
America’s Retailers Are Closing Stores Faster Than Ever - prostoalex
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-07/stores-are-closing-at-a-record-pace-as-amazon-chews-up-retailers
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russdpale
Everyone blames online retailing, buy the matter of the fact is that wages
still are not keeping pace with even cost of living, and more and more people
are having to cut out unnecessary things in order to make ends meet.

People love to go to malls, but they aren't going to go spend $75 on a polo
shirt when they have a $400 electric bill.

As wages continue to lag, this will affect online retailers as well
eventually.

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gozur88
There's a retailer near me that sells office supplies. One day I needed a USB
memory stick, and I needed it now, so I stopped by.

Everything in the store worth more than about $50 had to be ordered. "Should
be here in a couple days". I get that on paper it does nice things for their
cash flow, but what it's really doing is making sure people buy the $50+ items
from Amazon, and then the office supply place gets the crumbs.

If you're going to be a retailer, be a retailer and make sure I'm walking out
with my purchase. Otherwise that spot in the strip mall could be better
utilized by a restaurant or something.

~~~
flamedoge
Probably. It's really hard to be a retailer I'd imagine when more ready
customers are buying from delivery oriented e-retailer and traditional
customers aren't going to pay the premium for ready-to-buy. Doesn't help that
latter group is becoming more of an exception rather than the norm they used
to be.

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codingmyway
As a non american driving in the US what strikes you a lot of the sheer
swathes of parking lots, retail parks, advertising boards and drive through
McDonalds, KFCs and Taco Bells that go on and on for miles. How there is
enough business left in the internet age to keep these from becoming concrete
wastelands I don't know.

~~~
maxsilver
What gets me is that they're still building new ones anyway.

It seems like such a disconnect to hear various news reports over and over
claim that "US retailers are closing stores", and yet still see lots of new
retail construction all over -- not just one or two stores, but entire outlet
malls and such.

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theprop
And Planet Fitness is moving into the now-empty stores...pretty fast too.

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tzs
I'd buy more from the local stores of some retailers if they would make their
websites work better. I'm willing to pay more now and then to support keeping
the stores open, but not if they make me jump through too many hoops.

A good example of doing it wrong is Barnes & Noble.

Suppose I'm thinking of buying a book, and would like to go take a look at it
in person before making my decision. So my first question is simple: is it in
stock at my local Barnes & Noble?

That's fairly easy to determine. Just go to barnesandnoble.com and search for
the book. On the page for the book there is a "Want it Today? Check Store
Availability" link. Hit that link and you get a pop up to enter your
zip/postal code. Do so and it will then show you a list of their stores near
that area, and whether or not each has the book in stock.

OK, that's fine if you are only interested in one book. But I'm usually
interested in taking a look at several books. So navigate to another book's
page and click "Want it Today? Check Store Availability".

And guess what happens? You get the pop up that asks you to enter your
zip/postal code! They didn't set it in a cookie when you entered it for the
first book. You have to enter your stupid zip/postal code for EVERY book you
want to check!

OK...maybe it works better if you login. If you login you can set a store as
your local store, and the site remembers that. For instance when you ask about
upcoming events it shows the events from that store.

Nope. Logging in makes no difference. There is no way I've found to make it
use the "my local store" setting to save from having to actually enter
zip/postale code for every book you want to check.

If I'm looking up a half dozen books or so I usually get annoyed around #4 and
say "screw it" and make do with Amazon's "look inside" feature, and then buy
from Amazon.

I could simply not believe that they could do this, and so guessed that it
might be because I use Safari on Mac. Maybe they don't test with Safari? Nope,
I then tried Chrome and Firefox, and had the same problem. I then tried them
on Windows, and also Edge, and same problem.

At the very least, B&N needs to use a cookie to remember the zip/postal code
for that browsing session.

I say "very least" because that just solves the problem when I have a specific
list of books in mind that I'd like to come look at.

Another common case is when I just know the category I'm interested in. For
instance, I would like to get a book on improving my memory. There are a lot
of books in that category. To find out online which are at my local B&N I've
got to find them all on the site, and then check each one by one to see which
ones are at my store.

What I really want is an option to select a store, and then have the site show
me only items that are in stock at the store. If I search for "improve your
memory" I don't want to see the 244 matching items that are available at the
union of B&N stores and B&N online. I want to see only the 5 items that are
actually at my local store.

What B&N needs to realize is that I don't care what B&N sells online. If I'm
going to buy a book online I'm going to buy from Amazon because I have Amazon
Prime. If I'm at their website it is because I'm interested in what is in
their retail locations.

~~~
kop316
The past two weeks I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch. I ended up getting
it from Target for a similar reason; I was able to go on their online shop and
see which Target was carrying it. Wal-Mart only had scalpers trying to get
people to buy it for x1.5 the price. When I went into a Wal-Mart (As their
website said they had two in store), they were out even though their website
AND their own stocking inventory said it was in store. When I went to a
GameStop, they tried to upsell me to pay for a bundle (which had almost
nothing I wanted) for x1.5 the price. Many of the online stores also made it a
huge hassle to try to look in a local store without making a sign-in (Best Buy
was the worst offender). The only reason I did not buy from Amazon is because
of scalpers as well.

I also like to buy Music CDs. There's a few record stores around, but I have
frequently seen a $6-7 CD being sold for $12-15 at the record stores (This is
even assuming I can find the CD I want). I would not mind if I paid an extra
dollar or two to support the local store, but asking to pay close to twice the
price is not worth it to me.

~~~
tzs
> The past two weeks I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch. I ended up getting
> it from Target for a similar reason; I was able to go on their online shop
> and see which Target was carrying it.

That isn't working for me. It looks like they may have taken it out of their
online shop. When I go to the Nintendo Switch section of the online shop there
is a notice on the top of the page that it is only sold in stores and that I
should check my local Target store, and there is no entry for it down in the
product section of the page.

I don't see any obvious way to check online if an item is in stock locally
except by going to the product page for that item in the online shop, where
they also tell you if the item is available for pickup at your local store.

Speaking of buying hard to get consoles, I got a Wii on launch day without
much effort at all. I knew people were camping out overnight for it, and was
not willing to do that. I was, however, curious to see how many people
actually did that and so got up that morning about an hour before stores
opened and just drove around to see what the lines were like. As expected Best
Buy and Target and the game stores had long lines.

I went home and then it occurred to me...K-Mart sells video games, but I've
never heard anyone talk about camping out at K-Mart for a launch of anything.
I'm on the west coast (GMT+8) and it was about a half hour until stores
opened. On the east coast (GMT+5) stores would have been open already for 2.5
hours, so I called an east coast K-Mart and asked if they carried Wii. They
said they did, but were sold out.

So I figured it was worth a shot, and drove to K-Mart. There was a line: two
people. They told me they got there about 15 minutes before me. I got in the
line, and a little after that another person joined behind me. A few minutes
later someone came out from the store and told us that they had two Wii in
stock. I got ready to leave because there were two people ahead of me, but
they turned around and said they were together and only buying one. The person
behind me started making some obvious preparations to rush in as soon as the
door opened to try to get ahead of me, but the person from the store said that
they would be given out by the order we were in line.

~~~
kop316
They had it when I was getting it, that's interesting. I also used a site
called iStockNow, they seemed to be able to scrap from a few websites and tell
me who has it in stock. I hope that helps!

