The largest retailers in the US do not look very healthy | Hacker News Reader

The largest retailers in the US do not look very healthy

qz.com

Fremont, CA contains a shopping center I like to call "Furniture Hell." The shops in this center are all zombies, each and every one converted to retailers for imported Chinese furniture. All of them claim to be near-death, going out of business, and yet live on for years. Their banners reach out at you, groaning "SAAAALE."

The most uncanny of the stores, what I like to think of as the Zombie Leader, calls itself the "Furniture Depot," and as you may have guessed is built in the corpse of a Home Depot. The new residents only fill a small part of the cavernous building. The disused portion has all of its aisles removed and its lights turned off, and so it stretches backwards seemingly forever, disappearing into the darkness. Home Depots are huge.

> The disused portion has all of its aisles removed and its lights turned off, and so it stretches backwards seemingly forever, disappearing into the darkness.

And the thing of it is, it would likely be kind of expensive to shoot a zombie movie here.

Haven't we known for years that traditional malls are dying? So-called "lifestyle centers", typically anchored by a Whole Foods or otherwise hard-to-virtualize establishment, have been sprouting up for a decade.

And there's still room for specialty retailers. Somehow the two highest revenue/square foot stores didn't make it into these tables.

Yes, the traditional 50+ store indoor mall is a dinosaur, and there will be fewer and fewer of them each year. No, Americans are not going to stop shopping IRL.

What is a high-volume business that has mass-market appeal and can benefit from falling retail costs?

It has to be something that you'd never buy online, or that has some major advantage to physically handling before purchase... or maybe some sort of service.

Clothing, fresh food (meat, produce, etc.) prepared food (eat in and take out), and I think consumer staples (soap, toiletries, misc) that's just quicker to pick up on the way home than to order and wait for. Unless you're really well organized, you tend to buy that stuff when you've run out and you won't want to wait a few days for shipping.

Original on LinkedIn (OP's link is all but unreadable). http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-40...

Thanks for the linkedin link. Quartz seems very flaky

Third paragraph:

> A number of physical retailers have already succumbed to online competition including Circuit City, Borders, CompUSA, Tower Records and Blockbuster

I was curious about the timeline of these closures so I opened all five businesses' Wikipedia pages to find out when each went out of business. (Tower Records - 2006, Circuit City - 2009, Borders - 2011)

It turns out CompUSA[1] and Blockbuster[2] are still operating retail stores! Both are now owned by other companies and CompUSA at least has a substantially reduced number of stores, but you can hardly say something "succumbed" when it still exists. This has me questioning whether I want to bother finishing the article.

[1] http://www.compusa.com/retailstores/compusaStores/index.asp

[2] http://www.blockbuster.com/stores/storelocator

We needn't be pedantic here. These guys are essentially the black knight from Monty Python: "still alive!" but with no arms and legs.

Blockbuster still had profitable locations, IIRC. It was the company as a whole that was collapsing. I assume that those locations are probably still profitable now, though maybe not as much as at its apex.

Blockbuster didn't really get trounced by online sales though, it was more they didn't adapt their business model to account for the convenience and cost savings of services like netflix. Blockbuster is more a victim of poor management than anything else.

How can a brick-and-mortar oriented video rental business compete with Netflix on "convenience"? I can't see any way.

Given that CompUSA was purchased by TigerDirect, it would still qualify as an example that fits the article's narrative of physical retailers succumbing to online retailers.

The city I live in is building strip malls at an insane rate while the existing ones have a higher vacancy rate then I have ever seen. A few at the best locations will fill most of the slots, but the rest might have 50% capacity. Who is loaning money for this? Do they think that this capacity will be filled at some point in the distant future?

There's usually some gap between sourcing the site, buying out the land necessary for build-up, obtaining permits, obtaining financing, getting the headliner to (soft) commit, and build things out. Sometimes, as you point out, the economic environment changes in-between those stages.

Sounds like an interesting story but the body content is virtually undetectable under the floating sidebar.

With Ghostery it doesn't even open. Edit: right click the overlay, inspect element and delete the overlay div.

I found it confusing too. Here's the place where it was originally posted to: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-4...

Apologies for that! Seems to work fine in Safari. I should have used the link to the original article (see below).

Online clothing stores as they exist today will never replace brick and mortar stores.

I will always want to try on clothes before buying them unless I'm feeling really generous with my money and time. I don't like having to go to the post office to return stuff. Online clothing as it exists today seems to me like a form of roulette.

Build an iphone app that can take a picture of me and show me what I'll look like in a certain outfit and give me a perfect tailored fit every time and you can disrupt brick and mortar clothing stores.

What about http://me-ality.com/locations Unless your measurements change drastically (lose/gain weight, grow up), a visit to one of those booths once a year should suffice for all online shopping needs.

The design of this site is incredibly annoying and awful. I just want to read the article!

Ha! The site "freezes" while loading for me, and all I see is a spinny wheel and no requests coming across the net panel in Firebug.

Indeed, that design is horrible.

But you can still read it through instapaper.

It works much better with javascript disabled, and as a bonus you get to be amused by the incredible false claim that "QZ.com works best with Javascript enabled."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com