We know a lot of these stores are dying, but when you hear the spin from the companies, it’s pretty pathetic.
JC Penney boots its Chief Customer Officer after less than a year on the job:
They gotta pretend, right? Department stores don’t have “meaningful connections” with customers. Maybe some high-end stores? But Lord & Taylor and Barney’s are perishing as well.
JC Penney never had a “compelling brand identity”–not even when it was doing well. It had positioning–a decent store that wasn’t K-Mart but had affordable clothes. It maybe had a certain culture that engendered a certain type of experience that worked for people as late as the early 2000s, maybe? The idea that it can build such a brand identity now–a modern 21st century style BRAND–is, well, a scam. The execs very well know it’s impossible, but they need to pretend in order to draw their paychecks.
If you’re interested in the death of retail as I am, then the site www.retaildive.com is worth taking a look at (not a paid endorsement).
Examples like the one above are infinite these days. Feel free to comment and contribute however you like!
Have you been in a Fry’s recently? They’re barren. I don’t just mean they’re devoid of customers, they literally have almost no product on the shelves.
Apple and Harley create a product. You can get attached to a company’s products. It’s a bit harder to get attached to the building the product was sitting in when you acquired it.
About the closest a reseller can come is to get people attached to their service. Which is tough, since “you can shop from your couch without pants on” is hard to compete with.
Huh. I was talking to a friend recently and he typed: Ugh. So depressing. I’m at Fry’s at 6pm on a Friday and there are maybe 5 other people in the whole huge place. Its silent in here except for the music
Shelves hardly stocked
…I didn’t think much of it since I don’t think much about Fry’s in general but now I read this thread, so there ya go.
I went to our local mall the other day, to Dillards specifically. it was just a regular evening, and Dillards was packed. people were lined up at the register’s, sales associates everywhere - I was impressed. and when I left there I walked thru the mall for a second, including the food court. was as crowded as I ever remember seeing it. so not everyone is doing bad.
there have been some stores that had existed and no longer do, Sears for example, but I’m sure they’ve got someone in the place they formerly occupied.
*this is a good sized mall with lots of stores. it was built in the late 70’s. it looked no different regarding customer presence than it ever has. there’s some other malls in town though that have or are in their death spiral.
I personally don’t see much that’s funny about retail stores failing due to all of the obstacles they face nowadays. I’m someone who buys brick and mortar entirely, save for my first and only use of Amazon a few weeks back. If it wasn’t for the hurry I was in and not being able to get this part for a customer elsewhere that I’d found, I wouldn’t have used them yet still. I’ll gladly pay 20% more for something for the satisfaction of not further enriching Jeff Bezos.
One of our 4 malls in Las Vegas had a Dillards, a Sears, a JCPenney and a Macy’s as recently as a few years ago. Now, the Boulevard Mall is mostly a hospital, except where it’s a museum and a kids playpen/pizza joint.
I had a chemistry teacher back in the late 90’s who would read the newspaper at his desk while students came before the bell and every so often he would make a remark about how JC Penny was having constant 50% off sales and that “Any place that has a clearance sale every day is something that’s going out of business soon”. He also claimed that nobody in China is fat because “they all ride bicycles everywhere”, those are the only two things I remember from his class.
I work in retail. Here, paraphrased, the current party line from corporate headquarters:
There is not one thing we sell in our stores that our customers can’t buy elsewhere. If we want to stay in business we have to give them a reason to come our store to buy what they want rather than go down the street to some other place to buy that very same thing, or onto the internet to buy that very same thing.
Hence the constant drum-beating about customer service and keeping the place neat, clean, tidy, and stocked. Sure, we sell food, which is always going to be a draw on some level but we are far from the only place doing that. It’s kind of frightening when you think about it, even if my employer is currently in the black.
Those fake sales were actually propping up JC Penney. Customers liked feeling like they had gotten a bargain (even if in reality they probably hadn’t) and that kept them coming back. JCP was still struggling overall, but it was killing off the fake sales in around 2012 in favor of simple, “fair and square” pricing that pushed them out of the frying pan and into the dumpster fire.
There are malls that are still doing very well. Not nearly as many, but some. The exact formula is not clear, but there appears to be a sort of winnowing process: the niche is much smaller than it was, and malls require a critical mass, so in an area that used to have 4-5, one will survive.
In Dallas, at least, it seems to be the nicer ones, the ones with really high end stores along with the more normal options.
Our local Fry’s closed in early December. It didn’t even last the big shopping season. Local tax records show it sold then for $18k. Which would be the value of the property - mortgage and other debt on it. In other words, they were flying on the edge.
There were rumors that the whole chain was shutting down this month but that isn’t happening. Yet another store closing announcement here.
I hadn’t been there in years and went to MicoCenter for all my brick-and-mortar electronics needs. I haven’t seen any indication that MicroCenter is crashing.
It all comes down to management.
JC Penney picked a complete idiot of a CEO several years back. They went from “in a bit of trouble” to “bleeding badly” in no time.
I haven’t been to our area mall in a long, long, long time. Maybe the next time I need batteries I’ll go to the Radio Shack there.
It’s a topic that fascinates me, ever since I opened my online retail shop in 2016. It’s doing better than ever, although still small enough that I can handle all the tasks of running it single-handedly. I’m carrying a small amount of inventory in my house and have ambitions to grow it enough that I have to move it out into it’s own place. I haven’t yet decided if I want to get into a retail space, which is still very expensive, or a warehouse/mixed use location which costs less but has no foot traffic.
I think there is still a place for tiny local businesses, but it is extremely hard to compete with Amazon. My best selling items, which not coincidentally are keeping me afloat, can’t be found on Amazon.
[QUOTE]
There is not one thing we sell in our stores that our customers can’t buy elsewhere. If we want to stay in business we have to give them a reason to come our store to buy what they want rather than go down the street to some other place to buy that very same thing, or onto the internet to buy that very same thing.
Hence the constant drum-beating about customer service and keeping the place neat, clean, tidy, and stocked.[\QUOTE]
While true, those drum beats are about the bare minimum these days and isn’t enough to justify shopping with you versus someone else. These days you have to offer concierge level of service. But to be honest, I don’t think that’s scalable which is why the large companies are faltering. The larger you get the more it costs. Just using my teensy shop as an example, I spend time carefully selecting which products I carry rather than just jumping on commodities. I also respond to customer emails within an hour (during the day, several hours if they contact me at night). When I vend at in-person events, I invite my customers to try on things because I know people want to touch and hold and see how things look and wear. I have a very pleasant and warm attitude as I offer to help them. I will even adjust a dog harness to fit their dog just so they can see how it fits and if they still decide not to buy it I am cheerful. However, 98% of the time this level of service lands me the sale.
I’m learning as I go, though, so I can’t claim to know it all. But all of this is working for me so far.
I’m really sad, seeing the state of my local mall. It gets packed during the holiday season, but the rest of the time it feels so quiet and barren. So many stores have left it feels like every other space is empty. The ones that remain are the ones that have been there for years.
Amazon and the like are super convenient, and I’m the first one to try and nab a cheaper price. But if it’s something I’d rather get sooner or really browse over (or virtually any type of clothing), I’d love to get it in-store. My options for that are fading more and more, though.
I occasionally go to Sam’s Club to buy my huge things of toilet paper and paper towels. Last time there I stopped at the Pittsburgh Mills Mall (Rte 28) to see what was up there.
It was pretty much empty. There were groups of senior citizens in track suits walking for exercise, but that was about it. Many of the stores were closed down. It was like a ghost town.
