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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: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:01PM (4 children)
Oh no. There aren't any manufacturing jobs left since those all went to China.
Oh no. There aren't any tech jobs left since those all went to India.
Oh no. There aren't any retail jobs left since those all went to Amazon.
Oh no! There aren't enough Starbucks jobs to employ everyone!
Welcome to life in permanent unemployment. The good news is there's free wifi everywhere so you can keep busy by trolling incessantly. The bad news is you'll be trolling from the homeless shelter and eating all your meals in the soup kitchen because food and housing sure aren't free.
America #1 Forever!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:08PM (2 children)
If everyone is unemployed, then nobody will be able to buy anything from Amazon, anyway; your scenario makes no sense.
When money is cheap (that is, interest rates are low), that sends retailers the signal that it's a good time to take out a loan in order to expand their businesses; hence, more retail outlets were built. Alas, it turns out that these interest rates were set artificially low; that signal to expand was fake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @12:06AM (1 child)
"There aren't enough for everyone" is not the same as "everyone is unemployed."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @03:19PM
Economics. How does it work?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @11:39PM
I'm waiting for the "Oh no! There aren't any more CEO jobs in USA and I don't want to move to China!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:06PM (1 child)
Are you passing more and more boarded-up shops on your outings?
Only everywhere.
Has the effect of fewer and fewer consumers (fewer people employed locally) trickled down to your company yet?
Furloughs began in 2010. Layoffs began in 2011.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:36PM
The mom and pop general store burned down. Nobody bothered to rebuild.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:13PM (2 children)
Monday is Tax Day.
Anybody earn enough income to file a return?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:17PM (1 child)
Tuesday is Tax Day!
Only a filthy unwashed non-taxpayer would make that mistake!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:22PM
Oh man I crack me up.
Which reminds me, once the rest of you become one of us, you'll spend plenty of time talking to yourself. Because, you know, people really only have a thin veneer of civility, so they only ever talk to other people who have money.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:21PM (5 children)
The real economy must build on creating value, if it doesn't the effects will eventually ripple in all directions.
Who does the best job of making (metal) minerals into something others are willing to trade food other stuff for?
And the (fiat) money that oil companies make, where do their bulk part go?
Etc..
The fiat money is just a delusion that hide the real flows that matters. Which is why there can be collapses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:24PM
M0AR C0AL
TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:28PM (3 children)
It is perhaps simple!
Expand the Alaska Permanent Fund to all states and all territories.
Expand Medicare to all ages.
Done and Done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:12PM (1 child)
So, you can fuck off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @09:56PM
Alaska's stipend is funded by sales of fossil fuel, and the U.S. has plenty of fossil fuel to sell.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170407124854/https://www.blm.gov/ [archive.org]
(Score: 2) by Lester on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:38AM
Is there money enough for that?
Not every place has oil like Alaska
(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]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:49PM (6 children)
Yeah, we shipped all the real jobs overseas, that produce anything. One knucklehead after another told us that the future was in service. Phhtt. There is a future in driving delivery trucks, for a short while. Soon, half of the workforce will be employed in delivering stuff to wherever. Until the self-driving trucks and drones take over. I give that another ten to fifteen years . . . .
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:53PM
Yes but you forgot to mention how self-driving trucks don't concern you since you expect to be retired and/or dead by then.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:10PM (2 children)
Somebody has to fix and maintain all those kiosks and autonomous vehicles, and we're a good 100 years away from that being automated.
(Score: 1) by ben_white on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:17PM (1 child)
Somebody has to fix and maintain all those kiosks and autonomous vehicles, and we're a good 100 years away from that being automated.
Yeah, but the point is that on balance, more jobs are destroyed than created. You get rid of all of the long haul truck drivers and replace them with autonomous driving vehicles. You will create a need for more sophisticated maintenance jobs, but you will still see a net loss of jobs.
--
cheers, ben
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:26PM
Exactly. A maintenance guy can gloat that his job is secure. Remember when the IT guys were gloating about job security, while manufacturing jobs were being shipped to the lowest bidders in the third world? Now the third world is doing our IT work.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:45PM (1 child)
Let me hire prostitutes so I can be a Job Creator.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 16 2017, @02:00AM
Nobody’s stopping you... only if you have the money. Upfront, as it is.
Well, do ya ...?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Saturday April 15 2017, @05:55PM (22 children)
All of the facts in the article are basicially right, but of course it being World Socialist they F up the analysis.
Retailers are closing, others are building as fast as they can ramp up. The most at risk stores are clothing stores. Clothing stores in malls are dying because malls are dying. No new malls have been built in over a generation and the existing ones are in what used to be good suburbs but those areas are now generally Hellish with vibrant diversity and the white middle class have fled to new refugee camps in the exurbs. Hellhole malls don't support yuppie / preppie clothing stores and you only need a couple of shoe stores to keep the vibrant diversity supplied with $200 sneakers. As Sears and JCP finish their long painful death struggles most malls are going to close, unable to even pretend to survive without those anchors.
Family Dollar and Dollar General are multiplying like rabbits around here though. Selling highly perishable women's fashion clothing at 500% markup (for a month then marking it half off, then 75% off, etc....) might be going away but anybody who can sell cheap to people without the means to buy everything on Amazon can still thrive.
Amazon is the elephant in the room though for all discussion of retail. As long as they have the biggest lobbyist in DC (Bezo's Blog) there will be no questioning their decades long practice of selling everything at a loss. So long as Wall Street can be sold on the idea the tactic will eventually lead to Amazon essentially ruling the world they will keep dumping cash in to cover the losses. Which is of course made a lot easier when Yellen keeps the free money spigot flowing to Wall Street. Because if Amazon does end up the only retailer they think it will be a money geyser so they have to "get in."
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.
They can correctly observe the problem but not a one of them can identity the reason this recession has endured. Obama and Obamacare. Obama set out to destroy economic activity and succeeded. Private sector economic activity is chaotic, it creates winners and thus inequality and Obama SAID he was quite willing to trade economic growth for greater 'equality' and yet people are still shocked when he did exactly what he said he would do and got exactly the results he admitted would be the consequence of his policy. Equality under socialism comes by dragging the successful down, never by elevating the unsuccessful. Because elevating the low is hard, many theories abound but none have a proven track record; dragging the high down is simple and works every time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:23PM (15 children)
If you would care to look further back than your chosen liberal scapegoat, you would see economic decline began in 2001 when Bush did 9/11.
I remember the excuses employers used during the decade:
2001: Looks like war coming. Time for budget cuts.
2003: Another war! More budget cuts.
2005: Hurricane! More budget cuts.
2007: Market crash! More budget cuts.
2009: War rages on. Support the war effort with more budget cuts.
2011: Hey did everybody get laid off already? Whatever, let's have some more budget cuts.
The 21st century so far has been one downward spiral circling the drain.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:33PM (4 children)
You forgot the important one.
2000 CNN: "Elect Gore to keep these great economic times rolling"
2000 CNNFN: "Weesa all gonna die!" The .com / .bomb was already going off.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:40PM
So with the dot-com bubble bursting, what Bush did was: start a bunch of wars, and not only neglect to raise taxes to fund the wars, but also to go so far as to cut taxes on the rich, which incentivized the rich to hoard money, and which led directly to our economic troubles today.
Bezos has too much money. Tax him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:12PM (2 children)
2016: Jill Stein elected president; starts building/rebuilding USA's infrastructure.
Rejects wars of aggression and further military build-up.
Starts to down-size USA.mil.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)
Does posting about the events of an alternate universe in which Jill Stein showed competency and got more than 500,000 votes in 2016 make you feel in control?
The success of Trump and Bernie (Bernie's was a relative success) have cemented the two party system even more. Extreme outsiders will come into the two party system for a chance at actually achieving victory. But they will be tempered by other factions of the party. Congress will remain under 1% independent.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @09:28PM
I'm pointing to flaws in the system and overlooked people/ideas.
Bernie's platform and Jill's platform overlapped on many points and large bunches of folks liked what Bernie was saying.
Lamestream Media being what it is, few voters even knew that Jill existed--even after Bernie got stabbed in the back by the Establishment Blues.
As a practical matter, I see 2 likely routes to displace the race-to-the-bottom GOP in subsequent elections.
1) Progressive Democrats take over the Democrat Party (the way the Tea Party took over the Republican Party) and they get candidates who aren't just GOP-lite on the ballot and elected.
This seems entirely do-able.
In his weekly Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Ralph[1] often mentions how few people it takes to get change going.
2) An entirely new broad-based Progressive political party.
This seems much less likely to succeed.
Now, if it does go somewhere, cribbing off of Jill's platform would get them going in a good direction.
[1] BTW, regarding an earlier story here, it was Ralph who got bumped from Allegheny Airlines in 1972 and it was his lawsuit that went all the way to SCOTUS which established airline travelers' rights.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:04PM (7 children)
Various people have been predicting this outcome since the early 1950's. Actually since Kark Capek's RUR. Actually, if you use a wide definition, since Plato (I don't remember if he was the actual author) when the prediction "When the looms run themselves we will no longer need slaves." was made.
The problem is blatant enough that you don't need any detailed knowledge of the situation to realize it exists. When work is automated, what happens to those who used to do the work? In most societies the answer has been "Let them die.". This is what inspired the Luddites. This is what the slogan "The sheep are eating the men!" was about. That's what Bob Dylan's song "Hollis Brown" was about. Previously, though, there's generally been other work that needed doing. Now ... well, so far there's still other work that needs doing, but very VERY rapidly less and less. And unpredictably less, in that you can't predict with any certainty that the job you've entered a five year training program to qualify for will be there for ANYONE when you are trained. This used to take centuries to happen. Even in the 1800's it took multiple decades. Now... ? I think it's still generally a decade for a through replacement, but the time has been shrinking. During the 1970's I was told that it generally took 20 years. I don't know whether that was true at the time, or was rather a truth from an earlier time. Currently it seems closer to a decade on the average. But I'm including "redesign" into the average, and I'm not sure that was true of the earlier figure, so it may not be shrinking as rapidly as it would appear.
And, of course, there's a large component of "what is the job"? Is a job where you punch pictures on the cash register the same as the same job where you enter prices of the order? Is it the same job as the earlier one where you had to add up the prices to reach the total cost? What about the job where you stand at a desk and watch customers swipe their orders past the item id scanner? (Yeah, I mixed fast food "restaurants", ordinary restaurants, and grocery stores. But "fast food" restaurants are a recent phenomenon. They aren't really the same thing as the drive-ins that they replaced. So the very business that the original job existed in has pretty much disappeared.)
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 Saturday April 15 2017, @08:18PM (1 child)
Human life has lost its value, because there is a major surplus in the supply.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:53PM
Yet, if you go back to 2000,[1] things were purring along pretty well.
There hasn't been a giant increase of the number people since then.
What there has been is an increase in the number of dishonest people trying to extract wealth without producing anything of value.
...and there has been no increase in the number of those dishonest people going to prison.
...or prosecuted, or even charged with crimes.
In 2012, you had the chance to make a difference with the Justice Party's presidential candidate Rocky Anderson (a former prosecutor), whose platform was fundamentally about jailing the crooks.
Jill Stein has had that as a plank of her platform every time she has run as well.
[1] A similar observation could be make WRT the period before the start of the Great Depression in 1929.
A giant difference between the era of The New Deal and now is the unwillingness to dedicate the readily-available labor of the unemployed to building/rebuilding public infrastructure.
Look around. There's plenty of work to be done.
What is lacking is the will among the Capitalist class and its toadies in gov't to make an investment in a better society.
It's the Guilded Age all over again.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Sunday April 16 2017, @12:59AM (4 children)
When work is automated, what happens to those who used to do the work?
If you leave the market free enough it handles the problem, even when it is far more extreme and quick than what we see now. Go read Marx's Capital and see what things were like in his day. While his solution is insane, he does pretty accurately much describe the situation in his day. Improvements in farming tech made most of the peasantry redundant and they all flooded into the cities and the dole. This flood of labor contributed to the Industrial Revolution, along with a few Capitalists (that itself being a new invention btw, and the merchant and artisan guild classes didn't like it at all.) being free to invest their own money into new industries to utilize all of this suddenly abundant labor. The early days were rough for all, the workers had hellish conditions, the owners were in a constant race to chase the tech curve and stay in business. But the progress was very rapid, on a historical scale it all happened in a blink; before a barely civilized society using tech that had been mostly unchanged for a thousand years and a couple of generations later we had internal combustion starting to replacing steam.
We are heading for a similar time of great upheaval, if we are smart enough to get the government out of the way the things that must happen will happen, entire industries will be destroyed, and fortunes destroyed with them. New industries and new fortunes will be made. The trick is keeping the people with the fortunes likely to be destroyed from buying laws that will only make it worse for all.
Economics is a human activity, by definition everybody will eventually produce enough value for those with the robots to trade them food and shelter for. Remember, the whole point of all the automation is increasing productivity and output, which drives prices down. The two curves must always meet, production without demand is pointless and unmet demand will also balance one way or another.... often badly for a bit so lets avoid that, K?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 16 2017, @02:15AM (2 children)
One doesn't need cur-throat economic competition to drive progress anymore.
The limits of the nature and increased demands of a growing population provide today enough challenges for progress.
By the USian measure, the Western European countries are deep socialist (they aren't actually), yet one can see progress coming from there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:18AM (1 child)
Western Europe is dying. Almost exactly like the old Soviet Union was dying and for the same basic reason: no point in living. Ultimately that is the final fatal flaw with Communism / Socialism, the utter incompatibility with humans. Humans aren't ants. You managed to convince entire populations that your "Glorious Future" wasn't preventable, so they didn't fight you, they just gave up instead. So what 'works' or doesn't in Europe won't really matter unless the new owners (i.e. the hordes of military age Muslim men streaming in by the millions screaming for infidel blood and white pussy) decide to adopt modern socialist European values, which is highly unlikely.
It was dying long before they, in desperation to obtain the warm bodies to fuel their welfare states, opened their doors to invaders. People gave up and stopped living and making babies. Only part of the plummeting birth rate can be attributed to feminism, abortion, destruction of family formation, etc. The rest is simply loss of hope for a future worth living in. The old line was that when you abandoned faith in God you would believe in anything. But it turns out there is something far worse, believing in nothing.
There is now zero doubt that your Socialist kind is done, it is Evolution in Action. Natural Selection works on cultures as well as individual genes. What we fight for now is preventing your dragging us all to oblivion with you as you self destruct every society in the West.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @01:45PM
You are pretty vociferous for a representative of a dying empire.
A pity it won't help you, not matter if you have faith/belief or not.
You have good chances to live and see your dog-eat-dog capitalism go the way of dodo - it will happen quite quick, it may not be pleasant though.
Yes, the orange one will trigger it, even if he doesn't intend to.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:04PM
Yes, it handles the problem. But a part of the way it traditionally handles the problem is by letting a bunch of those made redundant die.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:32AM (1 child)
Consider the last 40 years... as our bankers keep offering "new, lower rates!" [macrotrends.net]to entice round upon round of borrowing sprees to finance price hike after price hike.
So, where did the money come from? We certainly did not earn it. We borrowed it. From people chartered to print up debt notes. People who have only 10% of what they loan out, yet they are entitled to collect usury on the entire amount, despite the fact they never had the money to loan.
They are at the end of their rope.
We are now at the edge of the curve... and they are starting to set another collapse in motion.
Note the upturned tail.
They are again starting to pull the rug out from everyone.
Debts due and payable. But no-one will have money to buy your stuff at the price you paid for it.
Because they don't have access to the cheap money you had when you bought it. So you can't sell and get your money back.
Foreclosures loom.
Followed by governmental bailouts to the banks.
How many times do we have to watch this thing repeat before we know what they are up to?
We do not have enough elevation anymore to "drop the rates" again to egg on yet another spending spree to bail everyone out.
This next one is gonna be a wowie... its gonna be interesting how they handle this when the interest rate is already hovering at zero. Pay us to take a loan?
And the good old USA is hardly in a position to start actually earning its stuff instead of playing financial games. The factories are no longer here.
This is gonna get interesting. Please oh please stay out of debt!
That's how they do us in.
Get us to owe them a dollar, then pull the rug, then when we can't pay, they foreclose.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday April 17 2017, @05:58AM
And the good old USA is hardly in a position to start actually earning its stuff instead of playing financial games. The factories are no longer here.
This simply isn't true. US manufacturing is very healthy. However, it's heavily automated and doesn't need very many workers. So the US makes a lot of stuff, but fewer and fewer can afford it, and the manufacturing isn't doing much to support the economy by employing workers, it's just bringing profit for the shareholders.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:54PM (3 children)
Hellish with vibrant diversity and the white middle class have fled to new refugee camps in the exurbs. Hellhole malls don't support yuppie / preppie clothing stores and you only need a couple of shoe stores to keep the vibrant diversity supplied with $200 sneakers.
When they say "thinly veiled racism", I think a little more effort than that is expected.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:57PM (2 children)
Jesus fucking Christ, I can actually see the crazy-eyed expression he must have been wearing when he typed that. You know that look some people have where they're reeeeeally intense and you can see the whites of their eyes above and below their irises? Yeah. That one.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @10:46PM (1 child)
I'm not sure. That strikes me more as the cold, steely kind hate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @09:07AM
It is, but true racists enjoy their self-perceived superiority. It makes them smug.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @10:17PM
Thank you for continuing to show everyone what a jackbooted nutjib you are. I really appreciate it! Takes the pressure off responding to your idiocy, now everyone can just see for themselves. I guess you aren't taking Trumps "winning (hahahaha)" very well.
Oh ya, for your blatant racism: fuck off back to whatever hole in the ground you spawned from.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday April 17 2017, @04:57AM
All of the facts in the article are basicially right, but of course it being World Socialist they F up the analysis.
Ok, but...
Clothing stores in malls are dying because malls are dying. No new malls have been built in over a generation
You don't even have your facts right, not by a long shot. This last statement is just plain wrong: lots of malls have been built in the last 10 years. The thing is, you don't see many of the traditional, enclosed "malls", now they're building "lifestyle centers" (or "outdoor malls" as the non-marketers call them). They're really the same thing, except they don't have a roof and tend to be a little more spread out. Some of them are mixed-use, and have shops on the ground floor with apartments on the upper levels, the way downtowns used to be. But the shops are all the same as at the traditional malls mainly, it's just the format is slightly different.
and the existing ones are in what used to be good suburbs but those areas are now generally Hellish with vibrant diversity and the white middle class have fled to new refugee camps in the exurbs.
Yeah, that's nothing new, "white flight" has been around for at least 60 years now. Those exurbs are where they're building the "lifestyle centers". The white middle class isn't going to stop shopping, but they're doing a lot more online, but they still want a place to walk around and go to restaurants and buy ice cream and such. The big thing that's different now is that many of them, particularly younger ones, are moving back into the cities (called "gentrification").
Amazon is the elephant in the room though for all discussion of retail.
What I don't understand is why anyone is still buying a lot from them. So much stuff on there is counterfeit these days. 3 years ago, even 2 years ago, it was great; today, not so much. I feel safer buying on Ebay.
> Equality under socialism comes by dragging the successful down, never by elevating the unsuccessful.
Except that western European nations seem to get along just fine with universal healthcare and other systems that give everyone coverage. But people like you seem to think it's a good idea to just let people die on the street if they don't have insurance.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:43PM (1 child)
Too many retail outlets cut back on what should have been their strengths.
Inventory, the biggest advantage a retail store should have is that someone can buy it now when they need it. But too many stores cut back on inventory so once you make a trip for that desperately needed item, well, you find out you need to order it anyway. Empty or scantily stocked shelves do not bring customers back. If someone desperate does buy something, chances are they settled for an inferior stopgap solution and chances are, they won't give that outlet a second chance. Why stop at the retail store when you can get what you want quick and delivered to your door from an online outlet?
Service, well retail has been blowing this for decades (no, not getting serviced that way, they would be thriving then). For far too long sales people that should be helping you get what you need and want have been pressuring customers into getting more product, only for the customers to find they still don't have what they needed or wanted once they exit the store. It's not necessarily the fault of the sales people, they need jobs and the only way to keep them and to get a decent paycheck is to follow these policies of management. That tends to sour the consumer experience. If you are a relatively passive person, and I suspect most people are, it is far more pleasant to browse well constructed websites than to be irritated by sales people who don't have your interests in mind, especially if that sales person has little knowledge about the products except for the pricier and newest that they are expected to push.
Both of these are tied into staffing, in which we have steadily seen the front line staffs reduced to low wage, unenthusiastic and uninformed drones. You can bet most of these stores that are failing have overwhelmingly reduced labor costs from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. The result shows in falling sales and closing stores.
(Score: 1) by nwf on Friday April 21 2017, @06:55PM
There may be some truth to that. When shopping for clothes, I have noticed a decided lack of stock in common sizes. And an item goes on sale, but they sell out in the first day. Even Target does this sort of crap. I now get more and more stuff online, especially via Amazon Prime.
Another is that these legacy retailers just don't understand what people want. People are much more about instant gratification and are more price conscious. You can use your phone and google to check prices at like 50 retailers in a few seconds. The ability to charge a lot more is vanishing.
Most of these stores have an online component, but it's typically poorly integrated. They are effectively separate companies. My wife was in sears visiting her mom and wanted to get her a TV. I found it online much cheaper (still sears) and they couldn't match it even on their own web site. I ordered it for in-store pickup and it was ready in 15 minutes. That sort of crap is just makes me never go back to sears.
On the other hand, many of the recent store closings appear to be specialty stores. Read high-priced boutique retailers and they suffer disproportionately when the economy slows. That and they are mostly pointless.