Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)
I don't think there has been a thread specifically to address Big Box stores, and it might seem like a minor issue given the more obvious big news going on in the world, but the economic and political effects of Big Box stores are a fairly major deal. I don't know the entire history of the Big Box store, so instead of giving an encyclopediac introduction, I will just give a quick sketch of what they are today.

Big Box stores are large retail chains, usually national or international, that sell general merchandise, usually at low or medium prices. The most famous is Wal-Mart, along with Target, K-Mart and others. There are also Big Box stores that focus on specific lines of merchandise, such as Lowe's or Home Depot (home improvement equipment), Best Buy (electronics), Cabela's (outdoor gear). There are also "Little Box" stores that are the same thing on a smaller scale. (Walgreen's Drugs or The Dollar Tree)].

Big Box stores are almost exclusively built as new, purposeful developments that rely on highway or freeway access on cheap land. The are, as the name implies, usually architecturally boring and utilitarian. Most stores are almost identical. They are usually built in commercial parks that work as uncovered shopping malls, with a general purpose retail outlet like Wal-Mart providing the "anchor" and specialized retailers in attached or detached buildings.

Big Box stores have kind of been a Bête Noir for many on the left, for several reasons:

1. Low wages. Many of these businesses keep prices low by keeping wages low. Employees also have little job security or benefits, and because the chains are run nationally, there is little personal loyalty to the employees.

2. Environmental impacts from sprawl: Big Box outlets tend to have gigantic parking lots and encourage more driving, which leads to every type of pollution, including water, air, noise and light. Since they are often new developments, they also involve habitat loss and destruction.

3. Destroying neighborhood and town character. Big box stores often destroy local businesses and downtown areas, turning cities into a bifurcated downtown and a highway interchange full of retail that has little community interaction.

(People can expand on these points and others at great length, I am sure).

On the other hand, here is a few of the pro's:

1. Supply chain logistics. These stores, through a unified supply chain, can deliver goods to more places at a cheaper price, thus increasing efficiency. Some of the low prices are not due to predatory business practices as much as they are due to good centralized planning.

2. Related to the first: these have often opened up new classes of goods in places they wouldn't otherwise be. Unified marketing and economies of scale were one of the things that allowed things like computers to be sold outside of specialty shops.

3. Sometimes "the unique character" of local businesses isn't a good thing. Both in hiring and in how they treat customers, local businesses can be discriminatory. National HR standards and employee conduct training can make for a more pleasant shopping experience. (Or: if you are a woman looking for a job, you might have a lot better of a time applying at Ace Hardware than at Earl's Toolshed)

Also, not exactly a reason, but many people feel, with some reason, that anti-Big Box viewpoints are often snobbish.


I am sure everyone has comments to make about this that are somehow interesting or informative, so lets get arguing!


Thread Update April 2017

I must have been behind the times when I started this thread, because I was still under the impression that retail, especially Big Box retail, was a behemoth that was literally and figuratively steamrolling across the United States' small towns, turning idyllic small towns into parking lots full of Bed, Bath and Beyonds, PetSmarts and Walgreens. But it turns out that 2017 is one of the worst years in a long time for retail, where the Big Box stars that surplanted "Mom & Pop Stores" are being replaced by Amazon, as well as suffering from previous overexpansion and shifting demographics. Several large, historically important retail chains are facing major setbacks, with Sears/K-Mart being one of the biggest. This thread's focus has naturally shifted to be on the causes, and effects, of 2017's Retail Apocalypse. I will see if I can have a mod change the thread title to reflect this.

glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Apr 22, 2017

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

El Mero Mero
Oct 13, 2001

Many of these large stores are now going under as they either move to emulate Amazon or get crushed by Amazon. In their wake they're abandoning their buildings which are now turning into blighted hulks. A lot of large retailers also are dependent on commercial corridors or shopping centers to drive traffic to their shops and they rely on the presence of a high density of large box retailers in one place in order to generate the traffic they need. When a single large box goes under, the drop in traffic causes a sudden a precipitous drop in sales for all of the surrounding boxes.

The creation of these developments is highly incentivized because most cities and towns see 100% of the sales tax go to the local governance. This is why local officials love to rubberstamp or even pay for any kind of high volume or high ticket-price (think car lots) development because they see more of that sales tax revenue than any other type of development.

That being said, when you look at the circulation of revenues and profits, local independents recirculate more of their revenues and profits (think wages, buying locally for their supply chains and maintenance, and taxes) by a large margin than any big box retailer or Amazon


I think that the US retail space is actually in a prime position to see local independent retailers make a resurgence. The modern retail space is incompatible with the big box store model and the only reason they're holding on anymore is because of favorable tax subsidies.

wateroverfire
Jul 3, 2010
Big box stores are cool and good for finding things you need, at low prices, all in one place.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane
I feel like a lot of big box stores are going to go under because they're awful at keeping things in stock. If I'm going to a physical store, I want either expertise that only an expert can provide in-person and/or a hands-on experience with the product (only one of which is possible to get from a big box store), or I'm loving impatient and I want whatever it is NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW! If you say "I can order that in" you can go gently caress yourself, because I specifically came to the store because I wanted something today, rather than two days from now if I order from Amazon.

I'd say there's also a division between "local big box stores" and giant multinational chains. We have a computer/tech store around here called Memory Express. I think it's probably up to 5-10 locations now, and it fits the definition of Big Box Store pretty well, but the employees are a little less dumb than Best Buy, and the product selection is a little bit wider, the service is way better, and it's just a nicer experience to shop in all around.

Frankly, I think specialized stores are the way to go, in terms of physical shops. I want to know that the staff is knowledgable about their (possibly small) range of products, and the thing I need will be in stock. I will pay a premium for this and be happy to do it.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!
Different segments are going to be under different amounts of pressure. The worst-off are entertainment and electronics, which are doomed because content is all going to digital distribution and hardware prices are crashing. Barnes & Noble is probably hosed and Best Buy might be hosed (I'm really skeptical that what's left on their sales floor makes enough money to justify their real estate footprint, especially since the items most exposed to competition from Amazon are the bulky electronics that justify their huge size in the first place). Office stores are probably hosed because they're basically just electronics, furniture, and stationary, the first two are dying to Amazon and the third is dying to Wal-Mart.

Stores that depend largely on clothing sales might be OK since those benefit from changing rooms and inspection, and pantry/grocery have a pretty large "need-it-now" factor.

Wal-Mart is actually having a different set of problems anyway: It has too many stores that are competing with each other and it's losing a lot of sales to places like Walgreens that are more conveniently located. Wal-Mart Express was supposed to expand them to rural areas, but that was a bust (probably because they were awful).

The empty shells of these things will be an interesting thing to watch though. A lot of them aren't getting converted into new retail, but instead are winding up with novelties that take up a ton of floor space like indoor racing and trampoline parks.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Dec 4, 2016

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

OneEightHundred posted:

Different segments are going to be under different amounts of pressure. The worst-off are entertainment and electronics, which are doomed because content is all going to digital distribution and hardware prices are crashing. Barnes & Noble is probably hosed and Best Buy might be hosed (I'm really skeptical that what's left on their sales floor makes enough money to justify their real estate footprint, especially since the items most exposed to competition from Amazon are the bulky electronics that justify their huge size in the first place). Office stores are probably hosed because they're basically just electronics, furniture, and stationary, the first two are dying to Amazon and the third is dying to Wal-Mart.

Stores that depend largely on clothing sales might be OK since those benefit from changing rooms and inspection, and pantry/grocery have a pretty large "need-it-now" factor.

Wal-Mart is actually having a different set of problems anyway: It has too many stores that are competing with each other and it's losing a lot of sales to places like Walgreens that are more conveniently located. Wal-Mart Express was supposed to expand them to rural areas, but that was a bust (probably because they were awful).

The empty shells of these things will be an interesting thing to watch though. A lot of them aren't getting converted into new retail, but instead are winding up with novelties that take up a ton of floor space like indoor racing and trampoline parks.

I went into a Barnes and Noble last year, and it seemed they were kind of trying to combine an "experience" with just a place to buy things. So you have books, toys, displays and a cafe. So it kind of offers a "service" as well as just a product. Its a keen bit of marketing, but I don't know how successful it will be on two grounds:

1. If you want an authentic, interactive community experience, like those millenials are doing in their renovated downtowns, going to a shopping park and drinking a coffee while reading the newspaper isn't really that involving.

2. Its expensive for the experience. Buy a book for 4 dollars on Amazon, or buy it for 10 dollars at Barnes and Noble and drink a 5 dollar coffee. The added value of that experience doesn't seem to be 10 dollars.


So while I think that repackaging themselves as not just retail outlets, but service and entertainment centers, might help a little, but it doesn't seem to be a full strategy.

The Muppets On PCP
Nov 13, 2016

by Fluffdaddy

glowing-fish posted:

2. Its expensive for the experience. Buy a book for 4 dollars on Amazon, or buy it for 10 dollars at Barnes and Noble and drink a 5 dollar coffee. The added value of that experience doesn't seem to be 10 dollars.


on the other hand it's super expensive to fly or drive all the way to a fulfillment center or amazon hq to destroy their bathroom

Paradoxish
Dec 19, 2003

Will you stop going crazy in there?

glowing-fish posted:

I went into a Barnes and Noble last year, and it seemed they were kind of trying to combine an "experience" with just a place to buy things. So you have books, toys, displays and a cafe. So it kind of offers a "service" as well as just a product. Its a keen bit of marketing, but I don't know how successful it will be on two grounds:

This isn't actually new, for what it's worth. I used to go into B&N to just sit down at the cafe and read over a decade ago.

I think you're right that this kind of "experience" doesn't justify the existence of a huge retail store, though. In the specific case of B&N, I could pretty much get the same thing if Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks offered some sort of in-store ebook lending system that I could access on my phone or tablet.

Wistful of Dollars
Aug 25, 2009

The only one I don't actively loathe is Costco.

I'm not a fan of Amazon as a company, but anyone who makes life more miserable for Walmart gets brownie points from me.

BarbarianElephant
Feb 12, 2015
The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.
Amazon is crushing these places, because they are simply no fun to shop at. Unless you are furnishing your first apartment, in which case it is helpful to have everything basic together at low prices, it's simply easier to order your new toaster from Amazon and wait 2 days. No-one needs a toaster faster than that. No one needs to spend a precious hour or two of existence driving, parking and physically walking through a store to find the toaster display, then standing in a queue while the miserable checkout person scans the 45 items of the person in front of you (who is presumably furnishing their first apartment) as slowly as humanly possible.

Star Man
Jun 1, 2008

There's a star maaaaaan
Over the rainbow
I hate going to Walmart, Target, or Kmart. I hate it, hate it, hate it. But I can't quit them. There is rarely anything on Amazon that I need that I'm willing to ride out a two-day wait for that I can just drive ten minutes to Walmart and get for a couple of dollars more. It's just easier for me to go to Guiry's and buy some paints than it is to order it on Dick Blick and wait. But I also love shopping. It gets me out of the house for a while at least.

This article written by Joe Lansdale sums it all up for me quite nicely, though:

Joe Lansdale posted:

"Walmart, I can't Quite You"

Once upon a time in our little town of Nacogdoches, arguably the oldest continuous settlement in Texas, there was no Walmart. There were numerous stores downtown and few outlander establishments where we bought our goods. Our first Walmart was little more than a glorified Kmart, just another place to shop. Then the old Walmart was replaced by a Walmart Superstore. As it went up, potential patrons like my wife and I drove by the ground where it was being built and stared out at the rising structure that was about to replace so many stores and businesses in our town. At that moment, we did not see it as good.

But lo and behold, it was built, and we came, and we bought, and I was wrong.

We needed a Walmart Superstore in our town. We just didn’t know it. It has become a focal point. A place where bored and thrifty shoppers can congregate and entertain themselves by seeing what’s new and who’s there with a kind of wonderful East Texas local yokelism reminiscent of a group trip to foreign tourist sites.

Laying it on the line, Walmart is not considered a prestigious place to buy clothes, quality jewelry or Paris fashions. If you’re looking for sexy underwear, maybe victoria’s Secret is a better place for you. There’s even a Web site that reveals shoppers at superstores in all their sometimes backwoods, broadass glory. The site’s secretive cameras focus on house shoe-shuffling women in muumuus all the colors of the rainbow (if the rainbow faded a bit and had some gravy stains on it). you’ll find huge, bearded men strapped snugly into overalls, and waddling patrons of both sexes in straining stretch pants, usually brown or gray (maybe that’s just the way I remember them).

Then there’s the rare bon vivant decked out in a cosmic, shimmering blue or green uniform that would shame a peacock, all of these stretch-pants regulars revealing way too much of their Grand Canyons, minus the donkey ride down (thank goodness), as they move off into the aisles searching for bargains.

There are gangs of overweight scooter riders, sometimes in corrective shoes that never touch the ground, whipping about with bags of open cookies in their laps, devouring as they shop, consuming enough calories to fuel an Olympic rowing team. Fact is, there’s something ominous about how the scooter riders congregate near the hot dog and ice cream aisles like motorcycle gangs, missing only the insignia on the leather jackets that read something like: WALMART ANGELS or BAD MOTOR SCOOTERS. They’re the kind of folks who look at you when you walk by as if, on a moment’s notice, they might snatch a can of potted meat and throw it at you because you’re ambulatory.

It’s easy to make fun of them because, dammit, they’re funny, and I’m ashamed that I think so. Missing teeth and plumber’s cracks are not a cause for celebration. Few of us wake up in the morning wishing we were overweight, underfinanced and unattractive with medical problems. But then, who is out there laughing at me? I’m not George Clooney material, either.

It seems the ones who make the most fun, like the ones who view the Walmart-hilarity Web site regularly, are small-minded, insecure turds who would not understand Mark Twain’s statement about there being “no humor in heaven,” meaning humor is primarily based on the misfortune of others. I can see the humor, too, when I’m in a mean mood. I’m not a saint, or I couldn’t write about Walmart’s clientele with an eye toward humor.

Let’s turn the dial the other way for a moment. Once, on a book tour in Los Angeles, I heard a welldressed man ragging about Walmart to the desk clerk in a hotel, as if this poor wage slave had nothing better to do then listen to this rear end-wipe ejaculate about the great unwashed. Well-dressed man was ragging while trying to bring the discussion to a higher ethical plane by talking about the cheap employment, foreign child labor and lack of benefits associated with these stores.

I got to say, I’m with Well-dressed man there. I’d rather not have my goods packed by children in diapers, foreign or otherwise. I’m all for folks being paid proper salaries, and given good insurance and better benefits, so that at the end of the day they can go home having earned more than enough to keep the gas from being turned off, and have more on the meal plan than a can of sardines, even if they are packed in springwater instead of soy oil.

Well-dressed man had one important thing to say. It was what motivated him the most. Walmart stores lead to the closing of downtowns. They do. No question about that. Not that this bastard had ever seen a small downtown, and the closest he’d been to Walmart was a scathing editorial in some newspaper somewhere. He looked at me and decided I should be brought into the conversation when all I wanted was to remind the clerk I needed a wake-up call. The man asked me what I thought about Walmart.

I asked if he had ever been in one. “Why, of course not,” he said. I asked him where he shopped. He told me.

They were expensive places. I told him, “you know, most of that stuff, except the stuff you don’t need, you can get cheaper at Walmart.” The clerk liked it. I liked it. I registered my wake-up call and went upstairs, left the authority on Walmart in the lobby, pissed off and pontificating.

If he had had heat vision, he would have burned me into a pile of ash and kicked it into the street.

Why am I defensive about Walmart? Let me tell you about the long-gone downtowns, my friends.

Before I do, I know you have some wonderful, cheerful, perhaps tearful, stories about the downtowns of your youth. Me too. I don’t want to hear them.

Let me tell you, the late downtowns in East Texas burgs were usually small stores run by locals. They generally priced things three times more than they were worth. Maybe they had to, but I don’t care. I don’t want to pay $30 for a hammer and a fistful of nails. If I wanted a banana, I had to go to another store. If I wanted to pick up a pair of shoes, another store.

The parking was minimal, and the choices were few.

If you worked, by the time you got off work, many of the stores were closed. Saturday, they might be open, but Sunday they were closed again. So for the working individual, the mother or father who had a kid wake up in the night with aching gums from teething, and you wanted something to make it all better, you had to wait until the next day. If you noted it was 7 p.m. and you were expecting dinner guests at 8 p.m., but forgot to buy hamburger for the meat loaf, you were, once again, screwed.

If you’re poor and barely making it, or even if your income is middle-of-the-road, it’s good to get what you need at slashed prices, anytime of the day, seven days a week, in a big, ugly, over-lit store that closes only on Christmas and half a day on Christmas Eve. If you forgot to get a gift card and a six pack of tall boys, you have to think, “To hell with downtown.” What we got now in our downtown are specialty stores that provide things we can’t get at Walmart, like maybe a stuffed deer head for that special place over the mantle. The stuff we really need, hell, it’s at Walmart.

Here’s something else. With Walmart in town, lots of people can be put to work, far more than downtown ever employed. Someone has to run a 24-hour store, check people out, sack groceries, push carts, place stock, work at the McDonald’s sequestered in the back. The workers have all skin colors, not something I saw a lot of downtown, except for immigrants unloading trucks. When I have a tummy ache from eating too many jalapeños late at night, I go down to our Walmart and buy Alka-Seltzer, run it through the computerized checkout, and I’m gone.

However, not before noticing that a large number of shoppers there look like those on that humiliating Web site, and a whole lot do not. Many are doctors and lawyers and teachers and pillars of our community, and a couple of guys out on probation.

As I catch my reflection in the automatic door on the way out, I notice one of those shoppers looks a lot like me. Am I on camera?

PS: The book racks at Walmart suck. Just being fair.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!

glowing-fish posted:

So while I think that repackaging themselves as not just retail outlets, but service and entertainment centers, might help a little, but it doesn't seem to be a full strategy.
B&N is planning to close a third of their stores, so they're not doing well regardless, and this is despite the fact that their biggest brick-and-mortar competitor (Borders) closed.

Fun anecdote: 10 years ago, if you walked into a Best Buy, movies and music were like a third of the store. Today, they're about 3 short aisles. Best Buy had other product categories that they could expand into that space though, but if retail book sales fall through, B&N is going to be a coffee shop the size of a Staples, and they're mostly located in shopping malls where the leases are really expensive.

There's another important but infrequently-cited factor too: Non-fiction sales are being eroded by the availability of information on the Internet. The only silver lining is that e-reader share is stagnant at around 20%, so print is here to stay for a while at least.

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

Star Man posted:

I hate going to Walmart, Target, or Kmart. I hate it, hate it, hate it. But I can't quit them. There is rarely anything on Amazon that I need that I'm willing to ride out a two-day wait for that I can just drive ten minutes to Walmart and get for a couple of dollars more. It's just easier for me to go to Guiry's and buy some paints than it is to order it on Dick Blick and wait. But I also love shopping. It gets me out of the house for a while at least.

This article written by Joe Lansdale sums it all up for me quite nicely, though:

I don't know who to disagree more with in that article: the strawman, or the author who destroyed the strawman, presumably to the slow clap of onlookers.

I guess one thing about Wal-Mart specifically is that I grew up in what I think was the last part of the US to get Wal-Marts, Oregon and Washington. There was already the Fred Meyer chain, which was founded in Oregon, invented "One Stop Shopping", but were built with a little bit more harmony in regards to urbanization (and were unionized). I don't think I heard about Wal-Marts until the early 1990s, and I can't even remember the first time I went into one.

One of the interesting things about that article for me is how much going to Wal-Mart has become this type of reverse-snobbery in certain places "All those East Coast ELITES care about their communities! Well, we will show them by destroying our towns!" This is especially odd to me considering this recent election was about protectionism: people want to protect their wages, protect their traditional towns, but also don't want to listen to those COASTAL SNOBS who are suggesting that maybe there is a downside to replacing towns with freeway interchanges. Its like, you know that if you want to keep those "manufacturing jobs in America", you won't be able to buy a fan for $5 dollars at 3 AM, right?

wateroverfire
Jul 3, 2010

glowing-fish posted:

I don't know who to disagree more with in that article: the strawman, or the author who destroyed the strawman, presumably to the slow clap of onlookers.

I guess one thing about Wal-Mart specifically is that I grew up in what I think was the last part of the US to get Wal-Marts, Oregon and Washington. There was already the Fred Meyer chain, which was founded in Oregon, invented "One Stop Shopping", but were built with a little bit more harmony in regards to urbanization (and were unionized). I don't think I heard about Wal-Marts until the early 1990s, and I can't even remember the first time I went into one.

One of the interesting things about that article for me is how much going to Wal-Mart has become this type of reverse-snobbery in certain places "All those East Coast ELITES care about their communities! Well, we will show them by destroying our towns!" This is especially odd to me considering this recent election was about protectionism: people want to protect their wages, protect their traditional towns, but also don't want to listen to those COASTAL SNOBS who are suggesting that maybe there is a downside to replacing towns with freeway interchanges. Its like, you know that if you want to keep those "manufacturing jobs in America", you won't be able to buy a fan for $5 dollars at 3 AM, right?

How are you liking Chile, btw?

Having to go to five different stores to maybe hopefully find the not-really-even-specialty things you need is life here. So is paying at least double what you should for lovely merchandise or waiting 20 days because your stuff is imported and the independent store you deal with only brings in one consolidation per month. There are big box stores here, sort of, but they're hilariously bad.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

OneEightHundred posted:

B&N is planning to close a third of their stores, so they're not doing well regardless, and this is despite the fact that their biggest brick-and-mortar competitor (Borders) closed.

Fun anecdote: 10 years ago, if you walked into a Best Buy, movies and music were like a third of the store. Today, they're about 3 short aisles. Best Buy had other product categories that they could expand into that space though, but if retail book sales fall through, B&N is going to be a coffee shop the size of a Staples, and they're mostly located in shopping malls where the leases are really expensive.

There's another important but infrequently-cited factor too: Non-fiction sales are being eroded by the availability of information on the Internet. The only silver lining is that e-reader share is stagnant at around 20%, so print is here to stay for a while at least.

Brick and mortar stores for a hell of a lot of goods are just dying. This is especially true of media; instead of storing it on some physical medium now you can just download it. Way easier and the thing never wears out. There are always people who will want the physical media (records are still produced for hardcore audiophiles, for example and I'm definitely one of those weirdos that would prefer a physical book to an e-reader) but even then the internet has been taking over certain things. Why buy a huge, bulky encyclopedia set when you can just look it up on Wikipedia? Literally everybody's cell phone has the entirety of Wikipedia on ready access.

While there will always be a store somewhere at least moderately nearby for poo poo you need right loving now for whatever reason most goods you can wait a few days or a week for. You don't even need to physically handle the good. Plus online reviews makes it harder to peddle badly made garbage that will break too quickly. At the same time no physical store can sell everything. Amazon can. I can order a toaster, a camera, three tripods, a set of screwdrivers, an entire pallet of pickled beets, a 55 gallon drum of lube, and 87 coffee cups with a few clicks so long as I have the money. I can even do it at 3 a.m. while sitting in my apartment drunk in my underwear. I'd have to visit multiple physical stores to get those things and will have trouble finding some of them. You can buy pretty much anything on the internet no matter how ridiculous it seems. Rather than being limited to whatever the store chooses to stock you can get whatever odd thing from somebody, somewhere.

Amused to Death
Aug 10, 2009

google "The Night Witches", and prepare for :stare:

OneEightHundred posted:

and pantry/grocery have a pretty large "need-it-now" factor.

I can confirm thiso. He'll the company actively promoteseeking our online shopping which can be picked up at the store or home delivered, but it's a tiny niche

Nonsense
Jan 26, 2007

HEB makes the rest of American grocers look like Soviet food depots.

unlimited shrimp
Aug 30, 2008

glowing-fish posted:

1. Supply chain logistics. These stores, through a unified supply chain, can deliver goods to more places at a cheaper price, thus increasing efficiency. Some of the low prices are not due to predatory business practices as much as they are due to good centralized planning.

2. Related to the first: these have often opened up new classes of goods in places they wouldn't otherwise be. Unified marketing and economies of scale were one of the things that allowed things like computers to be sold outside of specialty shops.
It's worth noting that these are only pros if you believe our current consumption/consumerism culture is a good thing.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

the trump tutelage posted:

It's worth noting that these are only pros if you believe our current consumption/consumerism culture is a good thing.

I mean they're kind of good in a "humans necessarily consume to exist" sense, some people might buy too much stuff but everyone needs to buy some stuff in order to live, we all need clothes, food, and shelter.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

glowing-fish posted:

1. Low wages. Many of these businesses keep prices low by keeping wages low. Employees also have little job security or benefits, and because the chains are run nationally, there is little personal loyalty to the employees.
While I don't doubt that the wages are low, are they lower than non-big-box retail? Also I think there are some that are known for having okay wages, like Costco.

quote:

3. Destroying neighborhood and town character. Big box stores often destroy local businesses and downtown areas, turning cities into a bifurcated downtown and a highway interchange full of retail that has little community interaction.
You're not wrong, but the reason they destroy them is because consumers prefer them. Specifically, consumers have a tendency to prefer low prices and convenience over more nebulous qualities like 'character'.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Brick and mortar stores for a hell of a lot of goods are just dying. This is especially true of media; instead of storing it on some physical medium now you can just download it. Way easier and the thing never wears out.
Yeah, the only physical media I buy any more are cartridges for old consoles, the occasional book for my wife (but most books even she buys are still ebooks), and kids' books. We hate the feeling of having too much stuff, and digital media is great for that because you can buy as much as you want without your home feeling cluttered and overwhelmed. If only I could do the same for random kitchen appliances.

Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"
Small time retail, like small business in general is rife with employee abuse.

pesty13480
Nov 13, 2002

Ask me about peasant etymology!

Cicero posted:

While I don't doubt that the wages are low, are they lower than non-big-box retail? Also I think there are some that are known for having okay wages, like Costco.

I was wondering about that myself. Seems to me that most of the smaller stores I know, in my region, including the "mom and pop" variety, are minimum wage and low future except for the owners. One dead end, minimum wage and minimum benefit job is the same as every other.

Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

I hope the general poverty is helping push consumerism down the toilet. Buying poo poo is a soulless experience and I've tried to minimize personally. Its like that lovely cube city from the Reboot cartoon plopped down in every suburb forever.

loving things everywhere are annoying as gently caress I cannot possibly relate to the person going into stores like World Market that infect these spiritless retail landscape. Who is buying this cheap chinese poo poo that has no functional purpose?

I get decorations can be nice, but most of it is absolute poo poo in quality. I'd rather a nice handmade thing with some soul put into it than a thousand faux art pieces.

Same with pretty much everything is, disposable garbage that fills nothing other than a mental illness that makes people buy as much poo poo as possible to fulfill an addiction.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

quote:

I get decorations can be nice, but most of it is absolute poo poo in quality. I'd rather a nice handmade thing with some soul put into it than a thousand faux art pieces.
I kind of feel like we're moving towards a two-tiered system where most big box type stuff like electronics or media you get online, and then people will go to local places for stuff where they care about having more character/charm.

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

the trump tutelage posted:

It's worth noting that these are only pros if you believe our current consumption/consumerism culture is a good thing.

I don't really know what "consumerism culture" means. It seems to be a nebulous thing to criticize.

But I know that I buy certain things. Lets say I want to buy a box of envelopes. If my town has five stores selling envelopes, and each one of those stores has their envelopes trucked in from a different warehouse in a different truck, that is less efficient than if you have one store with one truck and one warehouse.

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

Sylink posted:

I hope the general poverty is helping push consumerism down the toilet. Buying poo poo is a soulless experience and I've tried to minimize personally. Its like that lovely cube city from the Reboot cartoon plopped down in every suburb forever.

loving things everywhere are annoying as gently caress I cannot possibly relate to the person going into stores like World Market that infect these spiritless retail landscape. Who is buying this cheap chinese poo poo that has no functional purpose?

I get decorations can be nice, but most of it is absolute poo poo in quality. I'd rather a nice handmade thing with some soul put into it than a thousand faux art pieces.

Same with pretty much everything is, disposable garbage that fills nothing other than a mental illness that makes people buy as much poo poo as possible to fulfill an addiction.

Consumerism is a soulless experience? Can you explain more, please? I've never considered the idea that materialism is a vapid escape from a meaningless life.

silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost

ToxicSlurpee posted:

You can buy pretty much anything on the internet no matter how ridiculous it seems. Rather than being limited to whatever the store chooses to stock you can get whatever odd thing from somebody, somewhere.

Prices for smallish consumer goods aren't that great on Amazon though, like if you needed to buy dish soap or trash bags or a can of tomatoes you can pay 2x, or I've even seen 4x more than if you were to buy it in a grocery store. It's just not economical to ship a single can of tomatoes to someone's door.

glowing-fish posted:

I don't know who to disagree more with in that article: the strawman, or the author who destroyed the strawman, presumably to the slow clap of onlookers.

. . .

One of the interesting things about that article for me is how much going to Wal-Mart has become this type of reverse-snobbery in certain places "All those East Coast ELITES care about their communities! Well, we will show them by destroying our towns!"

It's not really a strawman though. A lot of criticism of Wal-Mart basically boils down to classism--'ugh the people who shop there are trash' and 'why does anybody need to pay low prices for consumer goods?'. It's no wonder that people take umbrage to that. Also, as mentioned before by other posters, working retail for a small business isn't really that much better and may even be worse than working for Wal-Mart.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Only semi-related to this discussion, but interesting enough to warrant a crosspost: Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

quote:

What is Amazon Go?
Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

How does Amazon Go work?
Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.
So not only is Amazon crushing existing big box stores via online shopping, now they're going to move in on their brick and mortar turf as well.

FCKGW
May 21, 2006

Best Buy will be fine. If you look at the moves they've made in the last few years, they've become super aggressive to responding to the threat of internet sales. They've gotten rid of rebates and they got rid of restocking fees. They've aggressively matched prices to amazon and online retailers. They've shrunk floor space of items declining in sales like movies and music and expanding big ticket items that don't commonly get purchased online like appliances and high end TVs. Even more importantly they've expanded heavily in the "store within a store" concept and have companies like Apple and Samsung buying floorspace in their stores at a premium.

On the flip side, Amazon is no longer the sure fire bet for lowest price. Often times they just match whatever local big box has it for. For any big purchase I just check Best Buy or Target first and if they aren't cheaper they will happily match it anyways. Amazon is coasting on their reputation and if they didn't have so much money coming from AWS they would be in trouble.

Inferior Third Season
Jan 15, 2005

Cicero posted:

Only semi-related to this discussion, but interesting enough to warrant a crosspost: Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

So not only is Amazon crushing existing big box stores via online shopping, now they're going to move in on their brick and mortar turf as well.
This sounds loving terrible. Now instead of a cashier going one-by-one through my things at a checkout register, I'll have to do it myself at my car when loading it up to make sure I didn't get charged for something I picked up but didn't set back in place just perfectly enough for the sensor.

Death Bot
Mar 4, 2007

Binary killing machines, turning 1 into 0 since 0011000100111001 0011011100110110
I've linked it every time this convo comes up, but there was a paper written that concluded that if Wal-Mart increased their internal minwage to 12/hr, the annual cost passed on to the average shopper was under $100. So each full time worker would make more extra in a week than the average shopper would spend extra in a year.

I can't find the paper because apparently they raised it to $10 since the last time I looked and googling "walmart minwage" just brings up a bunch of wsj meltdowns

La Brea Carpet
Nov 22, 2007

I have no mouth and I must post

Cicero posted:

Only semi-related to this discussion, but interesting enough to warrant a crosspost: Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

So not only is Amazon crushing existing big box stores via online shopping, now they're going to move in on their brick and mortar turf as well.

Sam's Clubs around me are already doing a similar thing. You scan the item barcode on your phone as you shop. You pay from your phone and show the phone receipt at the door like you would a paper one. It's a pretty painless process, except for getting the barcode on a giant box of something to scan right.

Paradoxish
Dec 19, 2003

Will you stop going crazy in there?

La Brea Carpet posted:

Sam's Clubs around me are already doing a similar thing. You scan the item barcode on your phone as you shop. You pay from your phone and show the phone receipt at the door like you would a paper one. It's a pretty painless process, except for getting the barcode on a giant box of something to scan right.

I'm pretty sure this is something Sam's Club has rolled out nationwide at this point and it's pretty great. I have no idea why Amazon decided to go with a more complex solution for the same end result. I find it kind of interesting that phone apps are basically doing an end run around things like self checkout and touchscreen fast food kiosks.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Inferior Third Season posted:

This sounds loving terrible. Now instead of a cashier going one-by-one through my things at a checkout register, I'll have to do it myself at my car when loading it up to make sure I didn't get charged for something I picked up but didn't set back in place just perfectly enough for the sensor.

Paradoxish posted:

I'm pretty sure this is something Sam's Club has rolled out nationwide at this point and it's pretty great. I have no idea why Amazon decided to go with a more complex solution for the same end result. I find it kind of interesting that phone apps are basically doing an end run around things like self checkout and touchscreen fast food kiosks.
I mean yeah if it's inconsistent that'll suck, but if it works well then it reduces the amount of friction in the shopping experience. If it actually works like it looks in the video that'd be awesome.

From a UX perspective, "grab thing off shelf" is a lot better than "grab thing off shelf, pull out phone, rotate object until code is visible, align phone camera to code". Only a small annoyance, but one that you have to repeat times however many things you buy.

That said the Sam's Club system still sounds way better than lines.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 5, 2016

BarbarianElephant
Feb 12, 2015
The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

Inferior Third Season posted:

This sounds loving terrible. Now instead of a cashier going one-by-one through my things at a checkout register, I'll have to do it myself at my car when loading it up to make sure I didn't get charged for something I picked up but didn't set back in place just perfectly enough for the sensor.

"Now instead of giving your list to the grocer and chilling while he got your goods for you from the shelves behind him, you have to trail round this huge cavernous store with a wheeled trolley picking things up yourself, then having them scanned one by one at the door. Sounds like a nightmare!"

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

BarbarianElephant posted:

"Now instead of giving your list to the grocer and chilling while he got your goods for you from the shelves behind him, you have to trail round this huge cavernous store with a wheeled trolley picking things up yourself, then having them scanned one by one at the door. Sounds like a nightmare!"

It is. Grocery shopping loving sucks, and the stores are designed to make things hard to find so you have to spend longer in the store looking around, increasing the odds of impulse buys.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Death Bot posted:

I've linked it every time this convo comes up, but there was a paper written that concluded that if Wal-Mart increased their internal minwage to 12/hr, the annual cost passed on to the average shopper was under $100. So each full time worker would make more extra in a week than the average shopper would spend extra in a year.

I can't find the paper because apparently they raised it to $10 since the last time I looked and googling "walmart minwage" just brings up a bunch of wsj meltdowns

Walmart actively avoids paying anybody at all. I worked for them a few years ago and when the recession hit they did their best to cut hours to the bone and get rid of anybody making more than ten an hour. Benefits also instantaneously became prohibitively expensive. Now they absolutely will not start new people full time. This is entirely geared toward making the Walton kids rich. They won't raise wages like that unless they're forced to.

Walmart is an evil, evil company.

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Walmart actively avoids paying anybody at all. I worked for them a few years ago and when the recession hit they did their best to cut hours to the bone and get rid of anybody making more than ten an hour. Benefits also instantaneously became prohibitively expensive. Now they absolutely will not start new people full time. This is entirely geared toward making the Walton kids rich. They won't raise wages like that unless they're forced to.

Walmart is an evil, evil company.

And in a normal market economy, they couldn't get away with that, because other competing retail outlets would attract workers away. However, Wal-Mart is a monopsony for labor (a monopsony is the counterpart to a monopoly, the sole buyer), and so can pay workers below what they would earn in a competitive market.

Apart from all of the moral issues, this is kind of one of the biggest problems in economics: centralization leads to economies of scale, which saves money, but also can lead to anti-competitive pricing, which loses money.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Sylink posted:

I hope the general poverty is helping push consumerism down the toilet. Buying poo poo is a soulless experience and I've tried to minimize personally. Its like that lovely cube city from the Reboot cartoon plopped down in every suburb forever.

loving things everywhere are annoying as gently caress I cannot possibly relate to the person going into stores like World Market that infect these spiritless retail landscape. Who is buying this cheap chinese poo poo that has no functional purpose?

I get decorations can be nice, but most of it is absolute poo poo in quality. I'd rather a nice handmade thing with some soul put into it than a thousand faux art pieces.

Same with pretty much everything is, disposable garbage that fills nothing other than a mental illness that makes people buy as much poo poo as possible to fulfill an addiction.

I mean maybe also some people just like pretty things and don't have the money to spend on vegan organic ethically sourced natural homeopathic tat so instead they go where they can afford?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Pharohman777
Jan 14, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Wal-mart and costco are 'soulless expressions of consumerisum', sure, but they are cheap, and they are places where a small amount of money buys a lot more food than at a more local socially concious place.
Everything may be cheap, lower quality, and not use socially aware manufacturing, but saving money and buying in bulk is why people shop there for food and everyday clothes perishables.

At Wal-mart, getting the stuff needed for basic hygene, nutrition, and clothing is accomplished easily and cheaply, and so money can be saved for stuff that is more artisinal and less 'consumerist'

Food, Clothing, and Hygene are things that every human needs, and Wal-Marts and similar places make it easy to get those things with less resources spent. Sustainability and other things are not issues for a person looking to stretch a paytheck further via getting low-priced food and soap.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply