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Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're aggregators. There's value in going to a single shop to buy everything instead of going to 200 individual suppliers for your weekly shopping.
Aggregation, filtering, sorting, recommendations could be best handled by machines. All businesses specializing in this using human efforts are at grave risk.
Retail is the prime example of middleman business. The middleman businesses don't produce anything by themselves and attempt to extract profits via information asymmetry and/or some value adds such as geographically closer availability. Eventually both of these should be done by machines. Throughout the history technology has been killing off middleman businesses such as travel agents, insurance agents, stock brokers…
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.
Retail is the prime example of middleman business. The middleman businesses don't produce anything by themselves and attempt to extract profits via information asymmetry and/or some value adds such as geographically closer availability. Eventually both of these should be done by machines. Throughout the history technology has been killing off middleman businesses such as travel agents, insurance agents, stock brokers…
They're aggregators. There's value in going to a single shop to buy everything instead of going to 200 individual suppliers for your weekly shopping.
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).
The 'Retail jobs growth by state' chart in this article (approx 2/3 down the page) is lovely: one square line chart for each US state, positioned roughly according to geography, all equal in size. I find it very easy to grok compared to choropleth maps and similar charts that attempt to stay true to geography. Unlike other non-map presentations of US state data, this layout preserves ability to spot regional similari…
I felt like this chart shows that retail store closures are a lagging indicator for employment. Stores are up in NY, WA, TX -- all states where people migrate to to work in tech companies. (Not sure about ND and UT, though.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're aggregators. There's value in going to a single shop to buy everything instead of going to 200 individual suppliers for your weekly shopping.
It's not really relevant, but I'm having a hard time picturing a household that consumes 200 unique items every week. Must be pretty fancy.
in general, it is difficult for me to separate a reasonable concern borne of the knowledge that a thriving economy is important from a sense that, so far, the big retail chains that are closing many locations sell junk that i both do not want and think is largely superfluous anyway. Anyone got a reasonable way to synthesize those competing thoughts?
in general, it is difficult for me to separate a reasonable concern borne of the knowledge that a thriving economy is important from a sense that, so far, the big retail chains that are closing many locations sell junk that i both do not want and think is largely superfluous anyway. Anyone got a reasonable way to synthesize those competing thoughts?
Would it help if you considered that if over 6000 stores closed, it is very likely the majority are small stored and not big chains? From what I saw in Bloomberg article it was 550/6000 are chain stores. That leaves significantly more to small shops that are trying to provide employment and selling worthwhile goods to their local communities. For example here in buffalo we have small stores for spiritual goods that a…
Historically, public markets have also provided a platform for important non-commercial informal civic interactions. The review section of e.g. Amazon doesn't seem to cut it.
However, I do feel bad for the people that will lose their jobs over it.
Let's make towns have downtowns, with beautiful brick roads, scenic ponds with some ducks, perhaps a waterfall, some nice cafes, a lawn with benches, some parks, some nature, trees, live music, a library and museums. It's okay to have some retails stores sprinkled around here and there, as long as they're original, and not those mass market plastic selling behemoaths we see everywhere.