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Yes a lot of urban retail seems to be in a death loop. Between online competition, wages, rent and shoplifting you see fewer locations, with a less convenient
by steveBK123 1y ago
Yes a lot of urban retail seems to be in a death loop.
Between online competition, wages, rent and shoplifting you see fewer locations, with a less convenient shopping experience, less staff and shorter hours.
Which only leads to more Amazon usage.
- ryandrake 1y agoYea, I want to "do the right thing" and shop locally more, but boy, they do their best to make it difficult. It's as if "Local Shopping" is a group that gets together for meetings to figure out the most effective ways to drive me to shop at Amazon instead.
- rkomorn 1y agoWhat kind of things are "local shopping" doing to drive you away? And how many of those are related to not having the same economies of scale (and other competitive advantages) that Amazon has?
- ryandrake 1y agoA random combination of inconvenient hours, skeleton-level staffing, rude and/or apathetic staffing, inflated prices[1], terrible handle on their own inventory (often can't tell me over the phone or online whether something is in stock), poor/lengthy product-returns experience, general condition/smell/cleanliness of stores. Not all local stores have all of these--but they always have some mix of them. 1: I get it that they'll never be able to meet or beat online pricing due to economies of scale, fine. But I've seen 2X+ markups depending on the store/product.
- creer 1y agoAdd: deliberately hiding their local price on their web site. They will try and give all kinds of info about the product in each local store - which aisle it's in, how many their stock mgt system thinks they have - but they will show a price that's deliberately different: "if purchased online".