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It sounds awful because they're shoving parking in the middle rather than something pleasant like a little park or recreation area of some sort. One of the nice things of even a dying mall is that you at least have a sizable indoor semi public space and shelter between the remaining stores. Tearing out the middle for more parking completely negates anything like that. The other stuff doing, adding medical offices and housing, those are fine. But making the center yet another parking lot? Gross. Edit: also lol that it seems to rely on the Sears and Sears Auto to stay in business considering the sears trajectory. fishmech fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 27, 2017 04:05
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duz posted:I'm kind of surprised no one mentioned Rackspace's purchase of an abandon mall to be their domestic hq and support center. But with them being local, I'm not sure how well known they actually are. Don't they do a similar thing for their offices all over? The Rackspace office down in Blacksburg is located in an office building that clearly used to be strip mall type retail on the bottom floor, directly adjacent to a small remaining "mall" that has a large chunk taken over by the university. I'm not sure if they still use the location, when we moved out in 2015 there were rumors they were going to move elsewhere in town.
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Apr 28, 2017 14:52
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glowing-fish posted:What is the difference? Which one is Denny's? Fast casual is fast food that thinks it's fancy, and has slightly longer wait for your food and slightly higher prices to match. In theory it's also better food than a regular fast food place, in practice lol if you buy into that marketing. For instance: McDonald's is regular fast food. Five Guys is "fast casual". Subway is regular fast food. Panera is "fast casual".
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Apr 29, 2017 03:48
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icantfindaname posted:I imagine much of the worst of it is in Rust Belt/Midwestern suburbs where the core regional industries died off long ago and the 90s/00s boom was built entirely on the credit and housing bubble, with no new industries being created While we often think about the industry dying off, we forget that lot of that industry itself relied on lots of near-regional consumption, and that near-regional consumption was driven by having a lot of single-family farming around. It's the same reason small towns in general died off, they needed all the farmers around to drive demand. As farming consolidated to much fewer workers and families, there simply wasnt enough business for them. Even if imports had never really picked up to sate national demand, a lot of that industry would have continued to centralize into the larger metro areas for efficiency of scale, and leave those other areas with their industry just as dead.
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Apr 29, 2017 20:57
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incoherent posted:Necro this comment. Target found out how hard it is to push into urban centers. I present the target husk. A partially built multi-leveled target that violated city laws regarding heights that the city council, in typical local government incompetencey, ignored to expedite the project. "Alleged" NIMBY group sued the city and target to stop the project. This worked because "local stupidity" was so profound not even a judge couldn't even wave away (the area is only zoned for 35 feet, the target is 74 total). Why is the area zoned for the buildings to be so low? It seems bizarre. The first "CityTarget" here is the bottom 4 floors of a much taller building.
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May 2, 2017 15:22
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OwlFancier posted:Actually I've seen a few shops like that, as well as the department store near me actively refusing to price anything in some of its sections, so you either have to ask or, I assume, are expected not to. Well I mean, there's always that one kind of store that's clearly a baby-sitting project for rich kids since their parents want them to "work" but don't want them doing real jobs. Those sorts of places don't really need to stay profitable or anything.
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May 2, 2017 18:55
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ReidRansom posted:Go price a yacht And then think about the fact that many of the richest people in the world could still buy a hundred of them at once, if they wanted to really blow their money.
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May 2, 2017 21:02
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blowfish posted:Yeah but that's because you're actually restricted in what you can have if you're a twentysomething goth fashionista or whatever, and the same goes for your friends, and there isn't very much to be gained from conspicuously outconsuming your friends. Note that this isn't universal though, there are ridiculous examples of conspicuous consumption even among poorer people, e.g. people who buy Tide detergent to seperate themselves from the store brand detergent buying plebs, which is apparently a thing in many poorer US neighbourhoods Well, for Tide in particular, you're forgetting this: http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/ The brand is so respected that people are willing to accept it as payment for various illegal things, including drugs. Fuckin' Gain or store brand detergent just isn't going to be the same for that sort of thing. glowing-fish posted:When we talk about the very rich, who are we talking about? Because I think there is some confusion about what the term means. Are we talking about people who are making $200,000 a year and own a million dollar house, or are we talking about people making 5 million dollars a year with 20 million dollar houses? Because those are two quite different groups of people. We're talking people who don't HAVE a yearly income figure from normal means, because they have so much wealth that direct pay is a rounding error in their bank account. fishmech fucked around with this message at 23:49 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 23:47
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One needs to remember that most of the fabled "mom and pop stores" out there that failed, were those located in dying small towns and rural areas. And they die mostly because ongoing rural depopulation means they simply can't manage enough business, hell entire towns can't really manage enough business to keep going after people have continuously left them for 100 years.
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May 4, 2017 00:39
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paragon1 posted:Lularoe advertises their pyramid scheme on the radio now, they've really hit the big time. Have they really? I mean a lot of the big box retailers that did electronics started as stores that primarily sold major appliances. And their business model kinda relied on the fact that there used to be a lot more people needing appliances, both because of the vast wave of new home building, and because old appliances were simply a lot less reliable. So their collapse really came from their core business of major appliances falling out. (You had places like CompUSA going under too which were explicitly electronics, but their only real reason to exist was the fact that it was difficult to order a computer online before a certain point) Meanwhile other big box retailers that sell electronics like Target or Wal-Mart do just fine selling electronics still.
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May 5, 2017 00:21
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OhFunny posted:Ya one store near me tried some automated check outs and took them out due to theft. Sounds like it was a store that thought adding self check outs = we can fire a bunch of cashiers. You can't do that, you need to retain staff to keep an eye on poo poo both to maintain adequate service speed and to look for accidental or intentional shoplifting. Famously, Wal-Mart tried this in a lot of their stores, the "just put in a bunch of self checkouts to replace like 8 cashiers with one guy" and got absolutely terrible amounts of theft, intentional or unintentional. dont even fink about it posted:I wonder what the stats on self-checkouts actually are. Like if they save any time at all, how much money they cost + how much theft they are enabling, and so on. When I was working at a supermarket years back, our union local researched this. They found that optimal implementation of them involved barely reducing anyone's hours (because they don't really replace a cashier, they change a cashier's job), but sped up customer throughput most of the time and didn't increase theft by a noticeable amount with adequate supervision. The equipment didn't really cost much more than normal lane equipment.
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May 9, 2017 17:41
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:There are a couple problems with self-checkers. There's plenty of other models of self-checkouts out there that have a whole loading belt and the machine in general placed higher which is more comfortable, just by the way. Again though, stores that actually try to use the self-checkouts to replace workers usually end up with massive theft and slowdown issues. You need to keep about the same number of workers in the store to avoid that. So you don't actually get the "benefit" to the company of not paying a salary unless you really luck out with highly efficient and conscientious customers
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May 9, 2017 18:04
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glowing-fish posted:Ah...in general, places on the East Coast are slower to adjust to technology and change. I wonder if that is the same in other East Coast states, like Florida, Arkansas, Wisconsin, etc? Arkansas and Wisconsin have pretty much nothing to do with the East Coast. Florida is still having ludicrous growth so it doesn't matter much if old stores aren't changing things, new ones are constantly being built anyway, and they're not going to go out of their way to buy old stuff.
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May 9, 2017 19:51
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Doctor Butts posted:The grocery store closest to me has a bunch of lanes. Fully half of them are automated checkouts that are in the style of a regular checkout (has a belt and everything, and sometimes someone will come by and bag your stuff). There are two small self checkout express for people with baskets/12 items or less. Well the manned checkouts are always going to attract all the people who need to do specialty transactions which can't be done at the self-checkout, and also people who physically can't handle packing their own stuff and thus are going to be slower to checkout. That's kind of the "ideal" situation really, the self-checkouts covering most normal transactions and the manned stations for old/disabled customers and customers with other special needs to cover. Like say, redeeming bottle deposit value in states that do that, or when someone's buying stuff with age restrictions, or weirdos who insist on paying by check.
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May 9, 2017 21:44
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dont even fink about it posted:Well you're never going to see a family of five doing their biweekly shopping move through a self-checkout either. What? I see that all the time. The nearest supermarket has the high capacity style self-checkout lanes, with huge bagging areas and a belt. hakimashou posted:What ever happened to RFID tagging everything instead of using barcodes? RFID signaling has a lot of issues with consistent reads and mistaken multiple reads. Customers absolutely hate getting overcharged from the latter, and the retailers hate when undercharging happens from the former. Plus, while it'd be easy to get RFID tagging integrated to simple standard items like pre-packaged goods, how are you going to do it for stuff like freshly cut meat, fresh baked things, loose produce, etc? That's a major chunk of most supermarkets' business.
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May 9, 2017 22:05
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ozmunkeh posted:It's been years since I stepped foot in one but Sainsbury's in the UK used to have a system where you'd scan your store card at a kiosk near the entrance to pair it with one of the handheld scanners on a wall. You could then put the scanner in a holster in your cart and walk around scanning things as you go, packing them into bags/boxes in your cart. When you're done shopping you hand your scanner to one of the checkout people, pay and walk out to your car. Occasionally you'd get flagged for a random check and they'd have to unpack the cart and put everything through manually. Seemed to work pretty well. No idea if they're still doing it but it was a fantastic system, they probably have a phone app these days. Yeah these are all over the place in the US too. Most people don't seem to want to bother with them though.
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May 11, 2017 16:45
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Xae posted:It is hosed up to think that if Sears wasn't run by this douchebag they would be Turbo-Amazon right now. Well I doubt that. He wasn't involved before the mid 2000s in any meaningful sense. And their online presence beforehand, while perfectly competent, simply was not on an Amazon level.
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May 12, 2017 17:35
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OhFunny posted:http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21721900-love-affair-shopping-has-gone-online-decline-established-american-retailing The stores and assets aren't guaranteed to cover debts anytime soon. A lot of the property isn't going to be bought up soon if ever, and the other assets are likely to be sold off before actually bankruptcy. Several Sears brands were already sold.
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May 15, 2017 04:16
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Horseshoe theory posted:He owns about 58% of the voting stock. This, and most of the board has been packed with his buddies for ages, basically since shortly after he engineered the merger between K-Mart and Sears.
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May 15, 2017 14:37
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hakimashou posted:Good, he's prob losing a shitload of money as its stock tanks. Yea that's the funniest part of all this, he really hasn't been able to run the company into the ground without also really loving up a major part of his wealth.
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May 15, 2017 23:54
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Selling assets, brands owned by Sears, etc. Selling real-estate. Sears is a pretty old company that owns a lot of things. Or did, anyway; if memory serves a lot of that stuff has been sold. He also has a holding company that controls K-Mart and Sears. The big thing to look at here is that those companies actually own a ton of exclusive things. Lampert also controls a hedge fund and those things get up to all sorts of financial fuckery and shenanigans where tanking and pillaging a company can turn a profit. But he's not really making money for himself from that? The vast majority of that money is going into Sears itself, only to immediately be spent to try to prop upt he rest of the business as he continues loving up. From all appearances, he's just loving himself up, and only making up a small part of that with his hedge fund and other assets taken from Sears. He's behaving as if he really thinks his things are just a months away from making Sears do really well again. Check out this article: http://fortune.com/2017/03/31/sears-eddie-lampert-net-worth-hedge-fund/ "While shares of Sears (shld, -12.43%) fell nearly 55% in 2016 amid bankruptcy rumors, the assets in Lampert's 29-year-old fund ESL Investments have dwindled a matching 55% in the same period. Sears, making up about a third of Lampert's portfolio, was a major contributor to the the hedge fund's shrink, but investors have also abandoned the fund recently, taking their money with them. By the end of 2016, Lampert's fund held a mere $653 million—a sizable decline of 94% from the $16.5 billion it once managed at Sears' peak in 2007, according to securities filings. Lampert's turnaround plan for Sears has so far not only failed to bring the struggling retailer back to health, but it has also been a personal disaster for the investor's net worth. Lampert's fund held $3.8 billion when he became CEO at the beginning of 2013, but those assets have dropped 84% since then, a Fortune analysis found—even greater than Sears' 74% drop in the same period. Wilson's stake in Sears, along with Sears Canada, once worth billions of dollars, is now valued at just $285 million. At least part of the reason Lampert's losses outpaced those of Sears' was due to the hedge funder significantly paring down stakes in his two other major holdings, AutoNation (an, +3.00%) and Gap (gps, +0.16%). Neither or those stocks have done well since 2013, with Gap down 39% by the end of 2016, and AutoNation down 3.3%. The flagging performance has also prompted Lampert's shareholders to pull their money out of the fund, according to the New York Times."
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May 16, 2017 01:15
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I think that Lampert believes he's going to come out ahead on the Sears stuff and all he looted. The problem is that it looks like he'll at absolute best end up back at his net worth of 2004, and even that would be unlikely. A monkey throwing darts at a decision board could have run Sears better.
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May 16, 2017 04:21
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ToxicSlurpee posted:And hear I thought he was just another vulture capitalist wrecking a company to feast on the corpse. Yea it turns he's just some kinda actual true believer in Ayn Randism, unlike the normal type of libertarian who ignores it when it becomes unprofitable. If he just wanted to raid the company, he would have gotten out like 7 years ago. Instead he seems to believe he's doing The Right Thing and he'll get rewarded any minute now.
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May 16, 2017 04:28
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Amazon is also in a weird semi-permanent transition period. Surely you mean the investors would demand they spend less on the various pie in the sky projects, not raise prices? That's Amazon's whole strategy for over a decade: they've managed to get to profitable, now they plow most of that profit into expansions and gambling on things like new TV shows, or new gadgets, rather than relying on doing the same thing on business credit as others do. Often those things fall through, like the Fire smartphone did, other times they work out. Amazon could instantly turn a larger profit for a year simply by pulling back on the reinvestment.
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May 16, 2017 15:18
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Raldikuk posted:They still do this. The best is if something doesn't have a price tag since they don't even use the upc at all in the system. I had to stand and wait for 15 mins for a manager to try and find the item I had and its price but none of them had one on it. I finally negotiated a price and the cashier typed the price in under whatever department it was. Apparently this is because the hobby lobby owners believe upcs are the mark of the devil or somesuch. Yep, the ownership are crazy Christians who believe the late 70s/80s propaganda that barcodes are of the devil. When I get to my computer I can embed an example of the kind of video those groups would send around. Edit: ok so this is one of the later ones, released in the late 80s, but it's the same story as the rest: upcs are the mark of the beast, they have 666 in them, it's all a trick to get barcodes tattooed on your skin, the new world order is going to station soldiers in the supermarket, etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lknW2mzXMMY Here's another one from the 90s that's more "serious" and "skeptical" but still goes HUH WELL MAYBE BARCODES ARE EVIL BETTER NOT USE EM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iST5Ip8a9nk fishmech fucked around with this message at 14:22 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 14:13
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BarbarianElephant posted:If the consumer doesn't like Amazon any more, there are plenty of other ecommerce sites out there. The only thing Amazon has got over them is cheap, fast delivery. That goes, the customer will go. Yes, but why would that go away? Cutting that isn't going to save money. Ripoff posted:Hahaha holy poo poo, I never knew this was a thing. Well it's simple: it was something that was new and therefore evil. It was part of a greater movement of "computers are evil tools of the devil!" poo poo. At this point Hobby Lobby is one of the few companies left that both operates mass retail and refuses to switch to using barcodes. Most other companies that don't use them are dealing with low volume business at a single location, where they just can't be bothered to set up the database for them. Crazy Ted posted:If I remember correctly, during a discussion with a manager about inventory (I used to do inventory control and ordering at another part-time job) the reason is that the owners actually think that switching to modern (and by modern I mean invented in about 1983) scanner systems literally isn't worth the cost - either up front or in the long term. Yeah that would have to be them just trying to cover their asses. It's something that might have held true in 1987, but these days you practically have to go out of your way to not save money using a barcode system at their scale of business. All their registers and poo poo are going to support it, and the scanner wands are dirt cheap.
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May 17, 2017 15:44
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How the gently caress can one be upset about something as benign as black stripes on a box while your God has commanded you to feed the hungry and clothe the naked (and there are a ton of examples of the latter out there)?
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Amazon doesn't do any of the crazy perks that google does which buys the latter a lot of good will for not very much money/employee. They still want crazy hours out of people. As far as Google goes, the East Coast offices are way more laid back, and incidentally less crowded, than the West Coast offices.
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May 19, 2017 00:42
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CFox posted:I wonder if the grocery pickup option counts as online sales because that is by far the best idea to come from grocery stores in a long time. Grocery stores have been offering that by phone for a very long time. One of my grandpa's summer jobs in high school in the Bronx was taking acre of the phone order pickup at a supermarket, and also doing grocery deliveries for the same place. And that would have been I think 1951 or 1952. fishmech fucked around with this message at 21:21 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 21:19
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Jack2142 posted:It feels like one of those things like "made to measure" clothing that pretty much died out since the 50's outside of really high end markets and is coming back into vogue via online ordering etc. Eh it's more of a thing that suburban markets never bothered to provide, while the city markets continued to provide it because people were used to it. Even many of the relatively "new" services were actually founded in the 70s or 80s on a phone and fax basis, and picked up online ordering in the mid-90s once consumer internet became a thing. Peapod for instance, which is now owned by Ahold and only deals with their branded stores and warehouses. What we've seen in recent years is these services gradually being made available to suburban or even rural locations and chains.
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May 23, 2017 22:10
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Pharohman777 posted:That place sounds like a nightmare to work at. Unfortunately the guy who had to sign off on approval process changes left the company, and no one could get approval anymore. 
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May 26, 2017 03:47
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FistEnergy posted:Best Buy keeps posting solid profits and their stock has jumped up again. Well, isn't that likely to be because they're about the only fully national store in their category left? They've also shaved off about 100 normal locations and 200 of those "Best Buy Mobile" branch locations since their height for store counts, rather than continuing with massive growth. And in their Canadian operations, where they used to have both Best Buy and Future Shop branded stores in the country, often locating a store from one very close to the other, they instead shut down the Future Shop brand and permanently closed any locations that were already close to an operating Best Buy, which surely saves money without much affecting revenue. You combine that with the fact that their Geek Squad service has developed a reputation with the average shopper as being a reliable place to get things fixed (regardless of the fact that various local repair places would probably charge less), which keeps people coming to the stores more often than they would otherwise do, and both is a revenue source in itself as well as a chance to tempt people into thinking "hmm maybe I could use some new gadget while I'm here". I'd say adding all these things together is why they've been able to get into a pattern of solid profitability after a few rough years adjusting to online shopping and stuff.
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May 26, 2017 15:29
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MiddleOne posted:Is competition for electronics just really poor in the US or something? Basically every physical retailers is either switching to online or getting pushed out of market by online competitors over here. Circuit City, CompUSA, all the other big electronics-focused national retailers went of business years ago. Now it's just Best Buy for national, and a few random regional chains that are still doing well like Fry's mostly in the southwest, P.C. Richard mostly in the northeast, etc. There are of course minor amounts of electronics selection in department stores like Wal-Mart and Target, but that's not really the same thing.
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May 26, 2017 19:09
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anonumos posted:CompUSA is still around but they suck. They were bought by Tiger Direct and run as brick and mortar locations for the online business and in store repairs/tech support. I thought the Tiger Direct retail storefronts with CompUSA branding got dropped a few years back? If you go on the CompUSA site now they don't even list any of their own products, it's just some sort of search engine for Amazon etc.
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May 26, 2017 20:57
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:
Haha no, unless what you want to tell Sears is "prevent that Eddie Lampert guy from merging K-Mart into you and then running you into the ground starting in the mid-2000s". All you have to do to keep Sears doing ok is to just have another boring CEO in charge, instead of that crazy libertarian true believer.
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May 26, 2017 23:36
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YF19pilot posted:It is funny how many "industry insider" stories I'll see crawl along my facebook feed that are basically "Millenials are too dumb to buy our product!" Then you get newscasters on local morning shows ranting about fabric softener dying off, literal "old man yells at cloud" stuff.  drat millenials won't even touch a dead body!
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May 27, 2017 02:26
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Cicero posted:Probably nothing until public sentiment was overwhelmingly cool with said drugs. Yeah I mean alcohol delivery is still barely legal or wholly illegal in a lot of places even though alcohol usage has been accepted for so long. It'd hardly be surprising if one of the places that is hard on weed now would make delivery very hard if they're ever forced to legalize having it.
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May 30, 2017 10:23
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ISeeCuckedPeople posted:The dash button is dumb ok. Not many boxes? When you do Amazon grocery delivery they tend to simply do one big box with a lot of stuff in it. You don't get individual cardboard boxes, unless you're willing to pay more for the delivery costs. And for other Amazon dash stuff, it usually doesnt ship right away, because they again give you better shipping prices if you wait to fill up a box more. That takes up even more space on a crowded bus... Of course the best option is usually to utilize a local supermarket's own delivery service, rather than Amazon itself. But those aren't available everywhere.
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May 31, 2017 18:57
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ISeeCuckedPeople posted:
When jet launched their thing was to "make $0 on sales, make it all from the membership" and to fulfill the "cheapest place to buy" thing by just drop shipping from other stores and eating the price difference. I don't know if they still that, but its hard to see how they could get ahead of Amazon with the original model. They'd need tens of million of paying members.
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Jun 1, 2017 07:04
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The thing to remember is that losses from vacancies don't mean that much when the owners of the building are making plenty of money from high rents elsewhere. My understanding is that the losses are usually on the order of a few cents per square foot per month that goes vacant, as that's the total costs needed for maintenance that must be done to keep the space rentable later. So if you have say 500 square feet of former store space sitting vacant, you're maybe spending $10 on that space as the landlord per month while nobody rents it. That's not 0 or anything, but it's hardly something that's going to make them think cutting from their existing $5 per square foot per month asking price for $2500 a month is worth it. They could leave the space empty for 20 years and a month at $5 per square foot would more than make up for those losses.
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Jun 3, 2017 22:24
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RBC posted:That's retarded, you're not including the forgone rent. You shouldn't do that, because that's not a real direct loss. Their actual losses from leaving a space vacant are vanishingly small. You might as well claim that since they could get $100 a square foot on a choice block in Manhattan, that renting out your strip mall space in Irvine must actually be a massive loss at only $5 a square foot.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:17
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