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The death of the brick and mortar toy store

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Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#241

Post by pstuart »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #196
me_smith wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a timely comment for me. I have been doing research on opening a small indie (new/used) bookstore in a small old downtown I walk through almost every day. It has restaurants, specialty shops, coffee shops and a small local grocery store. I've always thought it was missing a bookstore. Any tips/warnings that might not be immediately obvious to a hopeful bookstore owner? Do you think there is a sweet spot in te…

I'm just an internet commenter who knows nothing about running a retail store and has thought about a bookstore as well. With that out of the way, finding high margin items to sell to offset low margin items would make sense. I think this is why you see coffee paired with bookstores, coffee should be high margin but might also require food licensing/inspections. Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items f…

And if there was space for it, hosting board/card games.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#242

Post by dh2022 »

zoomablemind wrote: post #194
bombcar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they’re often owned by funds that are measured in the billions. A parking lot in New York covers for a bunch of empty middle America storefronts, as long as the valuation works out on paper.

It seems that approach is a way to generate losses without actually losing the titles. These losses are needed to offset incomes elsewhere thus not paying taxes on profits. Investment fund's commodity is value - the rest are just tools to optimize the value.

But if there are losses there are no profits. I am with SoftTalker on this one. I figure there are things I do not know that explains how this keeps happening even though my simplistic knowledge thinks it is not sustainable.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#243

Post by dh2022 »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #222
SoftTalker wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that simple. If the property is abandonded there's nobody to collect any taxes from.

On which case it’s owned by the state and the state can do whatever it wants. Like rent it out for $10 a year to the local knitting club.

How would the state become the owner of the property if there are no taxes of the property? The owner would probably be the bank or someone that bought the property in foreclosure. But not the state.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#244

Post by [deleted] »

salynchnew wrote: post #68
marcus_holmes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had this experience with a local town centre where the high street basically died. Retailers priced out by high rents, which was fine when the economy was good and people were spending, but as soon as it took a dip there was nowhere to go and they had to shut up shop. And this mechanism was why; almost all the real estate was owned by funds and leveraged. Property values based on a multiplier of rent. They could w…

That seems like a rather inefficient use of resources. How long will a fund typically keep that on the books before they have to offload the asset or declare bankruptcy? At a certain point, that smells like a scam with a real estate business attached to it.

[deleted]

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#245

Post by CamperBob2 »

milesskorpen wrote: post #124
mschuster91 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That seems like a rather inefficient use of resources. Inefficient for society? Yes. But for the capital providers aka investment (and let's be clear: retirement ) funds and banks? Definitely not. The fundamental problem at the root of all of it is how the US does pensions. In contrast to most European countries that operate in a redistribution system, aka the current workers pay the pensions of the current pension…

Americans save at a much lower rate than Europeans (5% US vs. 15% EU), which I think makes your whole thesis backwards. Maybe Americans SHOULD be saving more for retirement, but they aren't!

I think the idea is, why should they save more, if they can save a smaller fraction of their income and let the market amplify it for them?

Seems like one of those plans that works great right up until it doesn't.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#246

Post by CamperBob2 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #239
triceratops wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no, automation isn't a panacea either, because an economy not just requires workers to do work, but also people having money to buy things Automation is the whole reason people have money to buy things. Before we had automation everyone lived on farms and sewed their own clothes. Only noblemen could afford to pay for clothes. Your intuition is plain wrong, I'm sorry. AI may take away purpose if it takes away li…

> Automation is the whole reason people have money to buy things. Before we had automation everyone lived on farms and sewed their own clothes. Only noblemen could afford to pay for clothes. Your intuition is plain wrong, I'm sorry. Every industrial revolution to this day produced insane amounts of job losses and suffering. In fact, that's how we got the labor rights almost a century ago. Affected workers literally g…

Every industrial revolution to this day produced insane amounts of job losses and suffering.

(Shrug) Things were worse before. That's the part of the argument that the Luddites and their fellow travelers simply can't hand-wave their way out of.

This implies that at every stage, the best choice for the most people was to move ahead with the revolution, instead of trying to stop it.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#247

Post by hdgvhicv »

dh2022 wrote: post #243
hdgvhicv wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On which case it’s owned by the state and the state can do whatever it wants. Like rent it out for $10 a year to the local knitting club.

How would the state become the owner of the property if there are no taxes of the property? The owner would probably be the bank or someone that bought the property in foreclosure. But not the state.

Then you collect the tax from the bank.

Can’t avoid a land value tax as the land is forfeit if the tax isn’t paid. Doesn’t matter who owns it.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#248

Post by expedition32 »

bombcar wrote: post #13
kurttheviking wrote: post #6

I own a reasonably well performing indie bookstore. I've noticed for the model to work you need a critical mass of other local shops clustered to make the trip an experience for families and diverse tastes. My working theory is that three of such small businesses are sufficient and could operate well with a common inventory strategy and manager (e.g. a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop...nothing that sp…

The thing I've noticed is that even dying downtowns want insane amounts of rent; I think you have to be able to buy the building to make it work. However, that's not as unrealistic as it may seem, because the city itself often owns a decent amount of downtown, and can make a deal.

For the companies that own all that real estate it's better to let them sit empty for years than lower the rent.

But eventually the hammer always falls.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#249

Post by ishouldstayaway »

SoftTalker wrote: post #214
ishouldstayaway wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of LVT is right there in the name: it is the land that has value. "Location, location, location" is an old cliche for a reason. If you let your property go empty and crumble, the Land Value Tax is there to provide the incentive for you to either fix up the property and actually use it, or sell it to someone who will.

What if nobody wants to buy it and you can't pay the tax?

The same thing you do now when you can't sell a piece of land: you lower the price.

In addition to what others said, in this case the land is obviously not worth very much, and thus the taxes are also minuscule.

Re: The death of the brick and mortar toy store

#250

Post by ghaff »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #218
ghaff wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general theory of most malls was that you had anchor stores. My local one has a couple of stores adjacent to the mall (a local chain supermarket and and Home Depot) that are very busy, almost too much so. The mall itself is pretty much dead and has been on the market for ages. The anchor stores--JCPenney, Sears, and Macy's are all long gone. Haven't been in the actual mall in ages but I assume it's pretty sad and…

It's pretty much the same in my place, too. The old malls are dying. There are new malls coming up, but I'm not sure how they are going to hold in the future.

Luxury malls in cities aren't really my thing and there are even some higher-end suburban malls where Apple stores seem to have become an anchor store in this day and age that I would have laughed at once upon a time--shows how much I know.

I will say I have walked into some malls in Vegas and only half-hyperbolically thought I couldn't (and/or wouldn't want) to have afforded pretty much anything.

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