Probably too late the edit.
The Long Johns I remember seems to be gone. The company’s website doesn’t show any restaurants in the area it would have been.
YUM seems to be in a halfway decent position. Iirc they own KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut at least, maybe more. So there’s some diversity there. Pizza Hut has a delivery niche that not a lot of restaurants have.
That’s interesting. From where I’m standing, I don’t see how LJS could NOT be doing well. They are the only place in town (at least here in Dallas) you can go for a quick sea food fix. And, as far as fast food restaurants go, they make a good product.
I’m surprised they’ve gone on for so long unchallenged.
Now that you mention it, I’m surprised too. They always had good food, and if you wanted fast food fish, the only real alternative was a McDonald’s fillet-o-fish sandwich, which IIRC was a distant second in terms of taste. But the fact remains that most of the locations in SE Michigan are gone.
An A&W opened near us a few years ago, combined with a KFC. Happy to see it, since the closest we knew of was by Guide Dogs 50 miles away, which we stopped at whenever we dropped off the pup.
Was there a week ago - it was doing pretty good business.
OTOH, no LJS near here that I know of.
I keep hoping Sears/Kmart will find a way to turn themselves around but the prospects don’t look good. There’s a Kmart near me that I shop at somewhat regularly and I’d miss it if it closed. However, awhile ago I signed up for their rewards points program and now I’m inundated with email coupons and notices of exclusive sales, etc. It reminds me very much of the waning days of Borders and Circuit City, both of which would litter my inbox with endless pleas to continue shopping there.
I don’t have any Wal-Marts convenient to me (West Hollywood, CA) but I was visiting my parents in Texas over the summer and went to two different stores while there. Absolutely horrible! Messy, sprawling, crowded, limited selection. All the checkout lines were miles long and we spent a good 20 minutes in the self checkout line because all 4 registers went down and there was no attendant to correct the issues. My sister on the east coast assures me Wal Marts there are just as dire. I feel like Kmart could be a great alternative to people not wanting to deal with Wal Mart if they could figure out a way to lure in those customers. Instead, Kmart seems to have ceded the low cost shoppers to Wal Mart and is now going after the same customers as Target.
Doesn’t Staples (and Office Depot) do a huge amount of commercial business as well? ISTR that just about everywhere I’ve worked has had an account with one or the other, and we just buy online, and they actually have a guy in a Staples truck show up with the stuff later that day or the next day.
I think Wal-Mart isn’t going anywhere- they still have the lock on being the lowest-cost provider (or so they’d have you believe). Their problem IMO is that they’re trying to be everything to everybody. They need to decide if they’re the lowest cost outfit, or whether they’re going to try and have variety and be “cool” like Target. Right now, they’re trying to do both, and it doesn’t seem to be working. I’d guess the staffing levels are more of a local management response to profit goals for the individual stores that are compounded by a somewhat schizophrenic strategy. In other words, the corporate organization requires certain performance from their store managers, who try and meet the goals by reducing staffing, which causes mess, unstocked shelves and long lines at checkouts.
As far as the schizophrenic strategy is concerned, there’s NO reason IMO that a Wal-Mart should have more than maybe 9 varieties of flour- house-brand AP, whole wheat, bread and self-rising, combined with name brand equivalents of them, along with the requisite boxes of Swan’s Down cake flour. I’d even argue that maybe they just carry one type of bread and self-rising flour.
But the Wal-Mart near me has something like 12. 3 or 4 whole wheat brands, 2 bread brands, 3 AP brands, 2 self-rising brands and the cake flour as well. They increased their inventory cost by 25% and also their stocking labor by a similar amount.
The same thing goes for other things- there’s no reason for them to have 20 kinds of flashlights, or 6 kinds of hamburger buns, or a wine aisle that’s 50 feet long.
Wal-Mart is a store for poor people. Even the ones in nicer areas still tend to have a strong low-income vibe to them. Target is much more middle-class; it’s where you shop if you can afford to go somewhere other than Wal-Mart.
But the market is moving away from the core product that it is sticking to. People are increasingly choosing healthier fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle. McDonalds may be trying to introduce healthier and more upscale choices, but it’s still McDonalds. Yuk.
You’re overlooking the fact that Vegas has successfully branded itself as a family vacation destination. One with gambling and nearby hookers, yes, but it’s a place where people go for reasons other than gambling and hookers.
The killing factor was that Kmart failed to keep up with innovations in distribution and inventory management.
Walmart’s innovations in distribution processes allowed them to manage inventory on a much more granular level, including moving closer to the ideal of “just-in-time” delivery than other big-box stores. They were able to significantly cut costs and increase profits because of these sophisticated systems.*
Target took a different marketing approach than Walmart, positioning itself as the more upscale and stylish alternative. But they ALSO improved and updated their back-room processes to help cut costs and maximize profits. They saw what Walmart was doing and knew they had to follow suit in order to compete.
Kmart, on the other hand, had their heads completely up their asses. They were still doing orders by having some worker go around and look at shelves and manually enter orders into the system at an astonishingly late date. By the time the Kmart worker realized that something needed to be re-ordered, Walmart’s system would have anticipated the need and the replacement product would already be waiting in the back room.**
To summarize - Walmart excelled at innovations in inventory management. Target went for style, supported by modern inventory management systems. Kmart had neither style nor modern inventory systems. Failure was inevitable.
- I’ve left aside some of the other cost-cutting measures that they took for now.
** that ideal was not always met, of course, but they got a lot closer than Kmart.
This might be true in other areas, but the Walmarts in my overall middle-to-upper middle class area are clean, bright, and don’t scream that particular vibe. Most people I know jump between Walmart and Target, depending on what they’re getting (Target for clothes/housewares – Walmart for everything else).
Back in the 90’s there was a family-friendly push. Then they decided that couples with their kids fail to spend enough on drinking and gambling and people who want to drink and gamble aren’t attracted by a family theme. 2004 gave us the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” ad campaign, Treasure Island was turned into the adult-themed “Sirens of Treasure Island”, the family attractions began shutting down and now the only resort I can think of advertising has “The Right Amount of Wrong” as its tag line.
That’s the Vegas I remember. Treasure Island had rebranded itself as TI, and the Strip seemed to be working to make itself as big a Den of Iniquity as humanly possible. You were constantly bombarded by people handing out cards for call girls.
I agree. Wal-Marts tend to be very location-specific, and their shelf-space reflects their expected clientele.
Unfortunately, for some reason I can’t put my finger on, the general cleanliness of the stores, the responsiveness of the employees, and the stocking level tends to be in line with income levels: low income clientele = low stock level, low responsiveness of employees and low cleanliness, and high income clintele = high cleanliness, highly responsive employees, highly stocked shelves.
Personally (like I’ve said upthread), I think Wal-Mart’s problem is that they’re straying from their core business of being the lowest-cost retailer in an area, and are trying to do that AND poach higher-end business from Target/Home Depot/grocery stores. I mean, if I’m going to go buy extra virgin olive oil, Wal-Mart isn’t even on my radar. But they still sell around 10 different varieties. If they wanted to be low-cost, they’d sell Great Value/Sam’s Choice EVOO, and maybe Bertolli or Pompeiian, and that would be it.
And within a mile of my house is a combo LJS/A&W.
My impression is that all of these stores have a finite lifetime. I’m not exactly sure why, but in the local area, we’ve seen many of them go down – e.g. GEM, Ames, Caldor, Zayre, etc… Several of these places were fixtures of my (long ago) childhood and you could see them getting dingier and dingier and less well stocked as time went on. Instead of having great prices on good products they either start being non-competitive or start stocking off-brand cheap stuff.
My guess is that once the initial expansion is over, you have to compete on price with everyone else and that gets harder as your stores age and you have to spend money on capital improvements and maintenance, raises for your long term employees, and so on. You start cost cutting and that starts a vicious cycle that’s hard to break. Also, once the stench of failure starts to fill your stores, it’s hard to reverse the trend.
I’d suspect that Walmart is heading down that path, but they have such a huge war chest that they’ll be around forever unless the family decides to just stop investing and suck the profit out of the existing stores. Still, I’ve compared their prices to other local stores and they’re nothing special and, as people have noted, they are notoriously under-staffed and kind of cruddy looking.
Amazon is rumored to have…issues.