America’s Retailers Are Closing Stores Faster Than Ever | Hacker News Reader

America’s Retailers Are Closing Stores Faster Than Ever

bloomberg.com

15 pointsprostoalex12 comments

Everyone blames online retailing, buy the matter of the fact is that wages still are not keeping pace with even cost of living, and more and more people are having to cut out unnecessary things in order to make ends meet.

People love to go to malls, but they aren't going to go spend $75 on a polo shirt when they have a $400 electric bill.

As wages continue to lag, this will affect online retailers as well eventually.

There's a retailer near me that sells office supplies. One day I needed a USB memory stick, and I needed it now, so I stopped by.

Everything in the store worth more than about $50 had to be ordered. "Should be here in a couple days". I get that on paper it does nice things for their cash flow, but what it's really doing is making sure people buy the $50+ items from Amazon, and then the office supply place gets the crumbs.

If you're going to be a retailer, be a retailer and make sure I'm walking out with my purchase. Otherwise that spot in the strip mall could be better utilized by a restaurant or something.

Probably. It's really hard to be a retailer I'd imagine when more ready customers are buying from delivery oriented e-retailer and traditional customers aren't going to pay the premium for ready-to-buy. Doesn't help that latter group is becoming more of an exception rather than the norm they used to be.

As a non american driving in the US what strikes you a lot of the sheer swathes of parking lots, retail parks, advertising boards and drive through McDonalds, KFCs and Taco Bells that go on and on for miles. How there is enough business left in the internet age to keep these from becoming concrete wastelands I don't know.

What gets me is that they're still building new ones anyway.

It seems like such a disconnect to hear various news reports over and over claim that "US retailers are closing stores", and yet still see lots of new retail construction all over -- not just one or two stores, but entire outlet malls and such.

And Planet Fitness is moving into the now-empty stores...pretty fast too.

I'd buy more from the local stores of some retailers if they would make their websites work better. I'm willing to pay more now and then to support keeping the stores open, but not if they make me jump through too many hoops.

A good example of doing it wrong is Barnes & Noble.

Suppose I'm thinking of buying a book, and would like to go take a look at it in person before making my decision. So my first question is simple: is it in stock at my local Barnes & Noble?

That's fairly easy to determine. Just go to barnesandnoble.com and search for the book. On the page for the book there is a "Want it Today? Check Store Availability" link. Hit that link and you get a pop up to enter your zip/postal code. Do so and it will then show you a list of their stores near that area, and whether or not each has the book in stock.

OK, that's fine if you are only interested in one book. But I'm usually interested in taking a look at several books. So navigate to another book's page and click "Want it Today? Check Store Availability".

And guess what happens? You get the pop up that asks you to enter your zip/postal code! They didn't set it in a cookie when you entered it for the first book. You have to enter your stupid zip/postal code for EVERY book you want to check!

OK...maybe it works better if you login. If you login you can set a store as your local store, and the site remembers that. For instance when you ask about upcoming events it shows the events from that store.

Nope. Logging in makes no difference. There is no way I've found to make it use the "my local store" setting to save from having to actually enter zip/postale code for every book you want to check.

If I'm looking up a half dozen books or so I usually get annoyed around #4 and say "screw it" and make do with Amazon's "look inside" feature, and then buy from Amazon.

I could simply not believe that they could do this, and so guessed that it might be because I use Safari on Mac. Maybe they don't test with Safari? Nope, I then tried Chrome and Firefox, and had the same problem. I then tried them on Windows, and also Edge, and same problem.

At the very least, B&N needs to use a cookie to remember the zip/postal code for that browsing session.

I say "very least" because that just solves the problem when I have a specific list of books in mind that I'd like to come look at.

Another common case is when I just know the category I'm interested in. For instance, I would like to get a book on improving my memory. There are a lot of books in that category. To find out online which are at my local B&N I've got to find them all on the site, and then check each one by one to see which ones are at my store.

What I really want is an option to select a store, and then have the site show me only items that are in stock at the store. If I search for "improve your memory" I don't want to see the 244 matching items that are available at the union of B&N stores and B&N online. I want to see only the 5 items that are actually at my local store.

What B&N needs to realize is that I don't care what B&N sells online. If I'm going to buy a book online I'm going to buy from Amazon because I have Amazon Prime. If I'm at their website it is because I'm interested in what is in their retail locations.

The past two weeks I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch. I ended up getting it from Target for a similar reason; I was able to go on their online shop and see which Target was carrying it. Wal-Mart only had scalpers trying to get people to buy it for x1.5 the price. When I went into a Wal-Mart (As their website said they had two in store), they were out even though their website AND their own stocking inventory said it was in store. When I went to a GameStop, they tried to upsell me to pay for a bundle (which had almost nothing I wanted) for x1.5 the price. Many of the online stores also made it a huge hassle to try to look in a local store without making a sign-in (Best Buy was the worst offender). The only reason I did not buy from Amazon is because of scalpers as well.

I also like to buy Music CDs. There's a few record stores around, but I have frequently seen a $6-7 CD being sold for $12-15 at the record stores (This is even assuming I can find the CD I want). I would not mind if I paid an extra dollar or two to support the local store, but asking to pay close to twice the price is not worth it to me.

> The past two weeks I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch. I ended up getting it from Target for a similar reason; I was able to go on their online shop and see which Target was carrying it.

That isn't working for me. It looks like they may have taken it out of their online shop. When I go to the Nintendo Switch section of the online shop there is a notice on the top of the page that it is only sold in stores and that I should check my local Target store, and there is no entry for it down in the product section of the page.

I don't see any obvious way to check online if an item is in stock locally except by going to the product page for that item in the online shop, where they also tell you if the item is available for pickup at your local store.

Speaking of buying hard to get consoles, I got a Wii on launch day without much effort at all. I knew people were camping out overnight for it, and was not willing to do that. I was, however, curious to see how many people actually did that and so got up that morning about an hour before stores opened and just drove around to see what the lines were like. As expected Best Buy and Target and the game stores had long lines.

I went home and then it occurred to me...K-Mart sells video games, but I've never heard anyone talk about camping out at K-Mart for a launch of anything. I'm on the west coast (GMT+8) and it was about a half hour until stores opened. On the east coast (GMT+5) stores would have been open already for 2.5 hours, so I called an east coast K-Mart and asked if they carried Wii. They said they did, but were sold out.

So I figured it was worth a shot, and drove to K-Mart. There was a line: two people. They told me they got there about 15 minutes before me. I got in the line, and a little after that another person joined behind me. A few minutes later someone came out from the store and told us that they had two Wii in stock. I got ready to leave because there were two people ahead of me, but they turned around and said they were together and only buying one. The person behind me started making some obvious preparations to rush in as soon as the door opened to try to get ahead of me, but the person from the store said that they would be given out by the order we were in line.

They had it when I was getting it, that's interesting. I also used a site called iStockNow, they seemed to be able to scrap from a few websites and tell me who has it in stock. I hope that helps!

I agree with this, and additionally, the website doesn't tell you where to find the book in the store! The expectation is to place a reservation, but when I shop for a book locally I want to compare it to its neighboring books on the shelf. I've learned where to find most topics by now, of course, but it still seems like a worthwhile improvement to make.

Home Depot has this down cold. Their website will tell me if an item is at my local store, how many, how many are at the next 5 closest stores, and I can click a link to have which aisle and bin the product is in at my local store texted to my cellphone they have on file.

When I check out in store, my receipt is automatically emailed to me. If I want, I can make the purchase from their website and the product is waiting for me at customer service.

It's ridiculously good for a physical retail experience.

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