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America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

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Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#231

Post by eduren »

narrator wrote: post #52
sytelus wrote: post #24

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…

I know all you alpha-nerds just never want to leave the house and could live in a 20foot square cube and sit on the toilet with your laptop while only consuming auto-delivered soylent and a caffeine IV drip for all you care, but let me help you all out with a little in understanding this retail thing: Retail is mostly about entertainment now, primarily for women. Women like to shop for clothes and try stuff on. They…

>Retail is mostly about entertainment now

Yeah, I can see that.

>weird outdated stereotypes and condescending tone

Please don't.

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#232

Post by tonysdg »

drak0n1c wrote: post #201
wmeredith wrote: post #57

This is going to be brutal over the coming decade. "The most recent government statistics show that salespeople and cashiers in the industry total 8 million." Contrast that with 70k coal workers. Imagine the devastation in the coal belt spreading to suburbs all over mid America.

Fair point, but the comparison is a bit uneven - you are comparing one industry's post-devastation numbers with another's pre-devastation numbers. Across the rust belt, just a few decades ago, there were many times more coal workers than 70k. If you go back to 1923 there were 883k.

So it's one order of magnitude difference compared to two? That's still not pretty.

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#233

Post by andrewla »

Articles like this are starting to ring little bells for me. There's an argument that the government's reaction to the 1999 financial crisis (and the 1998 Russian bond crisis, which figures in) is what inflated the housing bubble [1], which started to show cracks in 2006 and 2007 (with the Bear Stearns fund collapses) and then went full-bore once things started unwinding in 2008 as home prices started to fall, and the hugely leveraged positions started to unwind.

Since the Fed stopped the liquidation of bad assets and refused to allow pricing to adjust, the question is what new bubble we funneled capital into. There's a lot of evidence that banks have been reluctant to make loans to consumers, both because of real risks around modeling of real estate pricing, and also because of changes in the regulatory regime.

It seems like it's possible that we're starting to see where all the credit has been going -- rampant investment into retail. The article mostly ignores restaurants and grocery stores (explicitly so) but we've seen other articles [2] talking about those sectors starting to show weakness as well.

[1] Not a source that I'd usually cite, but here's Krugman in 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/greenspan-and-the-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15593880

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#234

Post by coldtea »

>In the U.S., retailers announced more than 3,000 store openings in the first three quarters of this year.

That sounds like an insignificant number -- you can get as many openings, if not way more, in a country with 10-50 million population (but less centralized retail sector, with fewer cross-country chains).

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#235

Post by coldtea »

pascalxus wrote: post #60

Malls hold no interest for me whatsoever. There's nothing there worthwhile, other than employment. Malls have nothing: no libraries, no Good Cafes, no places to hang out, no parks, no museums, no zoos, limited live music, no outdoors. And the few things it does have: like some book stores and places to eat, are all engineered to get you in and out and back to the Mall's singular focus: Spend, spend, spend: shop till…

>Malls hold no interest for me whatsoever. There's nothing there worthwhile, other than employment. Malls have nothing: no libraries, no Good Cafes, no places to hang out, no parks, no museums, no zoos, limited live music, no outdoors.

Which makes sense, as their main purpose is to be places to shop for clothes, electronics, kitchenware, and so on, not any of those other things.

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#236

Post by tikhonj »

ericseppanen wrote: post #120
hkmurakami wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanford Shopping Center and the Santa Monica downtown thing (I forget what it's called) are very close to what you describe. What malls do have is space, and that kind of large space owned by a single entity is rare these days within a reasonable travel time away. Redevelopment potential is definitely there. Also, a professor of mine once wondered why we don't have great public spaces like they do in Europe. Then he…

Look at Stanford Shopping Center in the satellite view sometime: a bunch of rectangles surrounded by an ocean of surface parking. It's much more like a conventional mall than a downtown: It's effectively walled off from the rest of the neighbordood. You're expected to go there by driving your car, and it's isolated by its massive parking lots so nobody would consider walking in or out a pleasant experience.

This is why I end up on University St all the time and almost never go to Stanford Shopping Center even though it's a bit closer, pleasant and I like a few of the restaurants/cafes.

What I would really like is for a few blocks of University to become pedestrian-only with lots of outdoor seating for its cafes and restaurants. (The same goes for other downtown areas in the South Bay, like Santa Cruz in Menlo Park.) It's amazing how little outdoor seating we have in the Bay Area despite the amazing weather.

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#237

Post by em500 »

wmeredith wrote: post #57

This is going to be brutal over the coming decade. "The most recent government statistics show that salespeople and cashiers in the industry total 8 million." Contrast that with 70k coal workers. Imagine the devastation in the coal belt spreading to suburbs all over mid America.

For some additional context, that's about 5% of the total US labor force (160 million). The current labor force turnover (hirings and firings/quits) is around 5 million per month.

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#238

Post by 3pt14159 »

cwbrandsma wrote: post #122
pascalxus wrote: post #60

Malls hold no interest for me whatsoever. There's nothing there worthwhile, other than employment. Malls have nothing: no libraries, no Good Cafes, no places to hang out, no parks, no museums, no zoos, limited live music, no outdoors. And the few things it does have: like some book stores and places to eat, are all engineered to get you in and out and back to the Mall's singular focus: Spend, spend, spend: shop till…

I'm not disagreeing completely, but your location might be influencing your answer. I live in the northern portion of the USA, we get freezing winters and blistering summers. Come mid-winter...I am not going downtown to walk around outside, we don't hang out outside (unless we are talking winter sports, and then FULLY clothed). In summer, there needs to be shade. Fall and spring, we get wet. But really, it seems like…

North Americans are too soft.

I live in Toronto and it's wonderful to have nice streets that you can walk and bike on, even at ±30C.

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#239

Post by therealdrag0 »

cr0sh wrote: post #209
munificent wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the America that will result from this die-off is a better place. Less suburban sprawl. Less giant eyesore big-box stores that no one enjoys spending time in. More informed purchases because people buy stuff online where it's easier to compare reviews. But I think there will be significant, very painful collateral damage to people during this transition and I've very sympathetic to people hit by the job losse…

> Less giant eyesore big-box stores that no one enjoys spending time in. Instead, we'll have giant eyesore big-box empty buildings on oversized empty parking lots littering the land that nobody wants, and few who can afford to tear down and replace. And what will they replace them with? New houses or apartments or condos few can afford? Maybe office space?

Seems like the building could be turned into indoor paintball lazertag, rollerblading, offices, without rebuilding from the foundation.

Re: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

#240

Post by hinkley »

gorbachev wrote: post #145
hinkley wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the number was pulled out of the air, but you don’t think a family of four has 200 distinct items in their trash + recycling every week?

Durable goods would take that number way up from 200 for an average US family.

After I posted I had the same thought. But then I realized that durable goods from a store usually come in packaging, so measuring outgoing material isn’t as inaccurate as it sounds as first.

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.

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