03-10-2017, 10:58 AM
(03-09-2017, 08:30 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: CNN is saying, There is a retail bubble -- and it's bursting
Too many malls. Too many strip malls. The Internet is ever improving as an alternative to brick and mortar stores. I live in Plymouth MA, and have seen it clearly enough.
With manufacturing and paper shuffling jobs being lost to automation and computers, the retail sector has been one area where ordinary folk have been finding employment. How stressed is that going to be?
Moribund malls are a reality of American life.
The shopping mall depended upon bored people going into a store with a hundred bucks or so, finding nothing more interesting to do than to buy some phonograph records, clothes, or housewares and leave the store with ten bucks or so (after perhaps spending a little money in the food court for some over-priced fast food) but coming out with some phonograph records, clothes, or housewares. It took little intelligence to sell stuff to impulse buyers. Now that so much income has gone to people who have better things to do with their spare time (like order domestic servants about) than to do impulse shopping at the mall, the impulse shoppers are gone. Without the impulse shoppers, most stores would go under.
Places that cater to low-income shoppers, like Dollar General, Family Dollar, Wal*Mart, Big Lots (if you are unfamiliar with that regional chain,
"Go to Big Lots/ leave dejected
See what Wal*Mart has rejected"
close-outs, schlock too ugly for Wal*Mart, wares of companies that fail to advertise, reconditioned stuff)
are doing well.
What used to cater to middle-income people, like Sears, JC Penney, Macy's, Radio Shack, etc., is dying as the middle-income sector disappears in an America increasingly looking like a land of magnates and peons. But if one is destitute one has no choice; one must pinch pennies.
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.