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Reveilled posted:There's a difference between a new invention providing a popular alternative to an old way of doing things, and a new invention replacing the old way of doing things. Look at washing machines and tumble dryers. The former completely replaced the old way of washing clothes, the latter did not replace the old way of drying clothes, it's just a possible alternative to hanging your clothes up. Honestly, there's too many good use-cases for brick and mortar retail for me to consider full replacement possible. Sometimes you need a thing -now-, not exactly the thing you want in a couple days.
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Nov 12, 2017 18:38
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Hungry posted:As a Brit who has lived in America for the last 10 months, yeah you can't get a good pastry here, they don't exist (at least out here in the far-flung Midwest). I did find extremely overpriced frozen cornish pasties marketed as "hand pies" which tasted fine but nothing like a pastie was meant to. As a professional pastry baker who's out of the industry due to the bakery going under, the issue is simply that nobody outside of the wealthier enclaves wants to pay what artisan pastry costs to make. Most people's budget for pastry is on the 'frozen puff pastry sheets and canned pie filling' level, or grocery store cake-mix and pre-made bucket of buttercream level, and they have no interest in paying someone to do it right. I have more than tripled my hourly income in two years since leaving the bakery by getting out of the industry.
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Nov 12, 2017 21:34
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The Oldest Man posted:It's because the FHA made any development pattern except curvilinear car suburbs financially nonviable after 1955, hope that helps. This is absolutely a thing. From WW2 to the late 90's, mixed-use developments weren't really a thing. They're only really starting to come back in a lot of places as people gentrify old downtowns.
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Nov 14, 2017 06:30
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fishmech posted:Right, because if we talk your way we can be prissy little euro-twits who can pretend there's no sugar as we lie to ourselves. Come off it, clown. I ask this as politely as possible, but are you suffering from some kind of reading comprehension issue? Because we constantly get these slapfights where you mischaracterize something someone else writes in the most hostile way possible.
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Nov 14, 2017 09:00
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TyroneGoldstein posted:Holy poo poo!!! : Well yeah. It's a foodstuff, that has to be inspected. Why wouldn't it have a spec sheet?
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Nov 14, 2017 14:13
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TyroneGoldstein posted:I just forget sometimes that they're an entire department of our Government that classifies and standardizes everything. Two, interestingly. The USDA and the FDA handle different aspects of the food trade.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:08
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Magius1337est posted:yes lets put the lowly janitor with no experience in managing costs or analyzing foot traffic in charge of site selection or store management. I don't think you get it. I'm not harshing on you. I'm just saying that someone with significant financial resources who is in the rent-seeking level of capitalism is going to have different consumer opinions than the vast majority of schlubs on the street.
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Nov 14, 2017 18:06
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Sears is already dead. They exist on paper because Lampert's convinced the board that they can get something back out if he floats them through Christmas.
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Nov 19, 2017 16:54
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Xae posted:I think the Marketplace model where you list other people's poo poo is a mistake for that reason. Dozens of duplicate listings, and at least half are from bad actors selling knockoffs as genuine at a buck or two under retail.
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Nov 23, 2017 04:32
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His Divine Shadow posted:I have to say I don't recognize myself at all in most of your lives. I don't have amazon prime, I've never used uber, never bought stuff on black fridays etc etc. I've built and live in a house with the intention of spending the rest of my life here, I've had the same job for 15 years. Sometimes I feel like I'm partially outside the flow of the world, but in a good way. Don't take this the wrong way, but I guess I'm happy for you that you're a unicorn. It's rare indeed to find a job that continues to exist, with raises that meet or beat inflation, for 15 years and doesn't subscribe to the up-or-out management philosophy.
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Nov 26, 2017 01:56
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MiddleOne posted:It works on a lot of people because it is literal propaganda being force-fed down their throats by their employers. Also because of a very valid fear that the employer will just fire everyone if they try to unionize.
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Nov 26, 2017 10:06
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learnincurve posted:Old house was bought at auction. I got a loan secured on my parents house, rather than a mortgage. It was dirt cheap because it was basically a shithole that people buy to flip or rent out. Slowly did it up, sold it at auction again, paid off the rest of the original loan and bought this bigger, nicer, house at auction with what was left. People are well aware. They simply lack the capital. Most banks aren't going to give them tens of thousands of dollars unsecured outside of a mortgage loan to speculate with, as buying 'as-is' property is fraught with risk. Especially when you are intending the property as a primary residence, and can't just write it off if it is discovered to need, say, several thousand more dollars of asbestos remediation, a new roof, or foundation repair.
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Nov 28, 2017 02:41
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learnincurve posted:Exactly this, I’m in the UK so I don’t know how American laws work. It meant instead if having to borrow money for a deposit from my parents I just had to promise to keep up on the payments. Ah, there you go. Your parents effectively loaned you the money with the bank serving as an intermediary. learnincurve posted:Warning, you have to know or have somone around you who really knows thier poo poo when it comes to inspecting houses. You also see a lot of very cheap houses that will be shells, don’t be tempted, wait until a better one comes up, you may be out bid on that one but not on the 4th one. Yeah, your housing market is completely different than the US one. Hell, your mortgage market is completely different, IIRC the 30 year fixed rate mortgage isn't a thing in the UK at all. Most places in the US where there are any jobs, a $46k house is going to be a tear-down job, because the lot's worth that much.
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Nov 28, 2017 12:32
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learnincurve posted:No, it’s not, although what I did was different, in essence I took out a second mortgage on my own parents home, but at a fixed rate with no charges for paying it off early which is way better than an actual UK mortgage. The only thing that exchanged between my parents and anyone was paperwork. In what way is it different? Your parents put up their property as collateral for your loan. Had you, say, lost a leg playing in traffic and become destitute, it's their house the bank would foreclose on when you could not make payments.
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Nov 28, 2017 13:54
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Badger of Basra posted:This is something I see come up sometimes when people discuss manufacturing jobs. A lot of people (including reporters, unfortunately) make it seem like the loss of manufacturing jobs is bad because they are manufacturing jobs rather than because manufacturing had high unionization rates and therefore better pay and benefits. In some sense it's true, though, because those manufacturing jobs going away also has knock-on losses in all the industries to supply and transport their goods and materials.
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Dec 1, 2017 03:11
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Baronjutter posted:If there was UBI I'd probably open up a little workshop making laser-cut model kits and what ever people want laser cut. I could potentially do this now but it's way too risky to try to start a business with no safety net and it probably wouldn't pay as much as my current job. I like making things, specially things other people appreciate or find useful. If I had UBI, I'd still be a baker. It was a good job, could bring in enough to pay for the bakery, but not if you had to pay enough for the workers to be comfortable. UBI and socialized healthcare would have let me do what I loved instead of becoming a computer janitor for vastly more money but much less satisfaction.
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Dec 3, 2017 03:24
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Mike Rowe is a vastly entertaining person to watch ploying his schtick, but it turns out he's also kind of a nitwit sometimes and virtually everything he has to say about employment and work ethic is...questionable at best. He's anti-union and seems to be anti-regulation to some extent, while he's also talking out the other side of his mouth about how tough and dangerous jobs are and how that needs to be improved. He talks about people not being paid enough for doing everyday labor that needs to be done and about how constraining job mobility and availability is, but then says that you should never ever complain about a job and if the job is bad you should just pack up and leave it as though everyone living paycheck to paycheck has that option. He probably means well, I guess, but he kind of gets exploited as a useful idiot by right-wing types that are more than happy to suppress the people Mike Rowe keeps talking up. Never forget that Mike Rowe never worked a day of a blue collar job in his life that wasn't for the show. He's a career pitch man and TV host with a degree from Towson in communications who faked his way into the Baltimore Opera at one point.
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Dec 4, 2017 06:18
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anonumos posted:It seems to me that most of these retail stores that go bust also just happen to have some very rich owners, executives, investors, and lenders. It seems everyone involved got their cut at the expense of the business itself. Am I wrong? Welcome to private equity! If you really want to hate, look into what happened to Hostess. Continental Baking Company owned the brand from 1930 to 1995, when they were acquired by Interstate Baking Company. IBC ran the company into the ground to the point that they declared Chapter 11 in 2004. They stayed in bankruptcy for 5 full years, before emerging as a private company mostly owned by equity companies and the unionized workers who made contract concessions for equity. By the end of 2011 they were back in bankruptcy and quit paying their pensions, breaking their union contract. It was later discovered that over the previous year, while pleading poverty against their pension obligations, many of the execs received raises of as much as 80%. The company threatened layoffs over the course of 2012, ending in their proposed contract with the Baker's Union, which included more than 25% pay and benefit cuts, being rejected by 92% of the voting members. After that, just the usual corporate piracy. The whole point of bringing the company out of bankruptcy in 2009 was to sell off their brands, let the execs take their golden parachutes (hence the raises, as that will change their end compensation), and enrich financiers.
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Dec 22, 2017 06:21
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PT6A posted:Here's a question: why does it loving matter if someone lies about an allergy or not? So they want their meal a certain way, and they want the restaurant to be really careful about it so it doesn't get hosed up. It's not something I would do personally, but it's not worth getting pissed off about it either. It matters because if enough people lie about it, precautions get sloppy, and some poor rear end in a top hat who's actually deathly allergic gets an ER run from cross contamination. Back when I was baking full time we had to have a sign on the door to keep reminding people that yes, a production bakery does not contain a single flour free surface to include the air ducts, and they should not come in if they are sensitive to gluten or tree nuts on that level.
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Jan 1, 2018 01:59
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Honestly, a lot of restaurants would be better off financially just putting up a sign on the door that says they cannot accommodate gluten-free customers. The loss of business from the few people legitimately effected is likely less than the cost of a single lawsuit. Nobody likes to turn away business though. To safely make gluten free anything required actually shutting down the bakery for three days for a top to bottom clean, a full cleaning of the duct system, then a second top to bottom clean. That was never going to happen.
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Jan 1, 2018 15:58
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That said, it is flatly guaranteed that any single.player game will be at least 25% on sale on Steam within six months to a year. Usually 50% when the first expansion comes out. Steam is really good at marketing.
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Jan 8, 2018 01:04
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Halloween Jack posted:...and now I understand why blackgas has a similar premise that plays out with not quite so much graphic violence and rape. Yeah, Ellis has restraint, comparatively.
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Jan 11, 2018 02:22
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Arglebargle III posted:wait this is a real thing? naval poetry is a thing now? Dude, chanteys have been a thing since before there were boats. Turns out when you need a bunch of people to do a thing in rhythm, singing to that beat keeps them on time. If it's seamen hauling ropes or rail workers swingin hammers, it's a human thing.
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Jan 11, 2018 02:23
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Because The Market must Go Up. Seriously, much of our economy is run by people whose entire business acumen consists of 'one simple trick' to make the profit numbers go up so they and the other execs can cash out a d move on to the next business they can infest like the parasites they are.
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Jan 13, 2018 03:26
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Magius1337est posted:This is something that's only going to work once. Hahahah. Oh, I wish that were the case. Check out what happened to Hostess for an illustration. It's going to happen again in a few years, because they sold the trademarks and recipes to a new holding company that's primed for the same routine as soon as labor gets uppity again.
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Jan 14, 2018 03:54
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Magius1337est posted:would you honestly take stock options over a pension working for a company? In 2018, I'll take cold hard cash over either. Multiple PE firms have demonstrated exactly how to get out of paying pensions now, and stock options in a culture of crash and burn capitalism are worse than worthless. They are an insult. Edit: Amazon''s usefulness has decreased vastly for me in the last two years as a customer, 100% by their own lack of effort. There areally three major issues. First, they don't curate sellers or reviews at all, which leads to the current state where shoddy knockoff products with hundreds of obviously bot generated 5 star reviews are pushed to the top of searches. Second, they aggregate both sales and stocking by sku, so even if you get past the knockoff listings you may still get a knockoff product because they don't care to keep stock separate if it claims to be the same sku. Third, their shipping has become crap. 'Two day' shipping on Prime has consistently been 'next week' for the last year, and most stuff shows up rattling around in too large boxes without padding. I ordered a cell phone off them and it showed up with the retail packaging but tossed into a box twice that size with nothing to fill the space. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Jan 16, 2018 |
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Jan 16, 2018 04:46
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KingFisher posted:How do large retailers like Amazon or Walmart take your freedom away? Are you a libertarian shill, or just so ignorant that you are incapable of understanding how Walmart's model has destroyed most of their competition and is being seen as an ideal to copy by other large retailers? Even working for a company that is a supplier to Walmart is a special hell, because much of their competitive advantage is based on being big enough to dictate terms to their suppliers that are absurdly in Walmart's favor.
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Jan 17, 2018 08:46
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BrandorKP posted:Traditional publishers also make it really hard to get published. They don't pick up new authors easily. Somebody a traditional publisher won't take can, write, publish on amazon and do decently. Here's a guy who epitomizes that. He's doing three grand a chapter writing a sprawling space opera in monthly ~30k word chunks as a serial. That's ~10 cents a word. Standard for membership to the SFWA is 6 cents a word. Magius1337est posted:and all of this is in the consumer's favor Bullshit. Every bit of savings in that logistics chain comes out of someone they've bled for it, be it suppliers extorted for better prices and terms, or employees kept part time and signed up for welfare. Walmart is a major employer in a lot of markets without major employers left, and it treats those people like poo poo. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 11:11 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 10:56
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fishmech posted:But like seriously, another aspect of it is that when you're getting paid by the word, you're usually in a situation where you're getting paid once. Oh sure you make 10 cents a word, you're making about $45 per page written. If the publication your work is going into sells 1 copy or 1 billion copies, you're getting the same 10 cents a word the one time, and not making any more money until you sell the same work somewhere else (assuming you hadn't gone and as part of that sale given a serious exclusivity to the buyer). Or maybe in a while you're able to bring the work into a separately published book of your own where you finally get royalties. Patreon dude retains all his rights, and can edit and publish traditionally at his lesiure. He's effectively getting paid for his draft in real time.
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Jan 23, 2018 03:44
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DrNutt posted:I saw an Amazon ad for a neat leaking keyboard on Facebook the other day, it looked like some nifty retro future thing, almost like old typewriter keys, and I was like, neat, I'll check it out. I clicked the link and the motherfucking thing was 1000 dollars. Who spends 1000 dollars on a keyboard? Someone with enough money to burn that they can afford to pay the guy building those for his time. A thousand bucks is a lot of money, and at the same time it''s probably barely enough to make the man hours in bespoke gadgets pay out.
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Jan 25, 2018 21:48
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ryonguy posted:I cut in half any hours claimed by anybody who touches a computer at a desk for a job. You play Excel for money. Get a Twitch account and start advertising on autism support forums. I'm sorry that you somehow don't understand that mental effort is valid work, but Mike Rowe is nodding sagely in the background about the nobility of spending every second productively and giving your coprorate overlords the greatest value for the pittance they pay.
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Jan 27, 2018 03:29
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Chains can do that pretty heavily too. Food service in general runs on paying as little as possible so you bet your rear end every restaurant ever is trying to push as much work onto the servers as possible. You can hire three servers for the price of somebody else and only need to make up the difference if they end up with less than regular with their tips. If they make any tips at all the restaurant still ends up paying less than minimum. The above, I note, is why I got out of kitchen management. When I was running the kitchen for the bar, I averaged out to 6 bucks an hour.
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Jan 27, 2018 07:15
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Goa Tse-tung posted:why is everyone taking the "its from 1935 btw" joke serious? Because we are past Poe's Law.
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Jan 31, 2018 13:57
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I've never seen a mall that wasn't propped up by the food court. My local mall's food court ceased to exist. Everybody left in the course of six months. The only thing holding it up now is a Target.
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Feb 8, 2018 04:31
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Star Man posted:I used to deliver pizzas for a local place in Denver whose STEMlord general manager recorded data on our delivery times and other metrics. After six weeks, the only shifts I ever got were the on-call shifts because I was apparently really good at making deliveries from 6 pm to 9 pm in the middle of the week. At first it sounded like they were just trying to get rid of me until I saw the spreadsheet. I'd lay actual money down that his spreadsheet didn't give any consideration to traffic patterns or ordering patterns, because confounding factors are outside the breadth of that kind of world view.
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Feb 10, 2018 11:02
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Welp, think my local mall may be done. It's already a third empty with Sears amd Kohls as anchors. They underwent a huge renovation two years ago to try and stay relevant, putting in a brewpub/theatre on the second floor and a bunch of new shops below it. So of course the pub blew a water main this weekend. All those new shops below it have a foot of standing water, and the mall is closed while they try to figure out a cleanup plan so even the businesses in the unaffected wings are losing revenue.
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Feb 11, 2018 16:06
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SimonCat posted:Merle Hay? Yeah. Whole lower level court they just started getting stores to move back into is wet.
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Feb 12, 2018 03:21
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I love that thing, and would never believe it existed if I hadn't seen it in person.
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Feb 12, 2018 17:14
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The ones I cared about died long ago. RIP Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. Hilariously, Waldenbooks and Borders bookstores were also owned by Kmart. Barnes & Noble is the last remaining national-level bookstore chain in America, and they're struggling too. Laid off 18,000 employees after a lovely holiday sales season this year. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Mar 10, 2018 |
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Mar 10, 2018 08:31
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Cheesus posted:While i realize the operating officers don't have any plans beyond "Do the necessary to make my quarterly bonus", after they shutter all of these retail giants, what's next? Do they "slum" downwards to eliminate any regional/ local chain (that wasn't purchased by the giants in the past 30 years) and work their magic there? Or do they fail upward to...Amazon? Wait for the regional chains to step up to fill the void on the wings of investors desperate for the next bet, then repeat.
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Mar 10, 2018 22:21
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