They just finalized a merger with OfficeMax. Which is a sign both companies were in trouble.
I disagree. Plenty of people take photos for reasons other than posting on social media.
What smartphone photography is really killing are the cheapo point & shoot digital cameras- the sub $100 jobs that are the digital equivalent of polaroid cameras from days gone by.
Any halfway intelligent person wanting to take photos of a once-in-a-lifetime trip or their newborn child won’t rely on the barely adequate capability of a smartphone and will probably get a decent point and shoot or DSLR. You can’t really compare the camera on an iPhone with say… a Canon PowerShot S100, or T4i.
The Toys’R Us I’ve been into the past couple of years into seemed pretty nice; half of each store is a Babies R’Us, which seems to be the only game in town if you don’t have a Buy Buy Baby for a lot of stuff, and the other half was the same old Toys R’ Us that I remember from childhood- not run down, not old toys, etc…
I don’t know about Mitsubishi but I thought I had read in the Wall Street Journal fairly recently that Volvo sales are on the up in the United States. I’ll have to admit a bit of perhaps unfair anti-Volvo feelings, in the past I would have considered buying one of their cars but once they were bought by a Chinese automaker I became concerned about their quality. No idea if there has been a hit to quality after the takeover or not, though, which is why I said it was an unfair feeling I had.
A few years ago, I read an article that described how Toys R Us screwed up; they separated Toys R Us stores from the Babies R Us stores. Toy sales dropped. The reason is that parents go into the Babies R Us stores about once a month (presumably for diapers, formula, new clothes, etc) but into Toys R Us only once a year. So they were better off with combined stores. They may have been attempting to reverse the split.
As it is, Toys R Us was seeing a lot of competition from Walmart for toy sales, and there’s also the fact that kids play with fewer toys now anyhow.
To the best of my knowledge there has not been a quality hit that can be attributed to the new ownership.
Yes Volvo sales are up but up is relative. If you only sold 2 cars last month and you sell three this month that is a 50% sales increase. The problem is you need to sell 10 to break even.
Office Depot merging with OfficeMax would solve one problem for me, which is that I can’t tell them apart for the life of me and either call a particular location by the wrong name or simply refer to it as “Office … Office something. You know. Sells pens and shit?”
Besides, they don’t have the big red “That was easy!” button that Staples has, and everyone knows that makes all the difference. 
I thought Mitsubishi was already out of the USA. ETA: Whoops, I was thinking of Isuzu.
Not if I have anything to say about it. Amazon has replaced “going to the mall” for me. Why walk around a few dozen stores, when I can virtually explore thousands? It might be nice to do a “hands on” examination, but it’s sometimes even nicer to have reviews written by recent purchasers. And I’ve converted a few friends/relatives over to my way of shopping.
ETA: Not a paid endorsement, though it reads that way.
Haven’t read the whole thread, but Kmart and Sears are both owned by the same parent corporation, Sears Holdings. I refuse to patronize either, because they demand your whole life story for even the smallest cash purchase. :mad:
Best Buy has been on the skids for a long time. One of my Facebook friends, a former co-worker, had THREE interviews there for a job she didn’t even get, and no, she wasn’t interviewing as an executive or store manager. She had applied for a part-time cashier job. :eek:
The Barnes and Noble at my nearby mall is ALWAYS busy. We also have a Books-a-Million here, ironically in the old Borders building, and it seems to be doing quite well too.
Does anyone even use MySpace anymore? Last time I went there, which I’ll admit was several years ago, it locked up my computer so badly, I had to UNPLUG it.
JC Penney’s isn’t doing all that great either, although that was because of some very bad corporate decisions and I’ve heard that new management has gotten things somewhat turned around.
Microsoft. God, we can only hope.
I agree. The comments about Amazon are bizarre and completely ill-informed. They are the best in the world when it comes to the totality of information systems, logistics, customer service and lots of other categories combined together into one deadly and extremely powerful corporation. They started out as an online bookstore and wiped out that most of competition virtually overnight so they moved on to everything else and they are even better at it now.
Why do you think other retailers are going out of business and even long-time titans like Wal-Mart are hurting? It is largely because of them. Amazon is the Wal-Mart of the information age but it also offers other services like on-demand cloud server space that have extreme growth potential. I can see them being a target for being broken up as a semi-monopoly in the next 10 - 15 years because they are too successful and extremely disruptive to many types of other businesses.
If this was an opposite thread, the comments about Amazon would be relevant but otherwise no. They have the unique potential to destroy all but the most niche and specialized local stores out of anyone in the retail world in the next 5 - 20 years.
I read an article a while back in Craines Chicago that said Best Buy’s strategy was to make it through the holidays and then start closing out the box stores that weren’t performing and start concentrating more on smaller locations within malls and mall kiosks selling smart phones/plans/accessories.
Suzuki and Mitsubishi don’t have a big presence in North America but are considerably more successful in other countries especially in developing SE Asia. Suzuki also makes motorcycles and other assorted gas burning equipment. While Suzuki was probably never big enough to slug it out in the US without having some kind of joint venture partner like they did with GM, Mitsubishi probably could have if they hadn’t apparently just given up on everything for some reason. Regardless both companies will probably still be around in the rest of the world.
Garmin and Tomtom have more value in their IP and user interface/software expertise than the actually plastic parts which are all just off the shelf anyway. They are both heavily involved in OEM navigation systems in cars, for example, so I doubt that they will have much trouble going forward.
Companies are going to be using the Office suite of applications for a good long while yet.
Microsoft, like Wal-Mart, will still be with us in the year 2025. What shape they’ll be in, who knows? But they’ll be here.
And I’d expect Amazon to have taken over the known universe by then, and maybe the universe next door too.
I continue to be amazed that K-Mart is still with us. How many K-Marts are there that aren’t near a Target or WallyWorld? And why would you shop at K-Mart if you could shop at one of those other two chains? And given that Sears isn’t in great shape either, it’s hard to see how Sears could be keeping K-Mart afloat.
My guess is that whichever of Sears and JCPenney goes under first, will give at least a modest boost to the other one. I expect the one to die first will be Penney’s, which I’ve given up on after having shopped there pretty much my entire adult life. Sears at least has tools and appliances to justify its continued existence. Penney’s has alienated its core market (middle-class people from the baby boom and older generations) and is trying to win them back now that they’ve moved on.
And the New York Times will still be around in 2025. A lot of newspapers will die between now and then, but the Grey Lady won’t be among them.
Really? Netflix shares are flying high, so there’s plenty of people who do not consider them to be in trouble.
CVS will probably collapse under its own weight within the next few years. Pharmacists won’t work there if they can get jobs anywhere else, and sometimes not even if they can’t. Ask me how I know about that. 
+1
Amazon are poised to destroy all bricks and mortar / online stores. They don’t care about profits yet. Once all competition has gone out of business, they will jack up the prices.
Radio Shack, although I’ll admit I’m parroting something I heard on NPR this evening.
From what I gather, their non-Windows units do fairly well, and they’ve never really taken advantage of the Windows unit anyway; they had every reason to jack the OS price up through the ceiling, seeing as it was the ONE indispensable software product for the entire computer and they had no meaningful competition for some 15 years.
You know what’s a horrible online store? Buy.com, now called Rakuten for some stupid reason. Their interface and customer service are both awful. I never hear of anyone shopping there, none of the deal alerts I get from Slickdeals (and I get quite a lot of them from a lot of stores, even K-mart has a lot of featured deals) are even from there.