You’ve evidently never seen a 7-year-old with a holiday catalog. 
Besides, marketing is still at play when you’re browsing shelves - package design, placement in the store, etc.
I’d bet Family Video is doing that to get applicants, the one on my street frequently has their sign saying they’re hiring for store manager. So, lying.
Tanning salons. These strike me as the kind of thing future generations will look back on in disbelief; disbelief that such dangerous practices were actually promoted and sold.
Cigarette companies are probably 100 times as dangerous. Do you think they will disappear?
Maybe the one on your street just has trouble keeping a store manager. I’d guess that if there’s any exaggeration in “hiring twenty management positions”, it may be that they’re not all for Family Video per se but rather across its various sister companies under the same ownership umbrella:
That goes back to my previous remark, that Family Video isn’t just video/game rental but they’re also big into property management based on where the store is located. If you see a strip mall with a Family Video in it, chances are Family Video owns that strip mall so everyone else in it is paying FV rent.
Apples and oranges. Cigarettes are 100 times as dangerous but also probably 100 times more addictive. Addiction is the key to cigarettes survival.
Never been in a tanning salon; do they typically permit cigarette smoking in the booth?
The thing about that phone book company that I linked to is this:
- You have to dig deep into their website to find out they actually publish phone books.
- But if you dig even deeper into their annual report, you’ll find that their largest source of revenues and profits… is their phone books.
It is completely bizarre to me that the industry is so ashamed of their product that the major players completely dismiss them. It’s not as if phone books are totally worthless, they’re just more of a niche product instead of the mass product of 20+ years ago.
ooh! We have a PetCo and a PetSmart in our town, veeeeery close to each other (Between them? An Office Max!) I wonder which one will stay??
I used to work at a university that was using monkeys for research. Part of the guidelines required for an institution to keep research animals, and monkeys in particular, is an enrichment program. The monkeys required daily mentally stimulating activities that needed to be rotated frequently. One thing monkeys love to do for fun is to destroy things. We had categories of types of mental enrichment for the rotation and one category was “destructive item”.
There were frequent e-mails asking the staff to donate the free phone books that are still delivered to your doorstep every year or so. The phone books made great “destructive item” toys for the monkeys. Fun to watch, too.
It’s possible that phone books serve some purpose this day and age other than monkey enrichment, but to me this is truly the best use for them.
Yellowbook will be so proud.
Well, duh. It’s a university. Make them take calculus.
About 30 years ago, I was working on a research project with dolphins at a University. We were teaching them Latin. (ETA: Cite: Our full research report, PDF file.)
“Flipper! Vade auxilium!”
A&P just declared bankruptcy again. I know because the terrible Pathmark near my old apartment closed a couple of weeks ago, to be replaced by a Stop&Shop (of to-be-determined terribleness). Supermarkets are likely to be around for a while, but that particular one might not be.
Not quite on the subject, but I’m surprised the slot car track near my current apartment is hanging on, or was as of a few months ago – though I think it might be the last one in Brooklyn.
I have only ever read Playboy for the articles.
Because there was very little time between when I became interested in looking at pictures of naked ladies and when I had internet access.
That actually makes sense to me, for the reason gotpasswords said: you can go for the quality non-prurient content without worrying abut what your boss/toddler/grandmother is going to see if they walk by and glance at your screen (not to mention the sizable minority of potential readers who are themselves put off by tits)
But I wonder, is there a significant audience for “a little naughty” but not full-on porn? Like, are there people who actually prefer what I guess can no longer be called Playboy-style nudity to more seriously pornographic material?
Wal-Mart
I don’t think they will completely disappear, but they will be in some serious trouble if they don’t diversify.
They are operating on barely a 3% net margin.
Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, Hy-Vee, and smaller discounters (like me) are chipping away at that 3% fast.
Why doesn’t Wal-Mart acquire some of these smaller discounters?
Most supermarkets would kill for a 3% net profit and are happy with 1-2%. Do you think supermarkets are in serious trouble? They’ve lived on those margins since literally, forever. Supermarkets were conceived and exist based on this model.
Walmart reported gross revenue of $482.2 billion dollars last fiscal year, more than any other company on the planet. They have the largest and arguably most sophisticated supply chain management system of any private enterprise in human history. This system is at complete odds with the dollar store business model of buying and selling what’s available cheaply at any given point in time. There are certainly bargain brands at Walmart, but their main objective is to sell (for example) 64 ounces of Tide laundry detergent at a lower price than anyone else. A dollar store’s main objective is to sell 64 ounces of any laundry detergent for two bucks. The business models are not compatible.
It’s certainly not a company without controversy, but love 'em or hate 'em, Walmart is not in any danger for the foreseeable future. Including them in a “companies circling the bowl” thread is ridiculous.
Calm down, this is an “IMHO thread” is it not?
You must be in the upper Midwest. Hy-Vee isn’t going anywhere any time soon that I can think of; they’re going strong in any city where they’re located.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, they just opened 2 MASSIVE stores. Maybe too big for their own good, but impressive for sure.