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posted by on Thursday February 16 2017, @06:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-wizard-of-omaha-is-never-wrong dept.

When Buffet speaks, people listen:

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has sold off $900 million of Walmart stock, choosing to invest billions in airlines instead.

The sale, which leaves Buffett with nearly no shares in Walmart, comes as the US's largest traditional retailer has been rushing to catch up to Amazon and other online competitors.

Amazon's market value is now $356 billion, compared with Walmart's $298 billion. Last year, Buffett acknowledged that traditional brick-and-mortar retailers were struggling in the face of competition from the e-commerce giant.

Yes, but is he still long on Big Cola?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @01:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @01:16AM (#468032)

    When I was single I never really shopped at mega stores. They did not have things I needed. Now that I am married that *all* changed.

    I went from needing a bit of food and sometimes, a bit of TP, maybe the occasional fixit thing. Any store pretty much filled that need online offline whatever. But now I need junk in BULK. Online stores rarely compete with the local ones on price plus shipping cost once you start buying large amounts. Take something like 25 pounds of cat litter. Something I did not know about cats are they are picky about their litter. So you have to buy the kind they like. Online once and awhile will beat brick stores. Most of the time it costs as much to ship as the cost of the item. However, I still have a 3 week outstanding order of litter from amazon. Has not shipped yet. Well cats still need litter. Many times though once you get past about 2 pounds of stuff the price for shipping goes up geometrically not everything is free. Sometimes you can get a deal on total cost but not always.

    Also I have pretty much given up trying to buy cloths online. It is a waste of time. Buy item that looks nice. Get it and it is so f-ng cheap it is already coming apart or does not fit. So you spend a bunch of time messing with return. Buying local lets me usually skip the return step. Forget trying to buy womans cloths online. My wife has spent more time returning items than the ones she can wear. As every company has a different idea of what 'size 8' is. Mens cloths are a bit better but not much.

    My local mall has about 200 shops. 20 of them are empty. 2 years ago they banned any shoppers under 16 to be in the mall by themselves. They nuked their next demographic shopper from orbit making it clear they are not welcome. The place is mostly dead now in the evenings. I parked next to the door several times this last Christmas. I talked to a couple former managers for those stores. "why did you close you were doing great?!" "we couldn't afford the rent anymore they kept raising it and we just did not have the foot trafic to cover it we moved to a strip mall and pay 10x less and do not have to sell as much to stay open."

    The stores are not dying because they are less convenient. They are dying because they are just not very nice to visit or actually hostile to new shoppers and shops. My local walmart is gross to go into. The one across town is nice enough as wall-marts go but still kinda boring to go into. The local targets though? Usually fairly busy and seem to be doing decent. But they are nice to go into.