Office Depot Layoffs: 13,100 Jobs Cut, Store Closures, and Distribution Centers | Hacker News Reader

Office Depot Layoffs: 13,100 Jobs Cut, Store Closures, and Distribution Centers

ibtimes.com

29 pointsmomentmaker5 comments

Though I've never seen it happen, but it is said that the water recedes significantly in advance of an incoming tsunami. I guess we're seeing that now. I hope it was all worth it.

I don't understand your analogy - what is the water that is receding here? The jobs being lost? Do you anticipate a flood of new jobs in the future?

I believe that permanent job loss in the US is going to be catastrophic and these jobs will not be coming back anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong of course, but I don't think I am.

My perspective is that of a business owner. Our business was very intertwined with trade shows, corporate events and various sectors of the entertainment business. And I'm just following the dots and the branches to the final results of what my company used to do and it's staggering.

I'm looking at NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles through the lens of my business and without devolving into a political discussion...It's over...I throw my arms up.

Ah, yeah, I agree - there's a lot of optimism that the economy will come "roaring back", but in a lot of areas that doesn't seem possible. People who have been out of work for months won't have the money to spend on restaurants and concerts like they used to; the office landscape is rearranging and may never look the same.

I am hopeful that we will get some kind of new deal (hopefully green!) going on in order to help people, or maybe even something approximating universal basic income, but either way that money will have to come from somewhere. Currently it seems like the largest corporations could pay a lot more in taxes, but a lot of that money comes from online ads, which relies on online commerce, which relies on a big enough population with jobs to spend money.

So we'll see, I guess - going to be a rocky couple of years I think.

His analogy is like tremors before a large earthquake - or feeling the wind begin to pick up right before a large storm comes.

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