The Retail Apocalypse
Jul. 15th, 2019 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithStores are closing as more shopping moves online, and people don't want to lose all of them.
Shoppers won't get a choice, though. Stores aren't there to make you happy. Their purpose is to make money. If they don't, they'll close, no matter how many people want or need them. You can just do without being able to try on clothes before you buy them or having a hardware clerk who actually knows what the products do. The only way stores will survive is if people shop in them, and that's happening less and less. Worse, it's the specialty stores that get hit the hardest -- and those are the products that benefit most from personal interaction. Some generic stores may survive, but they're not great. Imagine a world with nothing left but WalMart and a few shoe stores. >_<
Shoppers won't get a choice, though. Stores aren't there to make you happy. Their purpose is to make money. If they don't, they'll close, no matter how many people want or need them. You can just do without being able to try on clothes before you buy them or having a hardware clerk who actually knows what the products do. The only way stores will survive is if people shop in them, and that's happening less and less. Worse, it's the specialty stores that get hit the hardest -- and those are the products that benefit most from personal interaction. Some generic stores may survive, but they're not great. Imagine a world with nothing left but WalMart and a few shoe stores. >_<
(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-15 09:09 am (UTC)or someone will figure out a way to do it digitally.
Well ...
Date: 2019-07-15 09:18 am (UTC)I've watched America go from having a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton in every mall, to having Borders and Barnes & Noble as freestanding megastores. The subsequent collapse has stripped bookstores from most towns. If I want to browse, I have to drive an hour -- and the remaining store is so shitty that I rarely bother anymore. They literally stopped separating the new books in each subject area. >_< 3q3q3q!!! Seriously people, if I am avoiding your bookstore, you suuuuuuck.
As a result, reading has dropped dramatically. Online bookstores are where you go when you already know what you want. But you can't really browse them, which means they do a lousy job of attracting new readers. A mall bookstore can put up window displays to entice people to stop as they stroll past. We've lost that, and it is costing us.
And this is before the coming boom in 3D printing and subsequent collapse of the whole widget marketplace, which is much of what drives the whole mercantile nowadays. It'll hit food too, eventually.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2019-07-15 01:43 pm (UTC)Neither are us blind folk who do a lot of that mainly because it's cheaper for us.
That said, I love shopping for clothes in stores; the descriptions on the sites are shit, especially if you can't see the clothing staring you (Quite litteraly in some cases, because I hear they put them on forms) you in the face..
-Trausio~
Re: Well ...
Date: 2019-07-15 07:31 pm (UTC)That applies to a great many disabilities; the internet can be incredibly enabling and that's a good thing. But any time one option wipes out all the others, that's bad, because not everyone needs the same accommodations.
>> That said, I love shopping for clothes in stores; the descriptions on the sites are shit, <<
That's because describing things in words is a skill. Some people are better than others, and many people don't realize how important it is, especially those with a strong visual orientation. I've described fibercrafts made by friends just for the fun of it, using whole paragraphs. A typical catalog would say "Blue multicolor scarf" or maybe with luck "Handmade scarf striped in multicolor, mostly blue with sari yarn accents and end tassels."
>> especially if you can't see the clothing staring you (Quite litteraly in some cases, because I hear they put them on forms) you in the face. <<
There are various ways to display clothes for sale. From most to least useful:
* Folded in a sealed package
* Folded but loose on a shelf
* Hung on a rack
* Hung on a mannequin
* Worn by a model
In a package, you can usually see the color accurately but that's all.
Loose on a shelf, you can unfold it to hold against you, and try it on same as taking one from a rack.
Hung on a mannequin, you can see -- or feel if you touch it -- how the garment drapes over a body shape. In some cases this reveals flaws or assets, like how well positioned the elbow patches are.
Worn by a live model gives a better indication of fit, and if the model moves around, you can see how the garment behaves on a body in motion. But most models don't want to be a tactile display. Wouldn't it be cool if a store for blind people had models trained in description though? Like a talking ad! I bed they have those in T-America.
What we do have here, just starting up, are services where the blind person wears a camera and a trained describer narrates everything around them. It's very popular -- but it costs money and isn't subsidized yet. :/ Not very helpful considering most disabled folks are broke. But! Over in Terramagne, they match people with vision and mobility impairments. The blind person gets description, and the less-mobile person gets to enjoy vicarious travel. Some organizations subsidize this, and others just hook up volunteers who want to find a partner.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-15 02:21 pm (UTC)Then Walmrt opened a superstore, and then there was just Walmart and a regional chain store.
Fortunately Albertsons sent a scout team through the area 4-5 years ago and their conclusion was "Why did we leave this town?" They built a new store, and a year or so after they opened (they were bringing in trucks three times a day to keep it filled for the first few months and poached all their cashiers from WM), Walmart opened a neighborhood grocery store in the NE part of town.
Retail is weird.
Our mall could be used as a zombie apocalypse mall, especially after Kmart closed. It had JC Penneys and a bunch of small stores and more closed store fronts than open. Since then, it was bought by an operator that transformed the mall in Gallup and took it to 100% occupancy, so there's hope. They've renovated the space that Kmart was in and a Melrose and Harbor Freight opened up and soon a Ross will open, so they're doing good.
Retail is weird.
My favorite example is a Home Depot opened. Useful things, Home Depots. Then literally next door a Lowe's Home Improvement opened. And I mean literally.(Google Maps)
Alamogordo now has three Subways, up from two when I moved here 14 years ago. The third used to be a Quiznos, but closed. A second McDonalds is under construction and will open in a couple of months. We now have two Taco Bells. We were supposed to get a second Starbucks, the first opened in the Albertsons, but the building was screwed-up: the foundation cracked and it was built across the property line of the Ford dealership next door. I've heard that when the law suits settle that it might be a Duncan Donuts.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-15 03:32 pm (UTC)I moved to Amazon because they had books I wanted. I wasn't picking books at brick-and-mortar stores by browsing - I was special ordering them. I moved to Lands End because I didn't have to deal with the painful music, or sort through heaps of stuff I didn't want in the hopes of finding whatever classics they might actually have - while sensory overload made me unlikely to actually spot what I came for.
Now that Amazon's killed most other bookstores, it's made it ever harder to find what I want, rather than what they want me to buy. Yay for "sponsored" merchandise - it tends to save me money by encouraging me to simply close the browser window rather than struggling throught the UI to buy what I was actually searching for.
Meanwhile, none of the local grocery stores ever have everything I came for. And when they do have what I want, it's often on shelves I simply can't reach, or that require sitting on the floor to access. Other choices are apparantly more profitable for them, and being unreliable about stocking apparantly encourages normall people to "try something new" rather than giving up in disgust.
I currently avoid Amazon when I can - but I have an order expected to arrive today, consisting of
- a type/flavour of tea no local store carries
- a dietary supplement where the local retail price has been climbing like a rocket, for something like 10% of local retail
- a very limited interest book written by an acquiantance
I live in a major metropolitain area, and am able and willing to drive in order to shop. If I lived in a smaller area, or was unable to drive for any reason, I'd have even more incentive to use etail.
Also, I'm writing this in the added comfort provided by an excellent window air conditioner. I was able to buy the best model (for my purposes) that I could discover, and get it delivered - by buying online. I think this is the first time in my life I've been able to buy the appliance model with the reviews that most attracted me - usually appliances are too heavy for shipping to be reasonable, adnd the local stores carry a tiny subset of available models.
I do miss browsing specialty bookstores - the big sci fi bookstore in New York had books I didn't know I wanted. And I'm not happy that we're now down to one hardware store in a reasonable distance - uncoincidentally the one that was most specialized in supplying local contractors, less in supplying local do-it-yourselfers. But for me personally, etail has been a net win - until the etailers realized they had enough market share to behave as badly asother retailers.
Thoughts
Date: 2019-07-15 07:47 pm (UTC)Sadly so.
>> This may have been because of financial constraints - they couldn't afford to have a selection that made customers like me happy - or it may have been because they judged that they only needed to be as good as their competition, which was just as bad.<<
For most stores, it's all about profit. They will do whatever makes them the most money. They don't care if people can find things they need, as long as shoppers buy enough to turn a profit.
>> Ditto for the shopping environment, where most clothing stores were and are actively unpleasant to me because of so-called music. <<
Let's not forget the nasty trend of putting computers every few aisles in grocery stores blasting commercials. It doesn't make me want to buy more; it makes me want to grab the shit I need and get out. >_<
>> And you also can't forget the fashion for buying companies, loading them up with debt to make a short term profit, then abandoning them to fail when interest rates went up. <<
Parasitic capitalism is a huge problem.
>> - a type/flavour of tea no local store carries<<
Yeah, I found my adaptogenic tea at a privately owned international store, but their distributor quit carrying it, leaving me no other option but to buy it online. Usually I just give up the thing, but this is a load-bearing item for me.
What I have noticed is that the churn is now much worse than it used to be. There's always been a slow tendency for established products to disappear, but now it's common to find something for a few weeks or months and then lose it.
Case in point: fiber bars. They started out with a bunch of flavors, which gradually dwindled. Then they added a new version that's 70 calories instead of 90, but instead of doing something sensible like omitting chocolate chips and icing, they changed the two main ingredients to nonfood supplements. ("And don't call it food: it's Chow.") I tried a box out of curiosity and found them ghastly. Now Wal-Mart has quit carrying the original version and often doesn't even have the bad replacement. I surmise that most other people did what I did and nobody would buy the crap a second time. >_<
>>But for me personally, etail has been a net win - until the etailers realized they had enough market share to behave as badly asother retailers.<<
Yyyeah. Which makes it the same as Wal-Mart moving in and killing all the other local businesses, then acting monstrous.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2019-07-16 06:49 am (UTC)*For the curious, it is brushtail meat, which is a cute but invasive species of possum in New Zeland.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2019-07-16 07:39 am (UTC)This is my response to edible invasives of all kinds. People may piss and moan about how much trouble they cause, but seriously, never doubt humanity's ability to kill things. We wiped out the passenger pigeons and they used to blot out the sun. People can wipe out anything if they're motivated enough. Create a compelling market for it and human nature will do the rest.
Might as well make a virtue out of vice.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-15 05:26 pm (UTC)O_O
Date: 2019-07-15 07:34 pm (UTC)Re: O_O
Date: 2019-07-15 08:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-15 05:45 pm (UTC)One of those is a used-book store that has entered into partnership with a furniture consignment store. The book seller goes to all the garage sales and library book sales in the area, skims the cream, and offers it at a good price (he even writes down customers' special interests and scouts for them!) You can peruse books and bookshelves in the same open, friendly shop, complete with good-mannered sofa-sized shop dog. I love that place and try to go in at least once a week.
The infrastructure will still be there even if the stores go under, but with the difficulty of opening a new business on a business model that's becoming less workable every year, I wonder what people think they're going to do if the ones we have drop out.