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In the time between when Amazon became a clear threat and now, students have started university and gone on to IPOed billion dollar companies. At this point be

In the time between when Amazon became a clear threat and now, students have started university and gone on to IPOed billion dollar companies. At this point being bad at technology is just incompetence/laziness/refusal to invest.

CountSessine 6y ago
And that's a pretty good description of Canadian retail. Most Canadian retailers just charge what US mail-order retailers do, plus typical shipping and duties. There are a lot of soft targets in Canadian retail. The Hudson's Bay Company is one of them.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I actually wrote a blog post on this when I was purchasing shoes: https://gaiser.io/amazon-is-winning-as-everyone-else-isnt-trying/ https://gaiser.io/amazon-is-winning-as-everyone-else-isnt-tr... I need wide shoes. I could not find a place to buy wide running shoes besides Amazon at the usual places. My typical shoe buying places did not have a way to search for wides online. I admit that I didn't really check all that exhaustively, but past experience has taught me that other retailers besides Amazon are not worth the clicks.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    Yeah - it's frustrating how bad Canadian retail is still. I had an experience a few years ago with Canadian Tire where I chose in-store pick-up for an online purchase. The people at the store looked at me like I was from Mars. They didn't have the item in stock, and the manager actually told me that 1. he couldn't refund me because it was two separate computer systems (a lawyer would have told him tough sh*t - you're still the same company), and 2. I should do a credit-card charge-back to get my money back! It's been years since, and I'm trying them again now. I ordered a set of dumbbells yesterday and ... still no email to come pick up my in-stock dumbbells. BTW - I have wide feet too. If you're looking for running shoes, ASICS is good (this is the brand I always wear), and I've heard New Balance is pretty wide too. I can't wear Nike or Reebok for this reason.
    - roter 6y ago
      I have wide feet and I buy all my runners through the New Balance store. Never an issue.
    - CountSessine 6y ago
      Wow. And, my order for the dumbbells was...cancelled! They sold my item to someone and cancelled my order. Canadian retail is still such a cluster-f*ck.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        Yep lol. This has happened to my Dad too.
  - StrictDabbler 6y ago
    Ten years ago I tried to buy a blazer in Downtown Vancouver. I could not find one larger than a size 38 without going to Mr. Big and Tall, where the blazers would fit my size 48 chest but had enough extra room around the waist to store a couple of toddlers. I had the same experience with width of glasses frames, with shirts, and with any good that fell outside of a single standard deviation from the average. There's a paper where researchers compare the "average" sizes for human factors to individual people and discover that people who fit all the averages are vanishingly rare. Almost everybody is outside a deviation for at least one characteristic. I wish I'd bookmarked it. Canadian retailers just stock within the one deviation and shrug. I specifically went to the Bay for that blazer.
    - CountSessine 6y ago
      It was a US military study for fighter plane cockpit ergonomics. They had accidentally designed cockpits to be suboptimal for all pilots. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/insight...
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  From talking with Canadians, are folks happy with that? Target didn't stay very long in Canada. It seems every store has a "Canadian alternative" that's just pricier and has less product. I always hear about cross border shopping being done in the US to bring back goods in Canada but never the other way around. Even for cars it seems the same car will sell for way much north of the border.
  - nasalgoat 6y ago
    Target made two mistakes. The first was making a deal to lease all the former Zellers locations, which was too many to handle at the start. The second, was to rely on their US-based logistics software that wasn't capable of handling multi-country inventory and tracking (like different currencies).
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    I loved Target. As a single dad, I loved the variety of kids clothes they had. They still carried the brands that Zellers did but they had their own from the US too. I was so disappointed when I heard they were leaving. I didn’t believe it at first but sadly it turned out to be true.
marcinzm 6y ago
You're a retailer with 0.5% profit margin, how do you rebuild your whole business model and technology philosophy without going bankrupt first due to the costs? Remember that your competitors are using their money to kill you short term throughout the whole time. Of course they refused to invest, they didn't have the money to invest with and the risk was too high to any individual retailer. edit: Also, e-commerce was only 16% of retail sales pre-covid. And that took 30 years to achieve. So traditional retailers saw it more of a long term problem than something to worry about right now.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Why would brick and mortar retailers need to find through profit margins, but amazon didn't? If amazon could convince people to give them money and forego immediate profitability, I don't see why the same wouldn't be possible for e.g. hudson.com, (which is not as mighty as the amazon, but has more commerce flowing through it than the Amazon)
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Why would an investor pay money for hudson's e-commerce bet (keeping in mind that their investment will grow proportionally to hudson's overall growth not the growth of their e-commerce division) versus just investing in a pure e-commerce company?
- asdfaoeu 6y ago
  Just to add as well the point of a company isn't to survive forever but rather make a return on the investment. For a lot of these retailers it's somewhat inevitable e-commerce will take a large portion of their marketshare. The best move might just be to extract profit while they remain above water.
- freeopinion 6y ago
  0.5% of $5B is $25M. Add that to your existing IT budget and make a start of it. It's do or die. For somebody like Walmart, 0.5% of $500B is $2.5B. That's more than a little outside of SF.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

CountSessine 6y ago

And that's a pretty good description of Canadian retail. Most Canadian retailers just charge what US mail-order retailers do, plus typical shipping and duties. There are a lot of soft targets in Canadian retail. The Hudson's Bay Company is one of them.

MattGaiser 6y ago
I actually wrote a blog post on this when I was purchasing shoes: https://gaiser.io/amazon-is-winning-as-everyone-else-isnt-trying/ https://gaiser.io/amazon-is-winning-as-everyone-else-isnt-tr... I need wide shoes. I could not find a place to buy wide running shoes besides Amazon at the usual places. My typical shoe buying places did not have a way to search for wides online. I admit that I didn't really check all that exhaustively, but past experience has taught me that other retailers besides Amazon are not worth the clicks.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  Yeah - it's frustrating how bad Canadian retail is still. I had an experience a few years ago with Canadian Tire where I chose in-store pick-up for an online purchase. The people at the store looked at me like I was from Mars. They didn't have the item in stock, and the manager actually told me that 1. he couldn't refund me because it was two separate computer systems (a lawyer would have told him tough sh*t - you're still the same company), and 2. I should do a credit-card charge-back to get my money back! It's been years since, and I'm trying them again now. I ordered a set of dumbbells yesterday and ... still no email to come pick up my in-stock dumbbells. BTW - I have wide feet too. If you're looking for running shoes, ASICS is good (this is the brand I always wear), and I've heard New Balance is pretty wide too. I can't wear Nike or Reebok for this reason.
  - roter 6y ago
    I have wide feet and I buy all my runners through the New Balance store. Never an issue.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    Wow. And, my order for the dumbbells was...cancelled! They sold my item to someone and cancelled my order. Canadian retail is still such a cluster-f*ck.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Yep lol. This has happened to my Dad too.
- StrictDabbler 6y ago
  Ten years ago I tried to buy a blazer in Downtown Vancouver. I could not find one larger than a size 38 without going to Mr. Big and Tall, where the blazers would fit my size 48 chest but had enough extra room around the waist to store a couple of toddlers. I had the same experience with width of glasses frames, with shirts, and with any good that fell outside of a single standard deviation from the average. There's a paper where researchers compare the "average" sizes for human factors to individual people and discover that people who fit all the averages are vanishingly rare. Almost everybody is outside a deviation for at least one characteristic. I wish I'd bookmarked it. Canadian retailers just stock within the one deviation and shrug. I specifically went to the Bay for that blazer.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    It was a US military study for fighter plane cockpit ergonomics. They had accidentally designed cockpits to be suboptimal for all pilots. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/insight...
908B64B197 6y ago
From talking with Canadians, are folks happy with that? Target didn't stay very long in Canada. It seems every store has a "Canadian alternative" that's just pricier and has less product. I always hear about cross border shopping being done in the US to bring back goods in Canada but never the other way around. Even for cars it seems the same car will sell for way much north of the border.
- nasalgoat 6y ago
  Target made two mistakes. The first was making a deal to lease all the former Zellers locations, which was too many to handle at the start. The second, was to rely on their US-based logistics software that wasn't capable of handling multi-country inventory and tracking (like different currencies).
- CountSessine 6y ago
  I loved Target. As a single dad, I loved the variety of kids clothes they had. They still carried the brands that Zellers did but they had their own from the US too. I was so disappointed when I heard they were leaving. I didn’t believe it at first but sadly it turned out to be true.

marcinzm 6y ago

You're a retailer with 0.5% profit margin, how do you rebuild your whole business model and technology philosophy without going bankrupt first due to the costs? Remember that your competitors are using their money to kill you short term throughout the whole time. Of course they refused to invest, they didn't have the money to invest with and the risk was too high to any individual retailer. edit: Also, e-commerce was only 16% of retail sales pre-covid. And that took 30 years to achieve. So traditional retailers saw it more of a long term problem than something to worry about right now.

oh_sigh 6y ago
Why would brick and mortar retailers need to find through profit margins, but amazon didn't? If amazon could convince people to give them money and forego immediate profitability, I don't see why the same wouldn't be possible for e.g. hudson.com, (which is not as mighty as the amazon, but has more commerce flowing through it than the Amazon)
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Why would an investor pay money for hudson's e-commerce bet (keeping in mind that their investment will grow proportionally to hudson's overall growth not the growth of their e-commerce division) versus just investing in a pure e-commerce company?
asdfaoeu 6y ago
Just to add as well the point of a company isn't to survive forever but rather make a return on the investment. For a lot of these retailers it's somewhat inevitable e-commerce will take a large portion of their marketshare. The best move might just be to extract profit while they remain above water.
freeopinion 6y ago
0.5% of $5B is $25M. Add that to your existing IT budget and make a start of it. It's do or die. For somebody like Walmart, 0.5% of $500B is $2.5B. That's more than a little outside of SF.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]