05-20-2016, 10:51 PM
(05-20-2016, 07:16 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(05-06-2016, 01:38 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(05-06-2016, 12:32 PM)Odin Wrote: If there is a crash with a 10,000 point Dow drop I think it will be a tech crash. There seems to be a huge bubble involving everyone and their mom trying to get into marketing on social media sites and the number companies centered around managing other companies social media presence seem to be growing at an exponential rate and reminds me a lot of the delusion that took hold in the late 90s.
But there seems to be no devouring of capital as there was in the real-estate bubble in the Double-Zero decade. Social media is largely a shoestring business except for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Real crashes come from BIG investments being gutted in value.
But aren't the cases of one-time retail giants like Sears and J. C. Penney qualifiers for big investments being gutted? And think of all those who once were great that are now extinct, such as Montgomery Ward.
I remember some years ago that the average shopper in a traditional department store was....59. That was a quarter century ago. The clientele has aged into extinction. It is possible to get away with an elderly clientele so long as the trade is in things particularly attractive to the elderly, and that there is a steady stream of elderly customers as they age into the clientele. So it is with many medical devices. There was no reason for department stores to have an aging clientele; young shoppers were not replacing old ones. The loyal customers remained and aged in place. Young adults were not developing the habit of going to the shopping center.
Recessions have a nasty habit of knocking out businesses that have been living on life support. The traditional department stores have been unable to get good help (they pay near the minimum wage, which suggests what sort of workers are available to them). The great marketing gimmicks have probably played out. The idea of getting everything in one place (so long as it is dry goods) doesn't excite people. A business committed to an obsolete model, the department-store business may itself be dying.
So what went wrong?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.