J.C. Penney’s troubles are reflected in satellite images of its parking lots | Hacker News Reader

J.C. Penney’s troubles are reflected in satellite images of its parking lots

theoutline.com

98 pointsjonbaer51 comments

I see huge crowds, maybe the most cars in a parking lot ever, I don't know, you look out the door and its nothing but cars, huge. Many people say that JC Penny is the best store, huge store, way bigger than Amazon. Have you seen an Amazon store when walking by yourself in the Mall? I haven't. You know why? Amazon is a fake store. That's right, fake store. Nobody buys anything there because its fake, all fake. Malls are wonderful places, I love Malls, everyone goes there and loves them, all our shopping is done at Malls, and I have to say I know a thing or two about Malls. Huge crowds, JC Penny is the best. No more questions.

Trolling, bro?

I was going for sarcasm. The slow steady death of Malls (the home of nearly all JC Penny stores) has been going on for over a decade now, and pretty much all of the articles I see about JC Penny's or Malls blame Amazon and people shopping from home for stuff. Given our current President's speech tonight and his preference for seeing things in an alternate light and his issues with estimating how full or how empty an aerial photo can be I thought "What would Trump say?" and well it just came out.

My apologies for those who were offended or missed the joke.

For me, arriving at a giant parking lot takes all the fun out of shopping.

I did get that you weren't serious. But I wasn't sure whether it was a joke, or a second-order joke. So I asked ;)

See http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law

I find this sort of data extraction interesting (I especially like the guys who try to validate trade numbers by counting containers in shipping ports as an example) but wonder about correlation here. JC Penny is in malls, malls are getting fewer and fewer customers, cars in mall parking lots are going down. JC Penny seems to be slowly dying because their online presence cannot compete with Amazon, so is this 'watch along with the satellites as fewer and fewer people go to brick and mortar stores' ?

That said, there are so many interesting things that having open spy satellites has made available to the non-spy.

This is a real world application of the same IMINT principles used during the cold war (and currently in use), with large nation states that had the money to build and launch photo reconnaissance satellites. Now applied to privately acquired satellite imagery. Example: Soviet Union analysts looking at photos of parking lots at key US defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, etc) and correlating them with intelligence related to certain projects. And vice versa.

I wonder what it costs to get these images, and if you could get them more cheaply by flying drones? I guess that would require a presence in a lot of places though. . . . Still, maybe you could focus on just a few cities, and get pictures more frequently than you'd get with satellites? Maybe there is an opportunity there.

I don't know the cost, but you can get the images here: https://spaceknow.com/

Drones could fly under cloud cover also. Satellite photos are probably less useful for Seattle than for Denver.

Note that to acquire imagery you don't necessarily need to request a new one be shot. Historical imagery often covers what you need, depending on what part of the globe you want to see, and when.

Each image with sample distance to differentiate cars seems to be $10-$48 each.

Rather than drones use large blimps, like google was planning to do with project loon.

I agree with you; I also think there's an opportunity here. I wonder what the biggest cost would be to such a company. Maintenance?

By the time you've paid for a drone and someone to fly it in each city, you might as well just pay someone minimum wage to drive around photographing the lots from ground level. It'd probably work out cheaper.

That probably wouldn't work for image analysis however, since it would be hard to see all the cars in the lot from ground level.

If you drove a Google Street View-style car up and down a mall parking lot, you'd get a lot of information. I doubt that a more in-depth sweep would cost significantly more to do than to just do a single drive by. The biggest cost would be driving to the parking lot in the first place.

And if you were trying to collect information, you'd be able to get a lot more info from the license plate numbers or the make/models of cars. You could also get information on employment by looking for which cars are parked where, since store employees typically have to park further from the entrance. There's a lot of information that you could get from ground-level that you miss at satellite level.

The real question is - is it worth it?

A couple of years ago, JC Penney's was on to something. They were moving to stylish affordable clothing and it was starting to take with young people. Investors got nervous and wanted to move back to the inflate prices and have constant fake sales model. They are seriously wasting their real estate and potential.

Is it pure coincidence that the use of satellites to gauge retail traffic was a minor plot point in the [latest episode of Billions](http://www.sho.com/billions/season/2/episode/2)?

I would be interested in the number of trailers unloading.

I wonder how much intelligence will be gleaned when and if automated semis make deliveries to retailers? At any given moment the quantity, weight, destination, etc can be real-time tracked with these self driving semis. Would be an interesting business. Especially if the truck could be tracked from manufacturer to store

If others could track automatic Amazon truck deliveries from their warehouses that would probably be desired.

I assume that once driverless vehicles are in the main then the trucks would have to broadcast and thus be able to be picked up by private listening sites.

Then some company will create a spoofing truck runs to give false intelligence.. and on and on...

Most big store parking lots tend to be legally mandated vast wastes of asphalt. New Urbanists celebrate Black Friday as "Parking Day": taking photos of nearly empty parking lots on supposedly the busiest shopping day of the year.

This is a little off topic, but did anyone else see the absolutely huge ad in the middle of the article? It takes up 670px in a window that's only 960px tall. Is this a new trend in advertising?

No because we have ad blockers installed :)

I use uBlock origin and I still saw it. I added a rule to block it but I just thought it was a little crazy that an ad was so large.

I saw it too. I thought that it was part of the article, as an example of the lame advertising that mall stores use.

Looking again at the article, it's not there. So it was a real ad ;)

I was looking at the big empty parking lot, didn't notice a huge Fnord.

Off topic - I recommend this site. Breadth and depth in terms of the article types. And the design is kind of weird, but I do dig it.

This article is basically a couple paragraphs of wikipedia-level explanation and a bogus graph. I wouldn't call it very deep analysis.

J.C. Penny's troubles are Target[1]: we have sufficently fashionable clothing for -10% less.

[1]any fast fashion retailer really.

The days of JC Penney, Sears, Kmart etc. are pretty much over. Walmart/Target have eaten their lunch. There isn't anything those three stores do particularly well that a different store doesn't do cheaper and better.

I personally feel sorry for people who need to buy their clothes at these places. But I guess they don't have other options? I am not sure how they live their lives.

Clicked but got a certificate error

There is a lot of this going on in Prague. There is even an entire specialty called geoinformatics that you can study. I have an aquantance who's first comercial project was to tell the city which street lights are out.

This really goes to show, however, how the everyday man has no hope, as an investor, against the big boys.

Edit: I origionally wanted to link to this startup https://spaceknow.com/ but couldn't remember the name.

The everyday man should not be investing in individual stocks like this. They should be parking their money in low cost indexes[1].

[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/4049862-investment-advice-wa...

There have been lot of talks that index funds are not what they used to :). The reason stock goes high or low is because there is asymmetry in demand and supply. Previously, some people intelligently bought average stock noticing that average always go up high over long run. However, imagine a world where everyone is always buying average of all stocks. Now there is no longer asymmetry and no longer profits for people who settled for average. So as everyone move towards low cost index funds, they receive diminishing returns.

There will still be that asymmetry. My comment was specifically with regards to "the everyday man" who is not a savvy investor, does not have access to all the tools and data, etc. Wallstreet will keep doing its thing just fine even if more Mainstreet investors jump on indexes.

Index funds seem to be emerging as a new religion on the comment sections of the internet. As religions go it's reasonably harmless, but the faith that some folks have in index funds vs sensibly diversified portfolios of decent self-selected stocks is disarming.

A reasonably chosen self-selected buy-and-hold portfolio will, on average, perform just about as well as an index fund. Psychologically it can be better or worse depending on your personality because you get/have to take responsibility for your profit/loss.

> on average

I think the goal of an index fund is to normalize results, so that you don't happen to be the guy who ends up significantly below average.

But that means you're not going to end up significantly above average either. Whether that makes sense really depends on your financial situation and tolerance for risk than any hard and fast rule.

But it seems that most people don't really beat the index funds so the expected returns are essentially the same as index funds. Without higher returns why would you take higher risk?

Your returns are potentially higher. And lower.

Let's say I want to take an Alaskan cruise, but I don't quite have the money. If I get a higher return I'll have enough to go. If I get a lower return I won't go, and I'll still have enough money for rent. In my (admittedly contrived) scenario I'm willing to accept more risk as long as my returns are potentially higher.

It's risk-adjusted return that you and the GP care about. It's fairly straightforward to add both risk and return - just add leverage. Picking individual stocks, on the other hand, means you wind up being the "dumb money" that the "smart money" systematically takes advantage of.

I don't think it's that hard to beat the "smart money" provided you don't try to out-trade them.

Buying and holding low-cost index funds is one way to beat the "smart money."

The way that you manipulate this is by adjusting your risk profile. If you want potentially higher returns, you accept more risk. If you want predictability, you accept lower returns.

Self-selecting a bunch of stocks increases your risk profile compared to using an index fund of the whole stock market, but you incur significantly more trading costs as a result. If you want to increase your possible returns at greater risks, there are cheaper ways of doing it.

Oh no, not another graph with misleading axes. It doesn't really show such a perfect fit as it looks like. They've both scaled and translated the axes to make the two curves look similar to each other. If they counted cars upwards from 0 instead of downwards from the previous amount, then it'd make more sense but then we would see if the slopes were different or there was an offset indicating, for example, that cars are expected to still remain after the stock price reaches 0.

Good on them for starting the stock price axis at 0, that's a rarity in stock-price graphs.

Of course one of the axes has been scaled. We're interested in the proportionality between the two variables, to see how good their claim that cars parked is a good proxy measure for stock price. I see where "percent since arbitrary start time x" is a poor choice of units for cars, but since it's a linear transformation, you'd get the same picture (and conclusion) were you using "thousands of cars" instead.

I disagree that it shows proportionality. Since we don't know where the zero would be with "thousands of cars", it could be way off the bottom of the chart, which means car numbers are relatively constant, even as stock price falls to a few percent of it's starting value.

The graph does show that both variables are decreasing, and that they both have a knee in the middle where the rate slows. But that's about all they clearly have in common.

An yes, scaling is of course necessary. It's translating that's the problem. I shouldn't have said scaling in my first post.

Sorry, I still disagree with that comment. They're not comparing apples and oranges, here, they're saying "here's why we're using apples to approximate oranges". The graph is showing a close linear relationship between # of cars and stock price.

It's saying "There is some a and b such that:

    a * "number of cars" + b ~ "stock price"

You can have a gripe with that method, sure, but the graph is fine.

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