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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 Thursday February 16 2017, @05:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @05:16PM (#467880)

    Not to dispute anything else you said, but at 30, you are no longer a young'un.
    Sorry, you are a mature adult.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @05:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @05:59PM (#467898)

    "Sorry, you are a mature adult."

    Well, adult, in any case.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @06:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @06:35PM (#467908)

    Sorry you were born in the "wrong decade", but 30 is the new 20. And I find it hard to take a lot of 30 year-olds seriously now a days, especially ones who still live with their parents.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @06:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @06:45PM (#467912)

    OP here. I agree that I am a mature adult. However, the critical market segment that shops at Walmart is the "household", which I think of as the "buys clothes with their own money" age demographic, being represented roughly in ages 20-70. At age 30, I'm on the young side of that demographic, and, as a user on a fringe tech site, on the early adopted side of the "cord cutter", "everything from the internet" group. 22-25 year old represent that group better.

    One sample is rarely representative, but I wanted to draw the distinction that the *tidal wave* of new shoppers are likely not to shop at Walmart for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these is that it *used* to be convenient to have a "one stop shop" megastore where you could buy anything. My parents live in a rural zone and used to have a weekly trip to the one-hour-away Walmart to get household supplies. Now a megastore is actually inconvenient, because of the time spent navigating the *physical* store instead of a *virtual* store can easily be spent on doorstep delivery.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 16 2017, @07:53PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 16 2017, @07:53PM (#467928) Journal

      Reasonable arguments, but the charges for delivery often make shopping the better choice. For clothes I'd like to say that being able to try them on for fit is also important, but, for me, getting to a clothes store has become so difficult that now I *do* order over the internet, even though I'd rather not...and often find myself less than pleased with the cut of the clothes I get.

      That said, I wouldn't expect WallMart to carry anything in my size anyway, and the last time I was in one (somewhere over a decade ago) there wasn't any decent way to try them on for fit anyway.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @09:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @09:13PM (#467964)
        OP here. Yea, I'm pretty boring/efficient. As a byproduct, I order a pair of pants, try them on, make sure they fit, return if necessary, and then order a stack of them from the same company. This way I only end up buying clothes once every few years. The second problem is that the selection on the internet is SO MUCH better. Take my last few purchases - lifetime warranty socks, linen/rayon blend mens yoga pants, high-performance compression socks, spiderman close-fitting undershirt. Yea, whatever, I'm a weirdo, but just _try_ finding any _one_ of those things in a store.
    • (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.

    • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday February 17 2017, @02:40AM

      by dry (223) on Friday February 17 2017, @02:40AM (#468053) Journal

      I'm rural, it's quicker to spend the 15 minutes to go to Walmart (actually their competition that is actually a minute further) then to load most web sites on my only choice of internet, namely dial-up at 5 min. a MB.
      I could go half way, pay a fortune for cellular internet and strain to see the web pages on the phone.