Posted on 03/23/2017 12:49:20 PM PDT by publius911
"It's no secret that Amazon (AMZN) is upending retail, with a new bankruptcy filing or store closure announcement coming nearly every day since the beginning of March from traffic starved bricks-and-mortar retailers."
"And the digital beast is showing no signs of letting up."
(Excerpt) Read more at thestreet.com ...
Increasingly it becomes clear that the solidly middle-class American Citizen/worker (under 75k a year) is the gore-ee. The hapless slave with a job, who works for decades, pays ever-increasing taxes and fees at all levels, fears the ever tyrannical governments at all levels to see that his contract with the "social contract" is meaningless.
That statement will be expanded on in subsequent posts... In the meantime the winner in all the results of the subject of this thread is likely to be... no one.
A frightening lose-lose scenario.
The first likely result is a massive national anti-trust, anti-monopoly hissy-fit by all the residents of the United States who are not :
Elected Criminals.
Crony capitalists and their parasites.
Lifetime Public not-working employees.
Union leeches with their special privileges.
Public unionized State County and local employees, including bureaucrats and "public safety" (/sarc> education employees.< (/sarc)
A hissy fit demanding anti-trust anti-monopoly action, a la AT&T and a dozen other huge corporations who were forced to split into many independent corporations.
Other relevant and transcendental subjects that need in depth discussions follow...
Yeah, but nobody can beat their prices on toner.
Sears and JC Penny destroyed the retail stores base with catalog sales last century. Right on time a hundred years later, Sears et al, are upset that Amazon is the new sears catalog business model. The only difference is their catalog is digital and fresh every second.
The internet is now the "Mall social construct", where as the mall used to be a place to visit in person, now it's Facebook and Twitter.
But when they've driven all the brick & mortar stores out of business they can raise their prices as much as they like! < /sarc >
I think I have a Sears catalog. Probably in a ‘safe place’.
It has pressed flowers in it.
Good business plans beat bad business plans. It’s not like Amazon is alone in this, they’re just the flagship for the change. They don’t even have a monopoly to bust.
Here’s what I don’t understand. Usually, although certainly not always, Amazon has the same product at the same or cheaper price. How is it that B&M stores can’t beat that?
Before everyone jumps on me telling about the cost of B&M stores, I would argue that Amazon has many very large distribution centers and many, if not more, employees.
I am by no means an Amazon apologist, in fact, it is my opinion that Amazon has gotten way too big and is, or is fast becoming, a monopoly and ripe for anti-trust review.
I admit that I hate shopping and have fallen under the spell of shopping online and having things delivered to my doorstep, but I want other retailers to innovate and compete with Amazon. Why is this not happening?
Even behemoths such as Wal*Mart are decades behind Amazon. Sears, who started the whole catalogue shopping experience which was the precursor to what Amazon currently does, is now bankrupt. Amazon started in 1996, I think. That same year I started ordering from them when they only sold books, but even back then I knew they were going to be huge. And here we are. Amazon owns most retail markets now.
Walmart could easily compete in this space if their CTO wasn’t completely incompetent. Walmart’s website is seriously amateurish.
Conservative billionaires should consider development of conservative alternatives to Amazon, eBay, Facebook and the other monsters. If the sites maintained overtly conservative standards they would pick up 20% market share in short order.
You fund it. I’ll build. My company has the skills. :-)
Since Bezos’ attacks on Trump I have been trying to shift purchases from Amazon to Walmart - but that is not a pleasant process and Amazon far more often than Walmart has superior pricing.
Ebay is putting on pressure also.Most items now come with 2 day Fast and Free shipping.
With artificial intelligence, machines will someday learn that they don’t need us.
Commercial real estate is going to be destroyed as all the brick and mortar buildings are no longer needed. They go away and a massive number of jobs go away. I see no future scenario in which most of us are working.
Yeah, but do they sell buggy whips?
TC
it’s still way easier and cheaper to have centralized distribution centers than to run a retail business.
Amazon has 300k+ employees, whereas Sears has about 180k. But amazon does a lot more than retail, such as digital content + distribution, grocery delivery, and cloud hosting services.
They don’t have a monopoly - other people are going to be in retail, but nobody can meaningfully compete with them because of the distribution network they have built and their first-mover advantage.
It’s only going to get worse because Amazon is going to have a huge lead in automation for those distribution centers. It’s a lot easier to replace warehouse workers with robots than customer-facing employees in retail locations.
We are rapidly going to end up with a world where automation destroys employment. We’ll have very efficient ways of selling products, but nobody who can afford buying them.
Amazon has announced that they will hire Gay Refugee drones to deliver products.
Related:
Amazon worth more than Sears, Macy’s and Target combined
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3511499/posts
(January 6, 2017)
Well aren’t you a little ray of sunshine!
Manufacturing in the U.S. began fleeing to "foreign greener pastures" in the late 60s.
Countries do NOT have friends and enemies; just National Interests. Among those interests is to maximize national income and minimize National expenses related to "trade." Do the math.
Trump has done a good job of shedding light on the short term orgasm, and the long term hangover of that "great" suicidal idea.
Those essentials include food, energy-electrical power supplies, clothing, ordinary household utensils, repair items and appliances, transportation, and perhaps some measure of limited "discretionary" spending, if any.
"Entertainment" may or may not qualify as an essential to the solidly middle class (under $75k) American Family.
ALL of those essentials are daily compromised by failures of less than adequate treatment of American health and safety issues by the foreign countries that now supply over 80% of most of them. The only possible exception is food, but the unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats and bugs-and-bunny crowd are determined and working on making sure tainted food becomes another failure of the "foreign trade" fiasco.
Next up... Examples of the statements above.
Distribution centers don’t cost nearly as much as retail space. The rent is cheaper per foot, you don’t need as much available parking, you don’t need to decorate it or stock shelves, climate control is much easier, you can use cheaper less pleasing lighting, stockboys are way cheaper than sales people, no shoplifters.
Amazon isn’t anywhere near being a monopoly. They’re big, but they aren’t 80% of anything, they aren’t even 50% of most things.
And all your other companies that are having problem it boils down to the retail section. Sears made the huge mistake of buying KMart and no gutting it. WM is a discount retailer which has all kinds of other problems.
I liked this post from this thread last year:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3434778/posts
To: PROCON
Sears just did not keep up with the times. It became a giant because of the Sears catalogue, but could have regained its glory days by in effect, becoming Amazon.
Instead of trying to preserve its brick and mortar stores, as such, they should have converted many of them to local mostly delivery and large item assembly warehouses, with local pickup to avoid postage and handling.
This would have meant their local inventory would only be smaller items; with the big stuff assembled on site for delivery. It would slash their costs.
They could even subcontract space to specialized businesses, somewhat like they did before, things like watch repair to product customization.
80 posted on 5/28/2016, 5:10:15 PM by yefragetuwrabrumuy (”Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative.” -Obama, 09-24-11)
When Sears took their appliance and hardware sales people off commission, their slide started.
Long live the consumer. Check out the company Shopify. SHOP is very possibly the way to profit from Amazon and Internet shopping. I guess there were angry people when the model T Ford replaced the horse and buggy. That’s Life.
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