Retail is mostly about entertainment now, primarily for women. Women like to shop for clothes and try stuff on. They like to be taken out to restaurants and movies and go to these with their friends. They like to go see their personal trainer at the gym. They like to go and get their hair and nails done and gossip. They send their kids to the math tutor. They send their littler kid to gymboree. They have a coffee at Starbucks.
If you look at some of the retail REITs and listen to their conference calls, a lot of stores are going out, but a lot are going in. Things are definitely changing to be more service and health oriented and the Big Box and Mega Mall trend is certainly over. The smaller format residential and mixed use stuff is going to be fine because they are more about services and entertainment as opposed to merely transactional delivery of mass market goods. People still want to leave the house and go somewhere.
This paragraph is so ridiculous. All of it is just little patronizing insults about women for normal things men and women like to do. As a male, I also like shopping for clothes, going to restaurants and movies with my friends (women are 'taken'), going to the gym (women go 'for their personal trainer', because we all know they can't do it alone), and getting my hair cut and nails worked on (women also need to gossip). I've even heard tell of men sending their kids to tutors and gymborees and having coffee at Starbucks. Crazy, right?
It's interesting that you start by insulting the parent with this generalization about their 'alpha-nerd' status, and then drop straight into a parody of men's and women's stereotypes from the 1950s, and then finish with a pablum point about people still wanting to leave the house.
But buying stuff made in China was cheap, even people who made $30k/year could do that. But going out for coffee, brunch, movies, massages, trainers, that stuff is way more expensive, and so is limited to the nicer parts of town.
Yeah, I can see that.
>weird outdated stereotypes and condescending tone
Please don't.
They provide an interface between parties who wish to exchange information, goods, services, and time.
The nature of middle-people businesses is changing, but they're not going away.
The modern day middlemen are doing a better job with way less people. Hence the Retail Apocalypse...
In other words, they're saying the businesses aren't profitable enough to service debt loads that were thought to be sustainable debt loads a few years ago.
That still points to lower than expected retail profit. Interest rates have been unusually low for more than a decade, so it's not like a credit spike changed the assumptions.
Anyway, at best it contributes to a negative feedback loop.
No, the debt was never sustainable. Essentially the banks allowed loans which were gigantic ponzi schemes.
Retail: "Our growth will continue forever!"
Banks: Hmm, we got bit pretty hard on these home loans and need somewhere else to make money, "Forever growth is like infinite money, I like money!", "Here is 10 billion dollars, just remember to pay us back in 2017".
You may see retail employees as unnecessary middlemen, but they provide a value a machine cannot.
I can talk to GameStop employees about which new games they played to see if they’ll be fun; I can talk to petsmart employees about proper pet care; I can go over installation prodcedures with the Geek Squad folks at BestBuy; I can get recommendations on outfits at the upscale men’s clothing store I frequent...and so on.
There is no superior specialization in this regard. Many of these examples are because of the relationships I have cultivated with long-term retail employees, who know me and my preferences far better than any machine learning algorithm has attempted to match.
That only changes who those middlemen are and their scope. Based on what I'm currently seeing on search machines can only deliver exactly what I'm asking for. Rarely do they recommendations that aren't patterns. For example, I was looking for backup software a few months ago, I get tons of ad pages on backup software now. I purchased that software months ago and no longer need backup software. It's probably going to be many more months before my search history cycles out of ad networks.
Another example. A road was recently converted to pedestrian only in my neighborhood. Would you like to know the number of Lyft/Uber drivers that follow Google Maps end up at a dead end and have to double back? And that is coming from the world's most powerful search engine.
I don't think best is correct in a lot of contexts, but just good enough is enough in most cases.
You're silly if you think that the industry isn't already using large data analysis to do this job. There's still plenty of value by having a human at the end of the tunnel to actually interpret it though.
Often they lie to producers to lower prices then lie to consumers by selling these deal at the usual rate (or faking a false discount week for appearances and then put back products back on the normal shelves).
As other said, economic and information asymmetry is not good.
Honestly .. aggregators should be a national thing, there's almost no competition to be had there. Kinda like internet, it should be way more neutral, except maybe on safety check (again, something to nationalize).
Also the odd item you occasionally need when something goes out of stock locally (like a trash bag, clothing reaches end of useful life etc).
Most of us are really pretty bad at tracking our purchases. We don’t want to look at them because it means admitting we have a problem. But we know the trash is full all the time and don’t think about how that correlated with consumption. Basically I was trying to trick people into an honest conversation about something nobody likes to be honest about.
And at any rate if the quantity is “more than 200” then it just reinforces GGP’s point.
The few shops I go to, I don't go there because they have every possible product, I go there because I know their purchasing reflects the opinions and qualities that I also value.
- Transportation
- Breaking wholesale packs into something an average person can actually buy
- Holding and efficiently managing huge inventories
- Allowing you to touch, see, and sometimes try items before you buy them
- Dealing with broken items, instantly replacing them
- Providing all these services locally