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Liquid Communism posted:I'd assume it's not significant enough to be noticeable over the usual noise of restaurant failure rates. The trick to surviving economic collapses: have your market already be so unstable that they have no noticeable effect.
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Jul 12, 2017 08:00
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Reminded of how Starbucks failed miserably in Australia, since it turns out we have tons of local coffee places.
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Jul 29, 2017 13:01
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Check the tech bubble thread for fun details on how Uber is an awful, awful company, and its drivers are mostly desperate people basically trading their car's value for money to keep the lights on, and treated horribly by the company.
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Aug 1, 2017 14:36
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call to action posted:Apparently the benefit of being able to get a car if you're black or disabled is ephemeral. Huh. Uber doesn't have a good track record with the disabled, though actually giving service to minorities is a plus. The problem is more going between two extremes; an underbuilt monopoly that refuses to expand to meet demand, and a dubious, exploitative jitney system.
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Aug 1, 2017 14:54
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Baronjutter posted:If you have to take a taxi to get to your local airport you have an absolutely failed local transport system. In most of the USA, that is by design.
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Aug 1, 2017 16:00
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Self-driving cars should be talked about as a theoretical at best. Right now we have glorified Roombas, which can only operate in controlled urban environments. Which may work for taxis, mind, but it means mass adoption of them is a long way away, especially anywhere it snows. Or even rains a lot.
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Aug 1, 2017 17:47
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Does theft on buses even happen? They all have security cameras, you need to pay to get on and presumably anything you steal you have to do so when you can get off, otherwise you're in a confined space with a bunch of people who are going to be pissed at you for disturbing their commute.
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Aug 1, 2017 18:35
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Like, your base assumption should be that anywhere in the US has, at best, completely token public transport if any.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:44
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You don't need to bring luggage, just steal someone else's!
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Aug 3, 2017 08:59
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hobbesmaster posted:The US stopped official genocide policies in the early 20th century. Canada did it in the loving 90s. See also; Australia, the Stolen Generations. Canada had the same hyper-abusive 'schools' for native children to be routinely tortured, raped, neglected and probably murdered and buried in unmarked mass graves.
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Aug 9, 2017 06:59
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fishmech posted:Yeah it's not that American treatment of native people is good. It's just that Canadian treatment is so so so much worse. I don't think anyone's surprised to hear how bad Australia treats its natives, but Canada does almost exactly the same things. And most of Australia's political class still seem to see Aboriginals as animals. (which they legally were for some time)
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Aug 10, 2017 09:00
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blowfish posted:Now, when you think about it, all humans are animals I mean, literally classified as wildlife til like the 70s.
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Aug 10, 2017 09:44
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simmyb posted:This is a myth I assume you have sources to back this up?
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Aug 10, 2017 17:22
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And on the other hand, in hot places it's why malls remain popular, because it beats having your own air conditioning going full blast all day, as I've personally experienced.
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Aug 21, 2017 06:53
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Postmodern architecture must be stopped. It always results in ugly, space-wasting death traps. gently caress, look at Grenfell. On another note, a lot of companies suffering downturns seem to be from chasing the same unicorn: the millennial with money.
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Aug 22, 2017 10:26
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Reveilled posted:I'm not sure I'd call Brutalism postmodern. The whole point was that the ultra-flammable cladding was put onto the building at the request of its rich neighbours to make it look less brutalist.
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Aug 22, 2017 11:43
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High-density housing attracts the dirty poors, foreigns and teenagers, of course.
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Aug 24, 2017 15:41
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In my experience, even the millennials who fill their living spaces with overpriced useless garbage (like me) tend towards increasingly niche stuff, hobbies and collectibles. IE, nerds. Which it's hard to advertise for partly because no one wants to admit to catering to nerds and partly because they tend to be ever-increasingly specific and occasionally embarrassing. They just don't want the same poo poo that boomers want. Probably because if they want it they can just buy it second hand from boomers or get it as hand-me-downs. (Except for affordable housing and jobs, of course)
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Aug 27, 2017 04:51
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Internet advertising is so hated at least partly because in the old days (and it hasn't gotten much better) it was completely unfiltered and selling people poo poo they couldn't possibly want, when it wasn't flat out scams and malware. And heaven help you if you're outside the US, then you'll see the same five ads from local ad buyers and international chains every time. I think in general the issue with marketing nowadays is that they're desperately trying to sell poo poo No One Wants. Like nearly everything Microsoft has done in the last decade and a half.
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Aug 27, 2017 06:54
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Baronjutter posted:Right, no one's going to buy a house cash (well very few people). The problem is that our society being so obsessed only with monthly payments is totally fine with housing prices turning into a huge bubble so long as they can continue to afford the monthly payments. Prices get too high? Just allow longer terms. Don't make enough money to reasonably qualify for such a huge mortgage? Don't worry, the government will swoop in and guarantee your debts. Wow prices keep going up? Clearly more and easier credit is the answer, anything that actually lowered or stabilized prices is off the table since all this easy debt has made everyone over-leveraged and they're banking their lives on their house price always going up. Also make this all tax deductible and make renting super unattractive. See also: Education, college/university fees, student loans.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:23
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the black husserl posted:Normcore was the creation of a trend forecasting group called K-Hole. They rule, and it will make perfect sense if you read that journal. They're actually right about the social shift, that people are no longer part of communities by default, and horrifyingly wrong about the implications of such.
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Sep 8, 2017 16:03
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the black husserl posted:Can you explain why you think that? I think they absolutely nail it, and subsequent trends in media & mass culture seem to back it up: It's been explored in other threads, but simply that naturally formed communities barely exist any more, especially among the young. There's no point getting to know your neighbours because chances are they'll be gone in a few years. All the social groups that older generations took for granted don't exist for the young, between the irrelevance of religion, disintegration of neighbourhoods, and atomisation of the personal identity. This is the kind of alienation that the alt-right rose out of.
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Sep 9, 2017 03:56
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Plinkey posted:Your social group is who you work with now, your church (if you do that) of your significat other's group or who ever around you can afford to also participate in your hobbies. Unless you live within like 30 miles of where you were born and still hang out with people you've known since middle school. I would bet that most people have a healthy dose of all of the above to some extent. Problem happens when no one expects to stay in the same job for more than two years, church is completely irrelevant to anyone under 30 unless you live in the kind of small town community that's dying rapidly (see the rural poverty thread), hobbies are increasingly atomised and wealth-gated, and people are moving frequently because of employment, scarcity of affordable housing, gentrification and lack of financial security, and are having fewer kids later in life because they can't afford to start popping them out throughout their 20s anymore. quote:people who go straight from high school into employment
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Sep 9, 2017 11:21
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And everyone in the small town is unemployed and/or dying from opiate abuse.
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Sep 9, 2017 12:45
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Almost as if retail is having problems because the world no longer works exactly according to the projections of marketing department and portrayals in 1950s sitcoms
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Sep 9, 2017 13:44
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As an Australian you Americans defending your backwards wacky tax shenanigans sound completely loving insane.
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Sep 10, 2017 07:26
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I recall something about how they make 95% of the clothes for 5% of the people. The whole market seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
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Sep 10, 2017 08:49
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greazeball posted:It's absolutely criminal that retailers can advertise their jobs as paying $12/hr when we all know that's a drat lie. You get your paycheck and it's not $12/hr at all! There's all kinds of "taxes" and "withholdings" and other made-up stuff. The law should require job advertisements to be accurate for every individual person. That is dumb and silly given civilised countries manage to advertise accurate prices.
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Sep 10, 2017 11:30
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From the sound of it, the clothing market might be vulnerable to completely loving imploding overnight once a less Kafkaesque alternative makes itself available. Which would probably bring about the mallpocalypse.
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Sep 11, 2017 19:08
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asdf32 posted:I just specifically chose to buy my daughter's first lego set from Toys R Us this weekend because I think it would be sad if they disappeared. I get why the toy business is difficult competing against online and, say, Target (which has a great toys/game section) but the joint Toys/Babies R Us thing seems pretty viable to me. People spend tons of money when they get pregnant and often want to see the stuff in person so it gets people going there who logically transition from strollers and bottles to legos and games. Is probably why. A hellish trip through a store designed to overstimulate your child vs buying the exact same plastic bricks/mans/ponies off the internet?
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Sep 12, 2017 04:43
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Sounds like a great ideal, Ra's Al Ghul. Who needs to die first?
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Sep 15, 2017 16:10
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As discussed in the PYF failing businesses thread, Toys R Us really is crippled by online retail; most mass-produced toys are the same thing no matter where you buy them from, and parents already have enough trouble pulling their kids out of the toy aisles in department stores, let alone an entire business devoted to overstimulating them. They may not necessarily have been doing anything wrong, their business model just doesn't hold up anymore.
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Sep 19, 2017 07:40
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Staving off bankruptcy til after Christmas makes sense for all involved; they can get rid of inventory and have more money to pay creditors with on the way out.
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Sep 20, 2017 06:29
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A lot of kids get hand-me-down phones and tablets, much like how they used to (and may still) get their parents' obsolete computer or laptop. It's functional, educational and completely expendable.
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Sep 20, 2017 14:52
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LogisticEarth posted:Well, realistically we could afford one, but I'd rather put it towards something else since my wife and I don't see any real utility from another device. I try and keep our budget tight enough so that we'd still be able to keep the lights on if my wife had to stop working. I make about $50k/yr, and my wife about $37k, in a moderate cost of living area. With daycare thrown in there, even something as small as $50-100 does make a difference. We've gotten by very well by skimping out on a lot of those small purchases like that, and using tech until it breaks. And of course, adding a tablet into the mix opens up another avenue for a slew of small $1-5 electronic purchases. Pretty much. And it's been the same as long as there's been neglectful/busy parents and things that keep the kids quiet and in one spot for a while. The old joke about how the Nintendo 64 showed more affection than your mother did is awfully true for some people, and should explain a lot. Freemium games are the work of the Devil's lazy Canadian knockoff, keep them away from your kids as you would drugs, alcohol and celebrities.
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Sep 20, 2017 16:38
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Welcome to Costco, I love you. Amazon is a massive pain to search, but it's still miles ahead of the competition. I'm still trying to find a 2 1/2 inch drive bay for a PC card reader and it insists on throwing every single hard drive mount at me instead, but goddamn, every other retailer site is still somehow worse.
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Sep 29, 2017 07:48
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glowing-fish posted:Once again, the Dollar Tree proves itself to be the corvid of the retail world: everywhere and irrepresible: Reminds me of Cheap as Chips down under. There's something so wonderful about buying ridiculously cheap stuff. Even if it turns out to be poo poo and breaks, you can hardly bring yourself to care.
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Oct 16, 2017 05:43
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I recall the thread about rural poverty was about 10% opiates epidemic, 80% arguing over the definition of 'rural', 10% unironic 'We should just let them die'.
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Oct 17, 2017 07:48
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Liquid Communism posted:Call me crazy, but I'd think that with the failings of the retail market lately, the last thing any retailer would want to do is make it harder for a customer to give them their money. Not enough businesses seem to understand that success in retail is entirely about making it as easy as possible for people to give you money. Regretfully, you will usually have to give them goods in exchange, so you should make that easy too.
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Nov 6, 2017 08:05
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Magius1337est posted:how long until gamestop disappears? EB Games down under sells more game themed merchandise than actual games at this point. Plus hardware accessories.
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Nov 9, 2017 02:58
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