Posted on 01/06/2017 1:19:13 PM PST by jfd1776
Vintage Park opened up near me and, guess what, it’s all open. No longer one big building. Up on the north side of Houston at SH249 and Louetta.
How so very true. I needed a new timer for my outdoor landscaping lighting. None to be found with any local retailers. Purchased online, delivered within 2 days.
I was thinking about this stat overnight. And I’ve decided it’s another one of those “lies, damned lies, and statistics” stats. 23 sq ft of retail per person sounds huge. But it isn’t. A queen sized bed is 32.5 sq ft. So that retail space is less than 1 queen sized bed. And given the percentage of folks with spare bedrooms and rollouts and hideaways that means the average person probably has in their home more sq footage of bed per person than there is retail space per person. Add in hotels, hospitals, homeless shelters and the like and there’s probably over 100 sq ft of bed in this country for every person. And nobody thinks that’s unsustainable.
And of course that 23 sq ft of retail space includes the actual stuff being sold too. Plus fixtures. So while that number sounds huge when you first see it, when you start working it you realize that if we all went to the store at the same time it would be freaking crowded.
“Amazon gets your orders to you in two days. How can local shops compete with that?”
By having inventory so that you can have it that same day.
That’s unrealistic, I think.
“That’s unrealistic, I think.”
You means stores should not have inventory? I think having inventory is the very definition of a store.
Part of the problem is that even if a store has inventory/upstock, the store may not have the manpower/hours/payroll to put it out on the sales floor. And I’m my neck of the woods, inventories seem to be running pretty lean anyway. Inventory costs money to buy and store. More to put out. More to get rid of if it doesn’t sell. It’s a vicious cycle.
The internet spoils us with the infinite variety of items that we can purchase. In the old days there weren’t that many brands of toilet paper, cereal, etc. But today we can get very specific things. Most stores can’t carry the variety that Amazon can produce.
Well, if retail can’t get the items on the shelf then they need to stop complaining that no one treats them like a retail store because they are not one.
I think the primary problem retail was facing is too much competition. Both electronic and brick and mortar. So many sectors are just grossly over represented. With the death of book and music stores malls have basically become clothing store collections, and there just isn’t room in this world for 40 different national stores all trying to sell blouses in competition with the big box stores. And so many sectors are over saturated like that. OfficeMax, Office Depot and Staples, how much office equipment do we really need? And then of course to try to scoop up all the money they expand their offerings which really just puts them in competition with more companies, all those office stores have grocery aisles, I understand that many office environments provide free snack, but everyplace I’ve worked gets their snacks from CostCo, I don’t think these companies helped themselves adding CostCo to their competitor list.
And the icing on the cake is really that there isn’t the diversity on the manufacturing side. If these companies were selling different stuff from each other they might have a chance. But when they’re all trying to sell me the same Dockers and HP printers they don’t have anything to separate themselves. That might be the real figure to look at, not the square footage per person, but the square footage per barcode, the number of identical items we’re trying to sell in different places is where the meltdown comes form.
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