Free Republic

All of the more than 300 99 Cents Only stores across the country are closing down. This doesn't just affect the shoppers who depend on low prices but it will be a loss of jobs for the workers in the stores. Right now everything is 30% off and business is brisk in the California-based chain. Shoppers are stocking up and many are waiting in line to get inside a store. Economists say this is a scary sight."Sad. I can't buy my apples and bananas anymore," said one man walking into the store."I think people are going to miss it," said...

There’s this meme that’s been cracking everyone up online. It jokes that AI isn’t some next-level tech marvel. Instead, picture this: 5,000 people in India, just sitting around, answering all our queries. It’s a funny take on the whole AI scene and pokes fun at the idea that maybe, just maybe, the big players like Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the government are pulling one over on us.

Plastic consumption in New Jersey spiked by nearly three times following the state’s implementation of a strict ban on single-use plastic shopping bags, a study found. "Following New Jersey’s ban of single-use bags, the shift from plastic film to alternative bags resulted in a nearly 3x increase in plastic consumption for bags," Freedonia Custom Research (FCR), a business research division for MarketResearch.com, reported in a study published this month. New Jersey implemented a ban on single-use plastic bags in 2022, the strictest ban on bags in the nation at the time, billing it as an effort to cut back on...

The Biden regime allegedly flagged transactions using terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP” for financial institutions. This is a direct violation of the US Constitution. Individuals who shopped at stores like Cabela’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods, or purchased religious texts like a Bible, may also have had their transactions flagged. This is a shocking report. The House Weaponization Committee reported on Wednesday night that the Biden regime was targeting Americans who were shopping at Cabela’s and Dick’s and those Americans who may have recently bought a Bigle! We are clearly witnessing the MOST GODLESS ANTI-CHRISTIAN regime in US history! (letter from Jim...

I've visited hundreds of abandoned places in my life—factories to asylums, schools to churches—but suburban malls might be the most surreal and striking. They captivate the imagination in a way few other types of environments can: with an almost imperceptible layer of fog that forms between the first and second floors of an atrium, endless reflections of vacant storefronts, or a chance encounter with a groundhog in the remains of a food court. Stripped of signage and wares, they are nearly perfectly liminal spaces. Malls have become a part of the modern collective unconscious, through both the haze of half-buried...

The most downloaded free app on both the App Store and Google Play for much of the last two months wasn’t TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, but a shopping app that didn’t exist just four months ago. Temu offers steep discounts on a slew of products, mostly shipped directly from Chinese factories or warehouses. In addition to incredibly low prices, Temu can no doubt attribute its popularity to its strategy of giving free stuff to users who promote the app on their social networks and get friends and family to sign up. But the company—the U.S. offshoot of Chinese e-commerce giant...

Shopping during Bidenomics!!! Whoever made THIS👇🏼 FREAKING ROCKS!! https://twitter.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1723891547245101344?

Shuttered stores at Schuylkill Mall in Pennsylvania in 2017. By the 1980s, the mall had become the center of American social life and accounted for the bulk of all retail sales. But a shrinking middle class, the rise of online shopping, and the fact that there were simply too many malls contributed to the decline of the American mall.

The new capability enables cashierless shopping for softline goods like clothing, fan gear, hats and shoes. Dive Brief: Continuing to enhance its retail tech, Amazon is adding radio-frequency identification to its Just Walk Out tech, the company announced Tuesday. The company partnered with Avery Dennison, an RFID sensor and digital identification tech provider, to add the capability. At locations using the technology, shoppers can take their desired items, each of which has a unique RFID tag, and pay as they pass through an exit gate using their debit or credit cards or by scanning their hand at an Amazon One...

After being left alone for the holidays, eight-year-old Kevin McCallister famously went grocery shopping in the 1990 classic "Home Alone," purchasing a large haul of food and everyday household items for under $20. With today's prices, however, McCallister would need a lot more in his piggy bank and Americans are taking notice. Items including a half gallon of milk, a half gallon of orange juice, a TV dinner, bread, frozen mac and cheese, laundry detergent, cling wrap, toilet paper, a pack of army men and dryer sheets cost the character, played by Macaulay Culkin, $19.83. Last year, the same grocery...

A record number of U.S. consumers shopped over Thanksgiving weekend this year, surpassing analysts’ initial expectations and topping 200 million shoppers for the first time ever. The five-day shopping period saw 200.4 million consumers shop this weekend, according to an annual survey released Tuesday by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Prosper Insights & Analytics. In 2022, the same period set a record of 196.7 million shoppers.

Black Friday e-commerce spending popped 7.5% from a year earlier, reaching a record $9.8 billion in the U.S., according to an Adobe Analytics report, a further indication that price-conscious consumers want to spend on the best deals and are hunting for those deals online.

Joe Biden was booed and heckled on the streets of Nantucket on Saturday even as people protesting the war in Gaza were kept far away from the president. The president's motorcade even took a different route from where he is staying - David Rubenstein's $34 million home on Abrams Point - into town to avoid driving past protestors gathered on the side of the road with signs saying 'Free Palestine.' A group of about 40 people calling for an end to the fighting in Palestine were kept down one end of Main Street in downtown Nantucket - about six blocks...

President Biden did some afternoon Black Friday shopping on Nantucket as international news coverage was dominated by Hamas terrorists releasing a group of 24 hostages — but no Americans — as part of a four-day truce in the Gaza Strip. “Can’t come without going to the bookstore. We’ve got a tradition,” the 81-year-old president told reporters on the Massachusetts island where he and his extended family are vacationing at the home of billionaire David Rubenstein.

12 year old goes Shopping Alone for First Time!

I know I've lined up what I hope will be the best sources for the Black Friday shopping list I assembled. What about you, fellow FReepers?

Once-bustling American malls are going bust as shoppers flock to online retailers instead of sprawling, brick-and-mortar locations. Ten years from now, there will be approximately 150 malls left in the US, Nick Egelanian, president of retail consulting firm SiteWorks, told The Wall Street Journal. That's down from around 2,500 locations in the 1980s and 700 today, Egelanian said.

The American Dream Mall, New Jersey’s behemoth shopping destination located in the Meadowlands, saw its losses quadruple in 2022 to $245 million as it struggled to attract retail tenants amid sagging customer traffic and expenses soared amid a heavy debt load, according to recent filings. In the years since its opening just five months before the pandemic struck in 2020, the 3.5 million-square-foot mall — which is home to an indoor ski slope, the Nickelodeon Universe Theme Park, and a whopping 450-plus stores — hasn’t caught a break. Aside from coronavirus-driven shutdowns and construction delays, the mall has been slammed...

Whether you shop at an independent grocery store or a major supermarket, you’ve likely noticed high prices for everything from eggs to olive oil.

Well, to put it bluntly, this sucks. I was in our local Aldi store earlier today and they were in the midst of going to all digital pricing. That is, there's essentially a bar code on the shelf under each group of boxes of items, or under the 2% milk rack, etc., which you scan with a smart phone to get the price. No printed prices are on the shelves, and won't be, according to the employee I spoke with.