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  #61  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2010, 3:04 PM
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Originally Posted by BTinSF View Post
They all are--downtowns and big boxers alike--because I hardly ever buy anything locally anymore. For $50 a year I can have an Amazon premier account and have it all: prices as cheap as you can get, free second day shipping and no tax (buy it at a store in CA and you pay another 9.5%).

As far as I'm concerned, only the strip mall (and it's urban equivalent--"neighborhood retail") may survive as a place to get take-out food and things you can't even wait 2 days for (sold mostly by Ace Hardware).
I will believe this when I get my paperless office and can telecommute from home.

Certain things are suitable for online retail, other things are not. For instance, anything with a tactile component or that you have to try on. I order dress shirts online because I get the same colors and sizes over and over again, but for anything else, I'll still go to the store. When I bought home theater speakers, I wanted to listen to them. When you buy a sofa, you want to sit on it.

There's also a social component, particularly when it comes to clothes. Online will never replace the ability to browse the shop, check out what others are wearing, ask a friend or a reassuring salesperson how something looks on you... and to shoppers (particularly women shoppers, the most important demographic) these things are absolutely necessary.

But yes, Circuit City went bust, and Borders, and Virgin Megastores everywhere, because there's absolutely no reason not to buy your books, music and movies online. There's a niche for a good independent bookstore with a comfy chair and volumes you don't find elsewhere, or a local independent record store, but the big mass market brick & mortar guys are screwed.
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  #62  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2010, 3:09 PM
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Have we become that lazy that we can't even go out to buy a book anymore?

Shopping online does not cut it for me. It is much nicer to browse, and I still do that when I need to get something.

The only time I buy online is when I want something from a store not located in my city. And that is very very rare.

People are becoming so lazy. What are we going to do when you never have to leave your home for anything
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  #63  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2010, 3:13 PM
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Anyway, back to a macro perspective...

1) I agree America is over-retailed;

however,

2) One of the reasons that the amount of retail (and services) seems to outstrip economic growth is that individuals are becoming more and more specialized in what they do. To use extreme examples: a family in the American West in 1850 didn't need (or have) a lot of retail stores nearby because they grew their own food, churned their own butter and stitched their own clothes; a family in 21st century America may not even mow their own lawn or do their own laundry. That long-term trend from making or doing things ourselves to buying them or paying someone to do them for us has led to the retail and services sectors growing faster than the economy as a whole. But it's largely a shift from output that can't be counted in GDP (e.g., someone trimming their own hedges) to output that can be (e.g., paying a landscaping company $50 to do it).
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  #64  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2010, 3:23 PM
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Originally Posted by miketoronto View Post
But that is the think. 30 years ago, people still got items at a low cost.
So the idea that we have more selection and cheaper prices now I don't think it is true.
Not to beat a dead horse, but is this based on your gut feeling or do you have any data to back this up?

The difference is that now, 2010, there is a lot more crap/consumable goods that we consider to be life essentials than there were in 1975. Furthermore, the stuff we demand is now of much higher technological complexity than stuff in 1975. Health care would be cheap if the only procedures and medicines available were those that existed in 1975.

South Park had a pretty decent episode touching on some of this...
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  #65  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 5:15 AM
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America's very much over-retailed, but people who think that Amazon.com is going to replace stores are very much mistaken. Amazon today is just like the Sears, Roebuck catalog of a century ago (and since I may have to remind people that houses available in that catalog) which quite literally had everything. But still, we have too much retail--especially in the suburbs--for our own good.

Even though the physical space of the department store--which big boxes take after--may contract again, as they must to regain equilibrium, they'll return to flagships within the major cities.
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  #66  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 5:13 PM
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Correction, the population of Michigan has dropped by a large amount.

The article below gives a number of 465,000 fewer people since 2001. That is a 4.5% population decrease over an 8 year period (article written in 2009).

http://detnews.com/article/20090402/...staggers-state
Yes, and Detroit is the biggest population problem as I said. The population in my own city has been surging...which is right next to Detroit. That is happening largely because of immigration.
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  #67  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 5:20 PM
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Metropolitan Detroit and in particular the areas these malls are being built in, has not grown much since the 1960's. Metro Detroit's population will go up 100,000 one decade, than go down the next, than up the next, etc. So it basically is a stable population with very very tiny growth if at all. Not enough growth to justify all these new retail ventures.
Huh? I just said the developments have been successful, how can they not be justified? Certain cities are doing better than others, but really the whole area is a giant suburb....so driving across town doesn’t take a whole lot of time. People will go wherever they build.
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  #68  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 5:32 PM
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Not to beat a dead horse, but is this based on your gut feeling or do you have any data to back this up?
Do you really need to ask this question?
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  #69  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 6:20 PM
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I will believe this when I get my paperless office and can telecommute from home.

Certain things are suitable for online retail, other things are not. For instance, anything with a tactile component or that you have to try on. I order dress shirts online because I get the same colors and sizes over and over again, but for anything else, I'll still go to the store. When I bought home theater speakers, I wanted to listen to them. When you buy a sofa, you want to sit on it.

There's also a social component, particularly when it comes to clothes. Online will never replace the ability to browse the shop, check out what others are wearing, ask a friend or a reassuring salesperson how something looks on you... and to shoppers (particularly women shoppers, the most important demographic) these things are absolutely necessary.

But yes, Circuit City went bust, and Borders, and Virgin Megastores everywhere, because there's absolutely no reason not to buy your books, music and movies online. There's a niche for a good independent bookstore with a comfy chair and volumes you don't find elsewhere, or a local independent record store, but the big mass market brick & mortar guys are screwed.
You can easily try it on, touch it or feel it at a store, then buy it online. But your experience in New York City is totally different from the experience of most of America--you have access locally not only to almost anything you might want to buy but also to places offering very low prices (not uncommonly, things I buy online come from stores in New York). San Francisco has most of the variety but not the low prices in its stores. In Tucson, I have neither.

And most of what I buy is either something I'm already familiar with (and may have tried/used in the past) or something where I'm buying a brand I have used and trust. Besides, many places offer free returns if you buy online and really hate it.
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  #70  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 7:32 PM
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You can easily try it on, touch it or feel it at a store, then buy it online.
Why would you want to order it online, pay shipping, and wait for it, when you've already gone to the trouble of going to the store? That makes no sense. And if you try it on in the store and buy it from a different retailer online because it's cheaper, you're just an ass. The actual store is probably slightly more expensive because they are maintaining overhead in order to provide you with a service.

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But your experience in New York City is totally different from the experience of most of America--you have access locally not only to almost anything you might want to buy but also to places offering very low prices (not uncommonly, things I buy online come from stores in New York).
Yes, we are the only people in the world that have to pay sales tax when we buy things from J&R or B&H Photo.

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And most of what I buy is either something I'm already familiar with (and may have tried/used in the past) or something where I'm buying a brand I have used and trust.
I will concede (and already have) that there are certainly products for which online retail makes perfect sense. I get all my toiletries from drugstore.com, as an example. But you still need a Walgreen's nearby for when you find yourself out of something at an inopportune time.

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Besides, many places offer free returns if you buy online and really hate it.
And packing things back up and sending them back, if you aren't at home all day for a UPS guy to come pick it up, is more of a pain than going to a store ever will be.


Sorry to be so argumentative but I'm trying to prove a point - there are enough exceptions and enough differences in personal preferences that brick and mortar retail is not going anywhere, and certainly not to the extent you claimed in your prior post.
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  #71  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 7:45 PM
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Why would you want to order it online, pay shipping, and wait for it, when you've already gone to the trouble of going to the store? That makes no sense.
It is often possible to get free shipping and save the 9.5% sales tax. On a big ticket item, that's significant. I pay Amazon $50 a year for free second day shipping on anything I purchase from them, for example. So the wait is only one or 2 days and the savings can be large. Also, again, I rarely need to do this. I know what size shoes I buy, for example, and I usually buy the same brands and models repeatedly. Same with most clothes. I have preferred brands of electronics. Even most food is repeat purchases so no need to sample it first.

Quote:
you still need a Walgreen's nearby for when you find yourself out of something at an inopportune time.
Oh, sure, I go there for some things.

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And packing things back up and sending them back, if you aren't at home all day for a UPS guy to come pick it up, is more of a pain than going to a store ever will be.
Not an issue for me: In SF, my building has a concierge who accepts packages and will even take them to my apartment (but usually I just pick them up when I come home from his office near the building entrance). In Arizona, my house has a small walled front courtyard and all the delivery services know to just sit things on a bench inside the wall that isn't visible from the street.

Quote:
Sorry to be so argumentative but I'm trying to prove a point - there are enough exceptions and enough differences in personal preferences that brick and mortar retail is not going anywhere, and certainly not to the extent you claimed in your prior post.
Sure there are exceptions and some brick and mortar retail will surely remain, but I think online shopping is hurting them a lot--in some categories like books and video rentals it is virtually putting the whole category out of business. I'm not happy about this because of the vacant urban storefronts it creates, mind you, but the savings are too good to pass up as long as states don't figure out a way to apply sales tax to online purchases.
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  #72  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 8:06 PM
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Originally Posted by VivaLFuego View Post
Not to beat a dead horse, but is this based on your gut feeling or do you have any data to back this up?

The difference is that now, 2010, there is a lot more crap/consumable goods that we consider to be life essentials than there were in 1975. Furthermore, the stuff we demand is now of much higher technological complexity than stuff in 1975. Health care would be cheap if the only procedures and medicines available were those that existed in 1975.
We have the same discount style stores we had 40 years. WALMART is just a new and meaner version of Woolworths.

There were a ton of discount stores before, as well as middle market places. Infact almost all the major downtown department stores even had a discount basement department store.

So cheaper goods were always available.

Look at Filene's Basement. That is a discount store known in many parts of the USA. Well the first store opened in downtown Boston in like 1905. The idea that we only get cheap items now is a myth.

It was a lot more specialized a couple decades ago. Like my parents were saying if they wanted a new winter coat, they would go down to Spadina Ave in downtown Toronto and there were dozens of discount warehouse clothing stores in a row. You could check out all different styles and barter prices, etc.

Like I said, almost all the big cities had discount stores, as well as whole districts full of discount shopping.

Some of these areas still live on. Manhattan still has some of it. And even Toronto's old garment area still has a number of discount clothing shops which sell high quality stuff for cheaper than the chain stores.

But the idea that Walmart and Costco have brought us cheap items is a total myth that American's have really bought into.

American's have always had discount goods. Woolworths, 5 & Dime, Kresege, etc.

In fact today we have less discount stores and who is to say we really are getting the best price? I remember when I was growing up, we had way way more discount options than today.
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  #73  
Old Posted Jun 17, 2010, 8:37 PM
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Mike, perhaps if you gave us an example of a documented price of something in 1975, then index it for 35 years of inflation and show us a documented price from today that is higher than that price. It has to be a like product (no technological improvements in today's version, etc).
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  #74  
Old Posted Jun 19, 2010, 1:58 PM
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Discounters and Supermarkets Are Among the Most Active Expanding Retailers


Jun 16, 2010

By David Bodamer



Read More: http://retailtrafficmag.com/news/mos...iers_06162010/

Quote:
One of the overriding themes at ICSC RECon 2010 was that retailers were becoming increasingly active in looking for strategic opportunities to expand. Those observations mesh with conclusions in Colliers International’s Spring 2010 Retail Highlights report. According to the report, “Colliers has seen a huge increase in planned new retail stores in just the past three months. Though 2010 expansion will continue to be dominated by discounters and off-price retailers, in the past few months we have also seen mid-price chains up their growth plans.”

Dollar stores are the fastest growing segment, according to Colliers. For example, Dollar General has plans for 600 new stores in 2010, while Dollar Tree/Deal$ has 235 stores planned. Family Dollar is hoping to open as many as 200 units. In aggregate, we will likely see dollar store chains add as many as 1,500 new stores in 2010.

The brokerage firm compiled data on the most active retailers in 41 metropolitan areas and found that discount retailers (21 percent) and supermarkets (18 percent) were the most active in looking for new sites. The number for discount retailers was about the same as 2009 (20 percent) while supermarkets and other food stores showed a jump in activity (11 percent). In contrast, drug stores were the second most active segment in 2009 (20 percent), but had fallen to just 9 percent in 2010 to date.

Another active segment is the food service area. Restaurants accounted for 13 percent of activity, fast food chains for 11 percent and quick casual restaurants for 3 percent. Some of this activity is from national players and franchises, but there is also a core of local and regional chains that is rapidly expanding.



Retail Stats PDF: http://www.colliers.com/Country/Unit...Spring2010.pdf
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  #75  
Old Posted Jun 19, 2010, 5:41 PM
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While retailers continues to expand, there are also a massive number of vacant shopping centers.

In Metro Detroit, there are an incredible number of vacant spaces. Virtually every strip mall has empty spaces, and a number of major malls and power centers are largely vacant.

So yes, retail space is added, but I think it cannibilizes older retail space in less desirable areas. So a Meijer will open, but it will close a KMart down the road.
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  #76  
Old Posted Jun 19, 2010, 6:33 PM
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If it comes in a box, its not food, and its not really big, then no reason not pay less to get it online as there's no real difference what you are getting. The times I go to Best Buy largely have to do with me wanting something that day, because I am an impatient bastard and if its busted I want to return it that day and not mail something back. I kind of think in the long term these retailers will realize they can get by with smaller stores and fewer staff, with less space given to things like CD's.

I'd rather buy shoes or clothing in a store, to try them on. Not sure how people get away with buying shoes off Zappos.com for instance. Maybe they go to physical stores and try the shoes on, then go online, which would be a major problem for shoe retailers and I wonder how it will be resolved. Some purchases like appliances or furniture will probably be delivered locally anyways and those aren't retailers who you shop at so much as their brick-and-mortar storefronts are kind of like local warehouses so the home delivery is shorter.

Food, I guess it makes sense to get your cans of soup and boxes of cereal cheap if online delivery offered lower prices, but I'd like to pick out produce and meat or things that come in containers but are frozen and may vary(like ice cream could be mooshed in its box so I want a not messed up one).
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  #77  
Old Posted Jun 19, 2010, 7:54 PM
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Originally Posted by miketoronto View Post
We have the same discount style stores we had 40 years. WALMART is just a new and meaner version of Woolworths.

There were a ton of discount stores before, as well as middle market places. Infact almost all the major downtown department stores even had a discount basement department store . . . .

In fact today we have less discount stores and who is to say we really are getting the best price? I remember when I was growing up, we had way way more discount options than today.
Maybe I'm the only person here who was an adult 40 years ago and shopped in the "discount" stores of the time. I can tell you you are wrong. Woolworths, Kresge and the rest were nothing like the Wal-Mart Supercenter of today. The old Woolworth and Kresge "dime stores" were really probably closer to what we now call "dollar stores" (Family Dollar, Dollar General and so on). They didn't sell groceries, had a very limited selection of tools or hardware items and so on. The old Sears and Montgomery Ward were not unlike today's Wall-Mart in the selection of non-food merchandise and services, but they weren't notably inexpensive (just good, solid merchandise at a reasonable but not discount price).

The only true discount stores of that period were a few that are gone now like E. J. Korvette (which I mostly am aware of from tales by friends who lived in New York of shopping there--it covered a limited geographic territory). In DC where I lived there was an early membership-only warehouse outfit that catered exclusively to government employees. I forget the name.

But I'll say again that what has really made discount shopping a possibility for most people is the internet. Even if you don't buy online, bricks and mortar retailers know they are competing with online retailers and they lower their prices accordingly.
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  #78  
Old Posted Jun 20, 2010, 3:19 AM
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Originally Posted by Sekkle View Post
speaking of "big box consumerism"...

(photo is mine)

I don't know if this is a major chain or what, but come on... "buy buy baby"??? Nice & subtle.
Hey - it's honest!

But yes, I agree America is over-retailed. I am always driving by strip shopping centers wondering how many of them stay in business. Little wonder I see so many empty storefronts.
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  #79  
Old Posted Jun 20, 2010, 3:38 AM
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But really how often do you all shop? A number of you go on about online shopping sending stuff to your house and all that.

But to be honest, I don't shop that often. And the once in a while I do, I like to go out, stroll through the streets, or the mall, etc. I just don't find it a chore to go to a bookstore. I infact like it, and don't do it as often as I would like to.

But overall we don't shop that much. Clothing a couple times a year, the odd gift here and there, a book, etc. But it is not like we shop for non food items every single day.
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  #80  
Old Posted Jun 20, 2010, 4:12 AM
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Originally Posted by miketoronto View Post
But really how often do you all shop? A number of you go on about online shopping sending stuff to your house and all that.

But to be honest, I don't shop that often. And the once in a while I do, I like to go out, stroll through the streets, or the mall, etc. I just don't find it a chore to go to a bookstore. I infact like it, and don't do it as often as I would like to.

But overall we don't shop that much. Clothing a couple times a year, the odd gift here and there, a book, etc. But it is not like we shop for non food items every single day.
You just don't stop.

1) Who is "we"? Is this the royal We?

2) As I understand it, Mike, you are a student. Trust me, your daily habits and needs bear little resemblance to what they will be in 10 years time.
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