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.
Dick’s other trick (pun!) was to locate stores near malls. In some cases they were attached to malls but more often they were on outlots.
As we all know, malls are cratering along with any businesses unfortunate enough to be near them.