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The World Socialist Web Site reports
US retail store closures for 2017 are on pace to exceed [those of] 2008, when more than 6,000 locations were shuttered. In the first three months of this year, 2,880 store closures were announced, compared to 1,153 in the same time period in 2008. If the current pace of retail bloodletting continues, total store closures could top 11,000 by the end of the year, an unprecedented number.
Along with mounting store closures, retailers eliminated 30,000 jobs in March, with a similar number cut in February, making it the worst two-month period for workers in the retail sector since 2008, when the economy was in the depths of the recession caused by the bursting of the housing bubble and stock market crash.
According to Retail Metrics, the combined same-store sales for retailers in the first quarter of this year is expected to rise only 0.3 percent, the worst quarter in four years. Current expectations are well below the 0.8 percent growth in retail sales which economists had predicted in February. Without positive sales growth posted by discount giant Walmart, the retail industry would have posted negative figures. The dismal first quarter of 2017 follows poor in-store holiday sales at the end of 2016.
Traditional retailers are being slammed by competition from Internet retailers, in particular Amazon. Even as many companies are increasingly turning to online sales in an attempt to shore up their poor in store sales Amazon continues to dominate, accounting for 53 percent of all online sales growth in 2016.
[...] While market analysts point to the competition from Amazon as a key factor in retailer bankruptcies and store closures, another factor is the underlying weakness of the American economy and years of wage stagnation for the working class. Wage growth has been flat since the Great Recession and monthly year-on-year increases have not exceeded three percent since early 2009. According to the Economic Policy Institute, average hourly wages are $3.22 behind where they would be if wages grew at 3.5 percent over the last decade.
Even as the stock market has boomed over the last nine years, thanks to an infusion of unlimited cash through quantitative easing and other measures, the real economy has not recovered from the recession. The economic growth rate has not exceeded three percent in a decade and was a meager 1.2 percent in the first quarter of this year. Nearly all of the jobs created since 2008 have been either part time or temporary.
[...] The last decade has seen a series of buyouts, mergers, and acquisitions by private equity firms as part of last ditch efforts by retailers to avoid bankruptcy [as well as] outright liquidation by corporate raiders squeezing every penny before liquidating or reselling them.
Are you passing more and more boarded-up shops on your outings? Has the effect of fewer and fewer consumers (fewer people employed locally) trickled down to your company yet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:34PM (8 children)
Now man Now!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:40PM
Faster Pussycat! I'm hungry now!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:03PM (4 children)
That would come under the heading of Liberal Democracy.
(Socialism is a method of organizing production with ownership of the means of production solely by the workers, standing in contrast to Capitalism and its concentrated non-Worker ownership.)
...and, 6 minutes before you posted, another AC mentioned the Alaska Permanent Fund.
This was establish in 1976.
It considers petroleum under that state to be the property of every resident of Alaska equally.
Unlike other states which hand out mineral rights like Halloween candy, Alaska charges corporations a fee for extraction of oil.
That fund is distributed as a dividend, equally to every Alaska resident.
Now, expand this to the entire USA and to e.g. leases for grazing, agriculture, timber harvesting, and mineral extraction, with every USAian as a compensated stockholder.
USA is very wealthy, but that wealth is concentrated and the wealth is in fewer and fewer hands with each passing year.
A model for egalitarian sharing of the commonwealth exists in Alaska.
It has only to be embraced at a national level.
The alternative is a return to a Dickensian/Guilded Age model.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @09:53PM (3 children)
Yeah but but but OMG Socialism! Hitler!* Stalin! Mao! Pol Pot! Venezuela!
* jmorris made me do it
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @02:07AM
I'm gonna try and get some street in Cuba named "Calla Jmorris"
(Score: 2) by Lester on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:45AM (1 child)
Socialism != communism
Sweden, Finland...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @11:52AM
Socialism != communism
That's true.
Additionally Stalinism, Maoism, and Hoism are not Communism.
...though you have sworn up and down that they are in your previous comments.
Sweden, Finland
...and neither of those is Socialist nor Communist.
They are examples of Liberal Democracy.
Some call that "Social Democracy" and that causes some people to get confused.
When Sweden proposed a brand of "socialism" back in 1981, [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [csmonitor.com] the voters there rejected it.
That was kinda-sorta Collectivism but it WASN'T Socialism; it didn't have actual worker ownership.
(When YOU own something, YOU make the decisions about that something.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:07PM (1 child)
Unlike many others here, I'm not inherently against neither capitalism nor socialism, but socialism only works in countries with relatively small, healthy, White, educated populations who all contribute to the means of production.
It cannot work in America because there are large sections of the population which are not White, and they are unhealthy, refusing to work, breeding irresponsibly, and use more unearned resources and services. Canada and the Nordic countries were good examples of how socialism could work, but their examples have been undone from invasion of the less-desirable elements of the human population.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:37PM
Yet again, someone gets his wires crossed and tries to claim that Socialism is something other than a method of production.
Use of the commonwealth to serve ALL members of a society equally is an example of a successful Liberal Democracy.
If all of the workplaces of that geographical area were ALSO organized as (Socialist) Worker-owner cooperatives, -THEN- you would have DEMOCRACY EVERYWHERE there and -THEN- the term "Socialism" would apply.
socialism only works in countries with relatively small, healthy, White, educated populations
You are completely clueless.
...but you have reminded me of a scene that I like concerning a village of poor farmers in an Asian country under USAian occupation in a Glenn Ford movie from the Cold War Era: [google.com]
breeding irresponsibly
Well, if you were to ever reproduce, the term would certainly apply.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]