Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 226 posts

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#211

Post by hateful »

padobson wrote: post #207
bunderbunder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's also a case of there being too much of the wrong kinds of retail space. If there's a retail store within a mile of our house, I'll happily walk to it and do my shopping there. Especially when it's a pleasant day outside, that's an enjoyable way to get out of the house and get a little light exercise. If the only kind of store left that sells what I need is one of the big box stores, so that going the…

What if your house was the shopping mall? When Sears, Macy's, JCPenny, etc all die, there's going to be a lot of shopping malls with big empty spaces. If those spaces were transformed to residential, it'd be trivial to walk to all the little shops currently between the big anchor chains, regardless of climate or season.

There are a few places by me where they've made apartments above a bunch of stores.

I'm in NY, Long Island specifically and they all get converted to Senior or Luxury apartments that cost way more than the average person can afford. But that's getting a bit off topic.

But it would be interesting to have some of those big places converted into cheap apartments. It's like you'd be getting a discount for having ads on your place of residence.

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#212

Post by seanmcdirmid »

randomsearch wrote: post #195
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I met the USA. Other countries will be diffferent of course, like China where deliveries are expected and rediculously cheap even including assembly.

According to their US site: Shipping rates are approximate and calculated by weight/volume & retail value of the order. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/store/homeshopping/shipping_calcu... Maybe it's changed, or that info is wrong.

Hmm. When we did our ikea order in late 2016, it was $99 for as much as we wanted.

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#213

Post by brownbat »

"Bain, KKR, and Vornado... will end up losing well over a billion dollars combined."

A lot of retail debt will be renegotiated in 2019 as underlying interest rates are increasing, so the pace of these might be set to increase dramatically as delaying reckonings like TRU did becomes steadily more costly.[1]

The article points out that the collapse of this one big name was pretty expensive to lenders, even if lawyers made some money during the unraveling.

I'm curious about the prospects for another financial crisis. How many billion dollar losses happening all at the same time are we looking at? How many can retail financing divisions endure without undermining the stability of larger banks?

It's not my main area of expertise, so I genuinely don't know if there's a serious contagion risk, but Google alerts for retail apocalypse have been a fun ride.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#214

Post by welly »

detaro wrote: post #111
sasaf5 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious: how to downvote in HN?

At some Karma threshold (might be 500?) you get a downvote button on comments.

I'm sure it's recently shifted from 400 because not that long ago I could downvote (not that I did) and now I can't. Although I may have imagined that but I'm pretty sure I could.

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#215

Post by nradov »

rtkwe wrote: post #210
nradov wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Santana Row planned community in San Jose, CA has been around since 2002 and seems successful so far. They have a walkable core area with retail and restaurants, apartments above and behind, and parking garages underneath and at the edge. The developers tore down the existing structures and built from scratch. They didn't build around an existing mall (although there is an another mall across the street).

Yeah areas like that have the best chance of succeeding because they exist in an already lively downtown so they don't have to create all their traffic out of nothing. A community built around a dying mall though has to create enough traffic to justify businesses opening there unless they're small and cheap enough to exist solely on the business of residents.

Santana Row is several miles from any lively downtown. That area is a random collection of low-density retail, restaurants, offices, and housing. Outside of Santana Row there's very little pedestrian traffic and no real night life.

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#216

Post by blindwatchmaker »

yourapostasy wrote: post #160
kgwgk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that there are many reasons why it may make sense to leave a building unnoccupied, I just don't think that "dodging taxes" (because losing money reduces your tax bill) is one of them. A job-seeker may pass on an offer that he considers too low (because he's confident he will find something better later), no one would say he's doing so to avoid paying income taxes.

Talking about very large real estate portfolio holders like the Vornados of the world, not small investors. In American terms, even newly-minted "accredited investors" can't avail themselves as private individuals to these kinds of strategies. In that context, when you are capitalized enough to land bank the worst-performing parcels until the next boom cycle, it makes sense to let them lay fallow and rejecting rent d…

A bug that seems to pop up again and again, here's an article about a crusader against land speculators who found it more profitable to leave land unused all the way back in the 1800s:

https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/04/Tax-To-Solve-Housing...

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#217

Post by cardiffspaceman »

duxup wrote: post #37
aviv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few years strip malls will be occupied only by food businesses, pharmacies, check cashing places, and urgent care clinics.

Don't forget spas and nail salons!

How do nail salons and the like afford to stay in strip malls when KFC shops can't even make rent anymore?

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#218

Post by padobson »

hateful wrote: post #211
padobson wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if your house was the shopping mall? When Sears, Macy's, JCPenny, etc all die, there's going to be a lot of shopping malls with big empty spaces. If those spaces were transformed to residential, it'd be trivial to walk to all the little shops currently between the big anchor chains, regardless of climate or season.

There are a few places by me where they've made apartments above a bunch of stores. I'm in NY, Long Island specifically and they all get converted to Senior or Luxury apartments that cost way more than the average person can afford. But that's getting a bit off topic. But it would be interesting to have some of those big places converted into cheap apartments. It's like you'd be getting a discount for having ads on y…

Do you have any links to the places already doing it? I'd like to know more about them.

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#219

Post by yourapostasy »

blindwatchmaker wrote: post #216
yourapostasy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about very large real estate portfolio holders like the Vornados of the world, not small investors. In American terms, even newly-minted "accredited investors" can't avail themselves as private individuals to these kinds of strategies. In that context, when you are capitalized enough to land bank the worst-performing parcels until the next boom cycle, it makes sense to let them lay fallow and rejecting rent d…

A bug that seems to pop up again and again, here's an article about a crusader against land speculators who found it more profitable to leave land unused all the way back in the 1800s: https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/04/Tax-To-Solve-Housing...

Yup, am familiar with the Georgist argument, thanks for introducing it into the discussion since many others reading undoubtedly have not heard of it. I'm sympathetic to it, but I believe the real issue was alluded to in the middle of the article you linked to. As much as economics has physics envy, I have yet to find a physics-grounded explanation of mainstream economics' treatment and classification of capital and assets. Even a walk through as crude as energy transfers in kWh ranges would be a start, because for me, physics is our currently-known ground truth. Instead, we get tautological definitions of classifications, and I'm no longer convinced they're as obvious and simple as economists make them out to be, because we see all these interesting side effects within the market that Georgism arose to address, like an emergent impedance mismatch in code architectures.

This doesn't mean I want to toss out all economics, but some discerning skepticism about the descriptive (not to speak of predictive or prescriptive) modeling power of economics is in order, certainly at macro scales.

What to do about all this? I think a start was expressed by Iain A Banks in his The Culture storytelling universe, where he said "Money is a sign of poverty." My take on that is all capitalists should be striving to achieve a world where money is a historical artifact, because money is only used as a tool to advance science sufficiently to unlock post-scarcity material and cognitive abundance. In other words, capitalists should be working to progressively put themselves out of a job as capitalists, driving down the cost of every material good to the point it is cheaper to subsume it as a general utility everyone pays for than to leave it outside the Cosean boundary.

In practical, actionable terms today, I suspect this means forming inter-generational and intra-generational cooperatives as a defensive measure by the under-capitalized against predations (sometimes not even conscious or intentional) by the well-capitalized. That's a tough problem to solve.

Re: Toys ‘R’ Us Didn’t Have to Die

#220

Post by toufique »

toufique wrote: post #98

Begs the question, what kinds of local businesses are structurally safe from being disrupted by Amazon? Some that come to mind: * Food - restaurants, fast food, pizza, takeout * Social experiences - bars, cafes, arcades, comedy clubs * Things that can't be shipped - gas stations, perishables * Things you want right away - milk, delis, convenience stores * Things that can't be commoditized - Copying keys * Services -…

Wow, I stand corrected. Question still stands, is anything safe?
Post reply on HN