|
BrandorKP posted:I think that the line between store and warehouse is going to get erased and that's how they are going to survive. Does anyone remember service merchandise? I guess it existed in some form till the early 2000s but does anyone remember it in the old days? Like they had a showroom instead of a store and you filled out order forms for things in the store and then brought it to a guy at the front of the store and then depending what you bought it'd either come out of the back warehouse of the store on a big conveyor belt or else they'd tell you to come back in a week and it'd be there then. It feels like that sort of idea but with less filling out forms would work pretty well. Small area with display areas, large warehouse in the back, shipping options.
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2016 18:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:17 |
|
|
BarbarianElephant posted:Service merchandise sounds like an attempt to transfer the U.K. shop "Argos" to the USA. It's the exact same sort of store but service merchandise predates argos by like half a century.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 00:18
|
|
|
PT6A posted:Ah, the first hurdle to clear is "does the employee even have the faintest loving idea what you're talking about?" which you really only have about a 30% chance of passing. Then it has to be something which they carry and is in stock... that's maybe a 40% chance if you haven't already been able to find it yourself, and then the employee has to know where it is... let's say another 30% chance. There has been a real shift in employee expertise over the years. Like if you walk into a specialty mom and pop store odds are the guy at the counter not only knows something about the stuff they sell but cares about it enough to run a store dedicated to it and probably can give you any detail you ask for and strong opinions on each and every relative merit of every sort of thing. Then at like chain specialty stores there is a degree that they hire randos but if you walk into game stop at least one person there definitely should be working at gamestop or there is at least one guy at autozone that definitely wanted to work at autozone and even the non-enthusiast workers know a thing or two just by being around a topic all day every day. Walmart is different, with thousands of products across every category there is literally no reason for anyone to have any special insight on what snowblower you should buy or what tv is good or what book you should read or anything at all any more than any random person would.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 00:51
|
|
|
BrandorKP posted:Clerks who know this stuff can dramatically increase a stores sales relative to what they otherwise should be btw. Most stores have metrics where they expect a given store to have X amount of sales based on the demographics and amount of competition in an area. Performance can be measured by comparing actual sales to the demographically predicted sales. This also allows for comparing performance of stores in different markets. Here's the thing front line retail employees who have this knowledge don't usually stay in retail. They usually don't get paid more than body off the street. Or worse some idiot canned them because the cost associated with the long time they have worked for the store is higher. The more product catagories a store sells the less possible it is for the employees to have meaningful knowlage about a meaningful number of them. Even if Walmart wanted employees that knew their products as experts it wouldn't be possible. Every day too many new tvs, shirts, toys, foods would be complete coming in to even learn the names of each, let alone details or testimonies.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 07:10
|
|
|
Doctor Butts posted:Yes. Our family never ordered there because there were so many other places where you could get what you were looking for right away. Even though it was a business model that lasted almost 100 years it felt really half baked an idea. Like to this day it feels like it was a unique solution that could be good for something but it never really felt clear what problem it solved. Like it was a really novel way to run a store but a worse way.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 15:55
|
|
|
glowing-fish posted:Oh did someone mention "rural" because I'm here to tell you about life in Montana and why you are totally not hardcore. Your rural gatekeeper gimmick is so weird. It is like the people in texas that have to get all huffy if someone says they are hot or people in new hampshire that have to step in to tell what real cold is every time someone in some other state calls something cold. Or the dumb claim that people who are being paid under the table at less than minimum wage really shouldn't complain because that isn't real poverty as long as they are making more than people in africa. Almost every metric is relative to local standards. If you start demanding absolutes then you aren't the most rural guy either, by a longshot. Only one place is every the hottest or coldest or poorest or most remote. It is absolutely okay for someone in alaska to say "it's hot today!" when it's 90 degrees, even if it's 115 in death valley. It's okay to not lecture the homeless guy that by owning a cell phone, a sleeping bag and a can of beans he has more wealth than nearly anyone on earth for most of human history. Or whatever. It's okay for people to talk about things in terms of local conditions. You live in an organized named town in an organized named state, if you were REALLY the most rural you'd live in some distant territory in barely surveyed land without internet, if only the most rural person imaginable can call themselves rural.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2016 05:27
|
|
|
glowing-fish posted:Its not a gimmick, and its not weird. Listen, that isn't secret information you have, everyone knows that. No one is impressed, just like no one is impressed with people from arizona telling people in alaska that 90 isn't hot or people in maine telling people in florida that 28 isn't cold weather. It's okay for terms to be relative to local norms, you wouldn't even win the title rural anyway if only the most rural person could claim the award.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2016 17:35
|
|
|
Just by definition far far more people live in the "fake" "poser" rural than the true authentic rural that has no people in it. Just basically inherently the number of people that are the one true rural are vanishingly small compared to the people that grow up surrounded by cows and are a 30 hour walk from any city (that is a 2 hour drive because everyone owns cars now) . Almost no one is living in the area with almost no one.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2016 05:05
|
|
|
rscott posted:For a long time the biggest distinguishing feature of Kmart was that they had layaway and Walmart didn't but then I guess they got rid of it and there was literally no reason to ever go to a Kmart unless it was the only place in your transportation range to shop. I worked at one in high school, and quit shortly after they merged with Sears. Even back then there was a feeling of decline and that the merger was an attempt to save two fading companies. I'm surprised it's taken this long for the whole thing to unwind. I specifically needed cargo pants for something and I thought "where could I buy cargo pants on short notice" and went to k-mart because it seemed like a store that would sell cargo pants (they did)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2017 02:54
|
|
|
Horseshoe theory posted:What the Hilcos and other liquidator firms do is increase the price of something, say from $100 to $300, then do discount from the $300 down to, say, $150, and put up signs saying "50% DISCOUNT!", which is technically not fraudulent misrepresentation, since the discount is from the heavily marked up price. That sounds like the sort of dumb loophole a stoner would make up where they think they can hire hookers because they brought a camera and that makes it pornography if you think about it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2017 14:10
|
|
|
LL Bean is famous for having an absurdly generous return policy where if something has an LL bean logo and you say you bought it you can return it forever no questions asked and the store employees will even be reprimanded if they try to argue with you. And of course people scam it nonstop. Everyone in 100 miles of a store talks nonstop about this or that scam they ran to get a free boot. But the store openly admit that is the point. They know everyone scams them, they don't give a gently caress, they get people to endlessly advertise for them for the rest of their life at the price of some boot. Every store could hardline on returns and the store could save 6 bucks by avoiding some low level obvious scams but its a very tiny amount of money to buy a bunch of good will and avoid bad will.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2017 22:53
|
|
|
the black husserl posted:There are still inexpensive food carts and taco trucks all over America and all over places like New York. I'm afraid inflation has made the .75 cent taco a thing of the past. The simpsons were buying 100 tacos for 100 dollars in 1996 for their doctor who marathon and that was treated as a good deal even then 20 years ago.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2017 03:32
|
|
|
Xaris posted:I'm curious what the "typical" mall rents are. I'd imagine there is quite a lot of expenses in HVAC, maintenance, cleaning, and security, and if you start losing stores I wonder if they could even afford to charge less? There is definitely malls that decide they don't need as much cleaning, maintenance, security or hvac as they were originally designed to have
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 04:38
|
|
|
Anubis posted:Most of the time they end up getting pretty decent property tax deals during construction under the assumption that a large commercial space is going to bring in more than enough sales tax revenue for the city to make it a net positive. This, imho, is one of the reasons newer malls can end up failing so quickly. Towns/suburbs without large populations get the idea that if they give the developer's a sweetheart deal they will be able to get people from as far as 20-50 miles away to come visit and it will effectively increase the tax base to the point where they can balance the budget just on the sales tax instead of raising taxes on their own through property taxes. This ends up leading to commercial districts getting built where the population can't support them, which inevitably leads to failure. There actually aren't new malls at this point, there has been no malls built in the US in the last 11 years.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 15:17
|
|
|
Anubis posted:Of course Lifestyle centers don't just seem like rebranded malls though, they seems like a similar end goal of having a bunch of chain stores in one place but at least the ones I've been to seem like pretty conceptually different in how you are expected to interact with them and to some degree what sort of stores they have.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 20:24
|
|
they're all "Lifestyle Centers" or whatever marketing wank you care to buy into, so they don't have to use the word that's becoming synonymous with failed suburban retail space.
|
fishmech posted:Most of them seem to expect you to drive between stores rather than walk, because of how far apart things end up getting and aggravated by their habit of placing massive parking lots all around each little bit. Or at least are set up in clusters. If you drive to one store there is ten others you can walk to, but if you want to go to a different section you basically leave entirely and come back. Like each section is a destination. They seem better than malls though. They are still manufactured shopping experiences but they seem at least more like a natural shopping district even if they aren't real.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 21:47
|
|
|
ExplodingSims posted:How is that better than a mall though? You have all the downsides of a mall, but now you get to do it outside in the elements and with no A/C. If you like malls as they are then they might not be better for you, I think they seem like ten steps above a mall and like 3 steps below an actual organically formed city commerce district. Like you can get all emo teen and say that because they are designed to be nicer that just means they are even more of a trap than malls but that kinda applies to anything anyone could possibly do as long as chain stores continue to exist.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 22:50
|
|
|
fishmech posted:The "lifestyle centers" are really nothing like a proper downtown/main street shops at all. They basically combine the worst attributes of a main street shopping district with the worst attributes of a mall and then get surprised that they don't do particularly well. At some level real downtown is just an even more glorified strip mall, at some point a store is a store
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2017 02:45
|
|
|
Fame Douglas posted:"Lifestyle centers" sound like lovely car-centric outdoor malls. What's new about that tired old concept? They are walking focused and generally smaller than malls. Although clusters of separately owned strip malls are inevitable.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2017 18:47
|
|
|
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. Are you able to post at all without bringing up personal grudges you have? Jesus christ.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2017 21:13
|
|
|
Crabtree posted:So I can either drive my rear end through traffic, find a parking space with old people and other terrible drivers, wade through rival BO, crying infants everyone needs to bring to the store with them and closed artery clogs of people hanging out in one isle that I want to look at; only to find they're out of stock of the one item I want. Isn't this literally "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded"?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2017 15:30
|
|
|
Japan also has 10 days mandated vacation and a reasonable number of days that everyone gets off as holidays (but totally unpaid). Compared to America with no vacation for many people and maybe no holidays.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2017 23:49
|
|
|
fishmech posted:That's not going to be standard practice because it is extremely illegal, especially since cell phone jammers often interfere with police communications. Active jammers are illegal.passive things like Filling the walls with cement and steel plates is legal.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 13:43
|
|
|
I bet someone could eventually get in trouble for something like faraday cages. Where something exists just to block signals an EMT could need or whatever. The funny thing is that a good way to block signals is to have a bunch of firewalls. The actual physical ones, not the network ones. Just throw a bunch of bricks and concrete in every wall and you are basically underground by a phone's perspective.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 14:19
|
|
|
fishmech posted:Doing that is impractical for most retail locations, especially those in existing shopping centers. Sure. Most stores wouldn't want to block cell signals either. But if one did there are ways to build that in ways that aren't obvious you are trying to block cell signals.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 15:14
|
|
|
got any sevens posted:Those fcc rules might not last forever, esp with repubs in charge willing to take corporate bribes to ease any restrictions "Don't Jam Signals" seems like pretty much the most basic law that exists. Like we end the radio age if we don't very forcefully manage who broadcasts what on what channel. I think the human race could degrade to mad max levels and we'd still have mobs of people that went around murdering people if they were jamming up the remaining radio communication.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 15:37
|
|
|
I do technology for small schools and schools are all cinderblocks with metal plates in between because fear of fire is so big and it's a nightmare for wifi but teachers love it because it keeps kids off their phones some. Phone companies will help you set up cell signal repeaters for cheap amounts if you want. like <10,000 dollars for a whole building. But I think there is a lot of places like schools and old movie theaters where they just blocked signal by accident because they made walls thick for some other reason and now can take a "nah, we're good" attitude about fixing the problem, even if it'd be pretty doable to fix.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 18:05
|
|
|
A tangent but related: Do people generally know how big a deal wifi cell phone tracking is? It's a technology that has existed for like 10+ years if you were a fancy nerd but is basically standard now as a gui option on pretty much any enterprise quality wireless system. Like a mall really really wants you to have your wifi on because it gives them a beacon that lets them track where you are exactly down to a foot or so. Like you can get real time traffic flow maps now pretty much for free forever if you spend an hour or so slowly standing in rooms spinning around with a laptop on. With generic information if you have the wifi on but not connected and like, a specific personal map across all visits of your exact path if you connect to the wifi.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 21:13
|
|
|
Xae posted:It is a big deal and almost every big box retailer has been doing it for years. Cisco released their big unified location services thing in late 2006. But that probably wasn't too valuable for customer tracking until a year or two later when smart phones got big. So yeah, probably had like 5 years of really in depth tracking. So like, plenty of time to collect the data but probably not enough time that they have physically redesigned stores much based on the results.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 22:06
|
|
|
Xae posted:Even before cell tracking they used laser tripwires and pressure mats to estimate it. WiFi tracking was just more accurate, cheaper and easier. Sure, and before that they had someone stand in the store and go "huh, looks like people go right to the candy isle, lets put some candy up front" or whatever. But precise real time movement tracking of "xae's iphone" across every trip to every target is some pretty huge new tools that wasn't really a thing before.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 22:15
|
|
|
El Mero Mero posted:Which really makes you wonder if those new tools are generating any insights more profound or powerful than that observer. Not sure if there's a lot of room left for innovation around floor/inventory layouts Think about how big a deal it was when websites went from simple hit counters and page load bar graphs to modern analytics. Think of all the teams of people that study exactly how many milliseconds a person is engaged with each page of a site and the exact workflow people use and exactly what page causes them to leave the page and stuff. Stores do that stuff too, but it's slow and sporadic, imagine a store that generates as much data on their customers as something like amazon does. It's a big deal.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2017 01:15
|
|
|
Automats still exist in asia. Both in the form of literal fancy vending machines but also in the form of restaurants that you walk up to, buy a ticket from a machine then give the ticket at a counter and you give you your meal. They are less based around pretending humans don't exist because they don't hide everyone behind a wall like US automats do but the whole concept is fundamentally the same where your interaction is with a machine and the person is only there to hand you something.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2017 22:06
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:What kind of soulless jerk would resurrect the automat and not take it as a opportunity to Art Deco the gently caress outta that place? That's the best part. I think people HAVE tried that retro style a few times. But come on, there has to be a point where people stop trying to bank their whole business on some nostalgia for a thing that virtually no one alive has even ever gone to or seen that wasn't even successful in it's own try and give the concept a fair shake in the modern world.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2017 02:01
|
|
|
Spazzle posted:Amazon grocery options are currently both expensive and extremely limited. Costco and safeway are better on both fronts. Yeah, they should probably buy some big supermarket chain. I bet that'd make the news
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2017 05:23
|
|
|
FCKGW posted:My local Ikea put in self service checkouts and it went about as well as you can image people trying to self checkout with pieces of loving huge multi-box furniture and household goods where you cannot spell or pronounce the name. I think people underestimate in general how much of a learned process the steps to buying something is. A constant I have noticed while traveling is that it's not just that I can't speak the language that makes it hard to buy things or go to restaurants the first few times, but that it takes a while to literally figure out what the process even is. Like we are all so efficient at buying things and checking out not because the process we use is super intuitive but because we do it every single day for years and years. Learning literally any new process will take a few tries good or bad.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2017 17:44
|
|
|
Here is some advice from reddit how to shoplift better: https://np.reddit.com/r/Shoplifting/comments/6dy7ll/if_someone_tries_to_stop_you_just_say_you_have_a/di69ypk/ LP are required to back off of a shoplifter if the lifter even says they have a gun (without actually showing one.) I have lifted three times this past week and my plan has been to just say "Leave me alone I have a gun." if anyone tries to stop me. Since I'm not actually pulling a gun out I can't be charged with it. If I get caught later on by the cops it's just a shoplifting case because LP can't prove I threatened them with a gun. They would have to have me recorded saying it, legally the court can't just take their word for it that I said anything. I'm not saying make a big scene obviously but to calmly say to anyone that tries to stop me "Hey man, I'm carrying a gun, back off." and just casually walk out. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2017 00:45
|
|
|
Stealing is bad, especially if you are a garbage person who does it recreationally instead of some poor orphan who is stealing a loaf of bread for survival or something.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2017 02:25
|
|
|
BarbarianElephant posted:Plenty of homeless folks out there really need to steal to eat. I guess "gently caress the man" recreational hipster organic food thieves provide some cover for them. Maybe. How would that even work?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2017 02:29
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:I've heard people start to call any sort of camping trimp "glamping" if like, you have a car and a tent and maybe there's a shower at the camp site. Basically anything other than making your own shelter out of pine needles in the middle of the woods in winter is now "glamping". Did you have fun on your camping trip? Did you have food you liked to eat and drinks you liked to drink? Congrats, you went glamping now. And there's companies that will give you a little van with standard camping gear and send you to a standard camp site and market the whole thing as glamping too I think people that are 'into' camping are really vocal about doing lovely gatekeeping stuff to the point people don't even want to say they went camping and get an angry lecture how they weren't REAL camping to the point people just made up a newer dumber word to avoid even saying it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2017 19:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:17 |
|
|
"How can we possibly shop for clothes online with sizes being weird!" seems like the most solvable problem possible. It seems like it'd be really insane for any retailer to bank on that being true in any sort of long term. Like even if some sort of laser scan, iphone app or ship 3 and mail 2 back scheme is forever unworkable it just hinges on praying that for the rest of time fashion never turns to anything baggy or loose fitting ever again where sizing matters less. Like stores shouldn't count on some mainstream version of pants sagging never being a thing again as a long term business model.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2017 14:57
|
|