Obviously Christmas preceded the Florida incident but I take your point.
I admit I strolled through Dick’s about once a month and did some shopping there at Xmas but only after exhausting all other options.
Like other big box stores, Dick’s used its real estate, marketing and purchasing budgets to devastating effect in pushing local competitors and even lesser national competitors off the cliff. But at least Dick’s offered significant variety in both price point and functionality in its various departments (shoes, athletic wear, golf, etc.).
Now that the competition has mostly faded, so has any attempt by Dick’s to maintain their standard of merchandise. They are now a Walmart-ish stack-em-high-and-sell-em-cheap grind joint.
To some extent they can claim to be at the mercy of OEMs. When oil prices spiked the makers of footwear and clothing claimed that they were getting killed on raw materials, manufacturing and transportation/shipping. Because the market would have responded negatively to price hikes, they began to issue absolute junk under the rubric of minimalism and/or ‘performance fabrics’ (read: polyester). It’s important to note, however, that once oil prices stabilized at historic relative lows the same OEMs did not improve or restore their quality of manufacture - in many cases because they had already signed long-term contracts with Chinese plants.
Still, Dick’s problems are mostly of its own making. The gun issue will definitely further erode sales. But like other big box stores they have cut back on inventory, variety and quality and then have the brass neck to blame Amazon for their troubles. All Amazon is doing is offering the variety that big box stores once did. Many people would still rather make a 30 minute trip to a store to buy an item rather than wait for a shipment, even an overnight one, but the retailers simply don’t stock the goods anymore.
You make some very good points, especially regarding many stores unwilling to stock or inventory anything. In that regard, I would love to buy local but often simply can’t because I am unable to find what I need.
With respect to Dick’s, that’s harder for me to say because I haven’t been in there in a good while although we used to shop there somewhat regularly. My recollection is that they had reasonable merchandise scaled from WalMart level to good quality stuff, but as I recall you really couldn’t buy much clothing from them as they were off-the-hook expensive relative to what you would expect to spend elsewhere.
Yeah, this was based upon Christmas sales targets but my point for posting, as you noted, was that I believe Dick’s has only self-inflicted yet more damage to themselves.
Let me just say that if I were looking to short a stock, it would be Dick’s.