, statistically, doing worse than their parents: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/01/13/millennials-falling-behind-boomer-parents/96530338/ quote:With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles. This isn't some fringe bit of research, it's literally just an analysis of Federal Reserve data. Stop whining because you're afraid of being associated with a generation of people who are legitimately worse off than the people who raised them. Millennials also have lower net worth than their parents did at equivalent life stages, which is actually even more troubling. All of this has pretty real implications for the future, but go ahead and pretend it's not happening because it makes you uncomfortable.
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Aug 22, 2017 16:55
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Xae posted:So the question is why does stating that all Millenials aren't poor make you so uncomfortable? Because a normal response to a problem that's affecting a group of people is not to point out that some of that group are unaffected. It does absolutely nothing to further the discussion and is going to read to just about everyone as if you're writing off the issue entirely. This is equivalent to responding to a discussion about wealth inequality by pointing out that actually some people are rich. What's your actual goal here? Why do you feel the need to respond to people complaining about issues affecting millennials by pointing out the painfully obvious fact that some people are doing fine? I agree entirely with BC that this is more of a symptom of a larger economic problem, but it doesn't do anyone any good to write off the concerns of people who feel as if they're being left behind by saying "actually some of your peers are doing great!"
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Aug 22, 2017 17:53
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Xae posted:Because if a huge portion of the target population isn't effected that means the "target" is wrong. This isn't really true. It's fine to say that generational cohorts are poorly assigned and not incredibly useful (I don't necessarily disagree, at least wrt to economics), but the effects we're talking about are statistically evident in the group in question. Millennials, as a group, have a lower median income and net worth than previous generations at similar life stages. Pointing out that this isn't true of all millennials is silly since income/wealth outcomes are probabilistic across groups and we're talking about distributions, not individuals. In any case, this is already getting way more pedantic than I intended. I was really just taking issue with the "not all millennials are poor!" response, since it's needlessly dismissive and doesn't even really address the point that anyone is trying to make.
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Aug 22, 2017 20:22
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Xae posted:The group of "Millennials" is so bifurcated it is meaningless. And we're starting to see that happen in all age brackets. The division still isn't that clean. College educated millennials on average only earn marginally more than their non-college educated parents would have, with the additional cost of college and a minimum of four years out of the workforce strapped on. And just to be clear, I don't really fundamentally disagree with you at all. I'm using the term "millennial" here as a stand-in for adults that entered the workforce sometime in the last 15 years or so, and it just so happens that that's the group where these effects are most prominent. You can stop using the label if you want, but we're still ultimately talking about economic advantages or disadvantages conferred by time of birth. quote:People need to stop making it a generational issue because when you do the "problem" will always be seen as your generation. Millenials keep leading with their chin and saying "the problem is Millenials are poor" because you are walking into the response of "Yes, the problem is Millenials". Someone who points to data like this and says "aha, the problem is with millennials!" isn't arguing in good faith and is never going see eye to eye with you anyway. If you look at the data in a broader context you're still essentially saying that people who grew up in the post-war boom were advantaged by birth, and that's going to cause people who want to feel that their wealth is entirely earned to chafe whether you use the "millennial" label or not.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:17
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blowfish posted:you're either a C level/customer facing rep for a company that takes itself way too seriously and sells expensive poo poo to people who take themselves too seriously (suit/blazer), or your employer provides a service uniform (like, nurse, doctor, delivery driver), or you should be allowed to show up in anything that doesn't make people want to actively punch you It's more that there's a very noticeable double standard when it comes to what's perceived as "sloppy" or "unprofessional" between men and women. The last regular office job that I had didn't have any kind of stated dress code and men would normally wear khakis or jeans and a t-shirt or polo shirt while women always went at least one step beyond that. Nobody was forcing anyone to wear anything, but I guarantee you that there would have been people judging any woman who showed up every day in jeans and a t-shirt.
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Aug 25, 2017 22:02
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Alterian posted:When I was a cashier at Home Depot well over a decade ago we would shut down the registers except for the self checkouts about an hour or so before the store closed. Self check-outs at a hardware store is the stupidest idea. Why? I'm at Home Depot several times a month and I always use the self checkouts unless I'm buying lumber or drywall or something. I can't recall ever having any problems.
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Nov 6, 2017 16:56
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got any sevens posted:I dont have amazon prime, or a printer That's fine and all, but as of the beginning of last year nearly half of all US households were subscribed to Prime. I suspect those numbers are way the gently caress higher when you start cutting out older demographics too. It's okay to talk about Prime as if its a really common thing because it is.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:43
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Solkanar512 posted:No, my explicit point was that while we need to seriously value the labor and contributions of service workers, one should not go so far as to presume that no one takes pride in their work. This is nothing close to “live to work”. When you’re paid well, when you’re treated well and when you have autonomy you start giving a poo poo. When you aren’t you don’t. I think this discussion mostly boils down to the fact that our system is abysmally bad at placing people into jobs that they're well suited for and can take pride in. The problem isn't that retail work is inherently bad, it's that it's one of several jobs that act as a kind of employment of last resort. Lots of people working in retail wouldn't be working those jobs if they had any other option, and the presence of a labor pool without better employment options means that employers aren't compelled by labor supply issues to make the job itself more attractive.
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Dec 2, 2017 16:25
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HEY NONG MAN posted:That's a really good point. If retail wasn't seen as a low-wage career with no prospects for actually supporting someone living a stable life, there are a lot of people who would do it happily for their entire career because it suits their personality and work style. As it stands, the only people who work retail are those who have no other options. Yeah. I don't think the trades are inherently more satisfying than retail or whatever, it's that most trade work requires an investment of time and energy to become skilled at and that effort acts as a filter for people who want to do the work. I take a certain amount of pride in my computer touching, but it's not because I think software is some noble calling; it's because I'm doing something that suits me and that I actually want to do.
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Dec 2, 2017 16:46
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