
J.C. Penney’s troubles are reflected in satellite images of its parking lots - jonbaer
https://theoutline.com/post/1169/jc-penney-satellite-imaging
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ChuckMcM
I see huge crowds, maybe the most cars in a parking lot ever, I don't know,
you look out the door and its nothing but cars, huge. Many people say that JC
Penny is the best store, huge store, way bigger than Amazon. Have you seen an
Amazon store when walking by yourself in the Mall? I haven't. You know why?
Amazon is a fake store. That's right, fake store. Nobody buys anything there
because its fake, all fake. Malls are wonderful places, I love Malls, everyone
goes there and loves them, all our shopping is done at Malls, and I have to
say I know a thing or two about Malls. Huge crowds, JC Penny is the best. No
more questions.

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mirimir
Trolling, bro?

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ChuckMcM
I was going for sarcasm. The slow steady death of Malls (the home of nearly
all JC Penny stores) has been going on for over a decade now, and pretty much
all of the articles I see about JC Penny's or Malls blame Amazon and people
shopping from home for stuff. Given our current President's speech tonight and
his preference for seeing things in an alternate light and his issues with
estimating how full or how empty an aerial photo can be I thought "What would
Trump say?" and well it just came out.

My apologies for those who were offended or missed the joke.

~~~
MK999
For me, arriving at a giant parking lot takes all the fun out of shopping.

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ChuckMcM
I find this sort of data extraction interesting (I especially like the guys
who try to validate trade numbers by counting containers in shipping ports as
an example) but wonder about correlation here. JC Penny is in malls, malls are
getting fewer and fewer customers, cars in mall parking lots are going down.
JC Penny seems to be slowly dying because their online presence cannot compete
with Amazon, so is this 'watch along with the satellites as fewer and fewer
people go to brick and mortar stores' ?

That said, there are so many interesting things that having open spy
satellites has made available to the non-spy.

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walrus01
This is a real world application of the same IMINT principles used during the
cold war (and currently in use), with large nation states that had the money
to build and launch photo reconnaissance satellites. Now applied to privately
acquired satellite imagery. Example: Soviet Union analysts looking at photos
of parking lots at key US defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, etc) and
correlating them with intelligence related to certain projects. And vice
versa.

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pjungwir
I wonder what it costs to get these images, and if you could get them more
cheaply by flying drones? I guess that would require a presence in a lot of
places though. . . . Still, maybe you could focus on just a few cities, and
get pictures more frequently than you'd get with satellites? Maybe there is an
opportunity there.

~~~
gydfi
By the time you've paid for a drone and someone to fly it in each city, you
might as well just pay someone minimum wage to drive around photographing the
lots from ground level. It'd probably work out cheaper.

~~~
duderific
That probably wouldn't work for image analysis however, since it would be hard
to see all the cars in the lot from ground level.

~~~
mbreese
If you drove a Google Street View-style car up and down a mall parking lot,
you'd get a lot of information. I doubt that a more in-depth sweep would cost
significantly more to do than to just do a single drive by. The biggest cost
would be driving to the parking lot in the first place.

And if you were trying to collect information, you'd be able to get a lot more
info from the license plate numbers or the make/models of cars. You could also
get information on employment by looking for which cars are parked where,
since store employees typically have to park further from the entrance.
There's a lot of information that you could get from ground-level that you
miss at satellite level.

The real question is - is it worth it?

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rednerrus
A couple of years ago, JC Penney's was on to something. They were moving to
stylish affordable clothing and it was starting to take with young people.
Investors got nervous and wanted to move back to the inflate prices and have
constant fake sales model. They are seriously wasting their real estate and
potential.

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clintonb
Is it pure coincidence that the use of satellites to gauge retail traffic was
a minor plot point in the [latest episode of _Billions_
]([http://www.sho.com/billions/season/2/episode/2](http://www.sho.com/billions/season/2/episode/2))?

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losteverything
I would be interested in the number of trailers unloading.

I wonder how much intelligence will be gleaned when and if automated semis
make deliveries to retailers? At any given moment the quantity, weight,
destination, etc can be real-time tracked with these self driving semis. Would
be an interesting business. Especially if the truck could be tracked from
manufacturer to store

If others could track automatic Amazon truck deliveries from their warehouses
that would probably be desired.

I assume that once driverless vehicles are in the main then the trucks would
have to broadcast and thus be able to be picked up by private listening sites.

Then some company will create a spoofing truck runs to give false
intelligence.. and on and on...

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Steltek
Most big store parking lots tend to be legally mandated vast wastes of
asphalt. New Urbanists celebrate Black Friday as "Parking Day": taking photos
of nearly empty parking lots on supposedly the busiest shopping day of the
year.

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harrygallagher4
This is a little off topic, but did anyone else see the absolutely huge ad in
the middle of the article? It takes up 670px in a window that's only 960px
tall. Is this a new trend in advertising?

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elorant
No because we have ad blockers installed :)

~~~
harrygallagher4
I use uBlock origin and I still saw it. I added a rule to block it but I just
thought it was a little crazy that an ad was so large.

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gallerdude
Off topic - I recommend this site. Breadth and depth in terms of the article
types. And the design is kind of weird, but I do dig it.

~~~
dublinben
This article is basically a couple paragraphs of wikipedia-level explanation
and a bogus graph. I wouldn't call it very deep analysis.

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Avshalom
J.C. Penny's troubles are Target[1]: we have sufficently fashionable clothing
for -10% less.

[1]any fast fashion retailer really.

~~~
duderific
The days of JC Penney, Sears, Kmart etc. are pretty much over. Walmart/Target
have eaten their lunch. There isn't anything those three stores do
particularly well that a different store doesn't do cheaper and better.

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secfirstmd
Clicked but got a certificate error

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timthelion
There is a lot of this going on in Prague. There is even an entire specialty
called geoinformatics that you can study. I have an aquantance who's first
comercial project was to tell the city which street lights are out.

This really goes to show, however, how the everyday man has no hope, as an
investor, against the big boys.

Edit: I origionally wanted to link to this startup
[https://spaceknow.com/](https://spaceknow.com/) but couldn't remember the
name.

~~~
shostack
The everyday man should not be investing in individual stocks like this. They
should be parking their money in low cost indexes[1].

[1] [http://seekingalpha.com/article/4049862-investment-advice-
wa...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/4049862-investment-advice-warren-
buffett-invest-low-cost-index-funds-advice-ignored-elites)

~~~
sytelus
There have been lot of talks that index funds are not what they used to :).
The reason stock goes high or low is because there is asymmetry in demand and
supply. Previously, some people intelligently bought _average_ stock noticing
that _average_ always go up high over long run. However, imagine a world where
everyone is always buying _average_ of all stocks. Now there is no longer
asymmetry and no longer profits for people who settled for average. So as
everyone move towards low cost index funds, they receive diminishing returns.

~~~
shostack
There will still be that asymmetry. My comment was specifically with regards
to "the everyday man" who is _not_ a savvy investor, does _not_ have access to
all the tools and data, etc. Wallstreet will keep doing its thing just fine
even if more Mainstreet investors jump on indexes.

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averagewall
Oh no, not another graph with misleading axes. It doesn't really show such a
perfect fit as it looks like. They've both scaled and translated the axes to
make the two curves look similar to each other. If they counted cars upwards
from 0 instead of downwards from the previous amount, then it'd make more
sense but then we would see if the slopes were different or there was an
offset indicating, for example, that cars are expected to still remain after
the stock price reaches 0.

Good on them for starting the stock price axis at 0, that's a rarity in stock-
price graphs.

~~~
leblancfg
Of course one of the axes has been scaled. We're interested in the
_proportionality_ between the two variables, to see how good their claim that
cars parked is a good proxy measure for stock price. I see where "percent
since arbitrary start time x" is a poor choice of units for cars, but since
it's a linear transformation, you'd get the same picture (and conclusion) were
you using "thousands of cars" instead.

~~~
averagewall
I disagree that it shows proportionality. Since we don't know where the zero
would be with "thousands of cars", it could be way off the bottom of the
chart, which means car numbers are relatively constant, even as stock price
falls to a few percent of it's starting value.

The graph does show that both variables are decreasing, and that they both
have a knee in the middle where the rate slows. But that's about all they
clearly have in common.

An yes, scaling is of course necessary. It's translating that's the problem. I
shouldn't have said scaling in my first post.

~~~
leblancfg
Sorry, I still disagree with that comment. They're not comparing apples and
oranges, here, they're saying "here's why we're using apples to approximate
oranges". The graph is showing a close linear relationship between # of cars
and stock price.

It's saying "There is some a and b such that:

    
    
        a * "number of cars" + b ~ "stock price"
    

You can have a gripe with that method, sure, but the graph is fine.

