Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

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@MarioLover92 Yeah, that's the thing, they were always close to everyone...no other retailer is, or ever will be again for most people. No matter what you needed, no matter what awkward time of day it was always "I have to run over to Kmart". They may not have had the brand, or the model you wanted. You may have wanted something kind of premium and they just had the bare basic...but if you needed it, they probably had it, almost never ran out of stock, and they were always around the corner. The story was a bit dusty, and the fixtures were kind of scratched and old. But it had a charm, was still presentable, and was old reliable.

After they closed "I have to run over to Kmart" changed from "Do I need it so badly I'll spend an hour or more round trip traveling to a heavily congested "shopping district" risk getting rear-ended at at least 10 moments thus ruining the next 3 months and taking away that PS5 money to go to TarDepotMartCy's, or do I just order on Amazon and wait 2 days? And then you realize it's a Wednesday, and the only time it's really going to make sense to spend an hour going to TarDepotMartCy's is going to be Saturday, because setting aside a weekend day is really the only way you can actually shop, and then you might as well hit 3 other stores (that are all 5 minutes away from each other by car across a shopping district that spans two municipalities because they were at war with each other for the business tax revenue that would move from one to the other whenver a new shopping center opened, and kept money hatting shopping center developers, so the Walmart is in one town, the Home Depot and Best Buy are in the other town, the Target is in the opposite direction by itself, and the Mall that once had a bunch of things is abandoned and almost certainly will be torn down and converted to (wait for it - luxury high-end apartments and office buildings!) once Macy's contracts further) and there's only 7 traffic lights between the two districts!) If I do Amazon I get it Friday (unless they don't do it Friday and tell me to wait longer, randomly, after telling me all day they'll deliver it) - and if I wait until Saturday and travel the hour, I'll get it later or at worst, the same time. It's only 5 bucks more..... on Amazon....hail Lord Bezos, our savior!
Kmart really was great. A "real" store, not located out in the middle of nowhere or in a concentrated regional "somewhere" that everyone was trying to get to at the same time.

I still can't tell if they're trying to save it or not. They've gone on a whirlwind closing most of the stores. Between Kmart and Sears they had something like 4300 stores nationally. They're down to 40 or so now I think. But they are technically still running, and the dotcom is still running. (Believe it or not they have the fastest shipping/delivery times of any online store I've seen!) - and their few remaining stores now have curbside pickup due to Covid....which is funny, because if they'd had that feature 5 years ago they'd have competed with Target much better....

@Wavey84 Agreed! In hindsight I don't hate the mid to late 90's and have some nostalgia for them as well, but at the time, I hated them....I suppose the rapid rollercoaster of change from a culture I know to a culture I'll never understand or be part of began then. I don't know what broke then. Maybe it was the end of the Cold War that somehow changed things in ways we didn't understand. Maybe the end of the Cold War was really defeat, even though we celebrated victory, and that's the problem.

The internet was the big whammy, but it was a slow burn. That fundamentally changed everything. But it didn't really change things until smartphones put all that in your pocket wherever you were. That's when it truly broke.

Speaking of Kmart, I'd see people roaming around Kmart scanning items to buy on Amazon.....who does that? Apparently everybody. Which is the other problem. Maybe the biggest one. The base level of ethics changed. Civil decency and behaving respectfully went out the window and was replaced by "get whatever I can get however I can get it - whatever gives me the best value/opportunity is all that matters - it's legal." How did that happen? When did that happen? Doing things the "right way" got replaced by "if it's legal, it's valid, and if it's illegal, what are the odds of getting caught?" The adult population turned into 5 year olds. Even with the internet, and phones......maybe none of that would matter if that were not the mindset of the population. Maybe the people changed, and the world didn't change so much? I'd say lack of parenting, but the WWII generation, the Great Depression kids basically had zero parenting, and they turned out to be the paragons of doing "right" - so it's not that, either.

Simplicity is certainly key. The simplicity back then made life, all aspects of it, understandable. Everyone understood where they were, who they were, what their "world" around them was and how it all interacted. Today you're just some cog in some tangled web that neither you nor anybody else actually understands most of, and just plods through it in a confused and frantic state (and then is drugged to not feel frantic.) I can't imagine how different the perception of "what is life" must be for the younger people that have no frame of reference for what "real" life is without this artificial pseudo-life glued to the world today. At least those of us that were here before know what real is supposed to be and have a general sense for how it's all effed up. Anyone who never saw that thinks this screwed up unlivable nightmare is normal and would probably actively resist an actual normal.

And yet, I can't imagine severing from the internet like that....too much of what I depend on is now only in virtual form, as it no longer exists in the physical.

@Tasuki Walmart's all about efficiency. They are ruthless in every way. Amazon, technically is just Walmart 2.0. A clone, at best, beating them at their own game simply by being newer and not having the overhead. But Amazon's not really beating them. Walmart still accounts for more retail, and once Walmart positioned themselves as the only grocery store in many markets, they became indespensible - everyone MUST go to Walmart, but they don't have to shop Amazon. So Walmart really fully owns people more than Amazon. But their ruthless efficiency, shared partly by Amazon, is their secret sauce.

Their employees are paid so little, they don't really count as fully employed. They actually work directly with government to streamline the welfare registration, so that their employees are paid by a combination of pay, and government assistance, by design - think about that, their workforce, is effectively, taxpayer subsidized! Worse, they quite literally have inmates working there. The door greeters, various other positions are work release programs, programs for slow or disabled individuals etc, where the government actually pays them to take the employees. They not only have free labor, they exploit the lowest tiers of society as free labor and collects taxpayer money for doing so. That's true Socialism at it's finest - the monopoly private enterprise that destroyed all other private enterprise is paid by the government to continue monopolizing....though well laundered so the optics are better. And that's just the start.

From there there's how they interact with their business vendors. Did you ever wonder why every year, say, toothpaste (and many other products) needs a NEW version? Why not just keep the old one. Darned P&G and their constant marketing. It's not P&G. It's Walmart (and probably Amazon who's just copying Walmarts invented strategy against them). See, they have unlimited market power. So they can tell P&G "you've sold that toothpaste for a year now, so you're going to sell it for 30% less now." P&G gets two options, they discontinue that toothpaste and create a new one at full price - or they take a loss and sell their current product at cost to Walmart. So every year there's 10 new toothpastes, and the old ones go away. It's really the same products with juggled ingredients balances and packaging. It suit's Walmart's demand to always have the newest product, while those other stores have leftovers.

Walmart also demands to see ALL the financials of a new vendor. They will then effectively micromanage that company. They will have their efficiency experts tell them where to relocate to, how to streamline their production and inventory chain, what swaths of employees they can get rid of and raise their margins, what production partners in China will reduce costs to the millionth of a penny......when you sell through Walmart, you're basically giving them control of your company. Don't like it? Don't sell through Walmart. But.....since they're the only store in most of America (plus Asda in UK!)....can you really afford to do that?

Thats upside-down business, and reeks more of planned economies. The reseller tells the producer what the price is going to be, and demands they open their entire financials to them to dictate to them how to restructure their entire operation to arrive at that price. (And you can also tie in the 90's rise of Walmart and the 90's rise of the export of consumer goods to China - Every producer of consumer goods needed to hit Walmart's price - and Walmart would tell them they're going to fire everyone and move it to China to do it....)

Stores are not stocked by a standardized general merchandising mix. It's stocked by logistics cost and convenience - you buy what they offer because that's what was cheapest for them to offer. It's more of a "giant dump table" warehouse of their logisitics needs.

I'm sure the same is done by Amazon. But that's just it. What store can compete with those two who literally control the business operations and product lineup of most of their vendors and force their customers to do what's most cost effective for them - while being subsidized by the government to do it?

Kmart by contrast, operates more like a department store (its actual roots was S.S. Kresge department store in the midwest - Target also follows a more department store (spinning off from Dayton's department store, also in the midwest) - with regularly stocked items and a standard distributor model. But it was also their problem Kmart is/was a retailer who buys from distributors. Walmart is a logistics company that masquerades as a retailer. They have more in common with UPS and CH Robinson than they do with retailers. So unit-to unit, distribution alone means Walmart could be cheaper. No middle man.

Similarly Kmart, and especially Sears was known as a good employers. They paid above average in the retail industry, had solid benefits, treated people well. And you could tell - aside from the usual part time high school kids that never cared a bit, the full time employees were a great crew that liked the job. At my local store some of the same people I remembered there as a kid were STILL there when they closed. It was a lifetime job. And some of the former employees from the past came back to see it again when they were closing. You won't see that at Walmart. On the Sears side they even had pensions for the longest time (though they cite that as one of the biggest reasons for bankruptcy.....) Nobody's done pensions in 30 years.... Sears did.

The "current" Kmart/Sears though under the new Transform name, I heard a lot of employees got screwed out of a lot of those benefits when Sears Holdings collapsed and converted to the new company.

The joy of shopping just isn't there anymore. Kmarts were fun stores....I'd go for one thing and come home 2 hours later, just getting lost browsing in the aisles (and they had the best in-store music!) The malls were fun to get lost in. They're mostly gone. The quaint little mom & pop stores were quirky and fun. What do we have now? A half dozen cookie cutter sterile, miserable warehouse stores and an app. And a CVS, Panera, and Starbucks on every. single. corner.

@Heavyarms55 Based on the idea of all-new construction, big luxury homes, all SUVs, obnoxious people, etc, etc, I strongly suspect you've landed in one of the recent booming Southern "retirement areas" consisting mostly of transplants from here in the northeast. They're all over the country. Check the plates. I'm betting you'll see mostly NY/NJ/CT/MA & DC/VA/MD) plates. Self-absorbed a-holes with money is our biggest export. Let me give you a big misfit northeasterner welcome back to the states: I'm sorry, up yours.

They rack up their money in the living nightmare up here, then take their money and "retire" where the taxes are so low and it's so much cheaper, there. Then they vote in politicians and convert the landscape that mirror our living nightmare here, and convert there into here within a decade or two until the people that already lived there are new screwed over while they create a new mini-utopia like the unffordable cesspool they fled from here. Land developers know this, and now that we have national corporate land developer corporations on a Walmart scale, they buy up the cheap land, then build all these "lower cost, lower tax!" retirement communities to lore the rich retires from here to there, to drive the land value and cost of living up, then they cash out their land assets and lease out their now expensive business real estate at peak value and make megabucks.

People like Bruce Toll should be swinging from a tree until there is no meat left for the crows to pick off the bones, then the bones should be offered to the wolves. And then he should be made to suffer.

Can't agree on yards though. I hate doing yard work, and I will complain relentlessly every April/May. But especially as an introvert, the idea of not having your own little personal park to escape into nature in is a horrifying thought. Not being able to afford it is one thing, but not wanting it..... I'd probably have gone The Shining levels of crazy without that nature escape. That's the best part of Switch, I can take it outside and play games in my little natural world instead of being stuck on a couch indoors.

As for the SUVs it's an unholy mix of things, both practical and impractical:

Status symbol: That's really the key. it's a status symbol and a "lifestyle marker" - and people in the US love signifying their status.

Hauling big stuff - since home needs to be a warehouse and everything isn't local, you do need to be able to move large objects or large quantities of objects on your own (or at least did until Amazon replaced all other shopping....)

Weather: The weather in the northern climes (NOT an issue in AZ!) pretty much requires one to be able to go through daily life as though the weather isn't hazardous in winter.

Then there's the ugly side:
Intimidation. It seems the primary thinking of most vehicles on the road and the mindset behind the wheel is intimidation. They will get the most intimidating, most aggressive vehicle (Toyota ran a commercial even for their new model Camry sedans a few years about mostly promoting it's "new aggressive styling" - being aggressive, intimidating, making people afraid of you, controling them, pushing past them, forcing them to accomodate you seems to be what every American driver wants. The thrill of exerting power over others and making them fear you seems to be the entire point of the drive. Along with tailgating with your big SUV when the vehicle in front of you isn't one to make them go faster and speed for you..... It's all fun and games until someone, not to name anyone specifically, one day has enough and decides it's time to intimidate them with a nailbat a few hundred times in return.

And finally there's the prolem that keeping up with the Jonse's really is a requirement here. If the Jonse's all have SUVs, they can see farther, see over the other traffic, get around a lot easier....particularly if the majority of Jonses have that. So to have equal safety, sight and ability with everyone else on the road, if they have an SUV, you need an SUV just to keep up and have equal ability. And along with that goes , in the bad weather, if you work in a company and most of the peopele have SUVs - when it snows, they're going to be in on time. And you aren't. Then you're not the valuable employee. You HAVE to keep up wit them and have the same ability as them. And the only way to do that is to buy every tool they have as well....because you can't afford to not keep up and be the "bad" one. So if everyone else buys it, you have to buy it too.

Except I don't.... Because even as someone looking at buying 3 consoles, and possible 4-6 consoles in the next year.....that still doesn't come close to the cost of an SUV...it's not like NOT buying the multiple consoles means I can suddenly buy the SUV.....or buying the 3 consoles ever 6 years...

It's a mess because it was allowed to become a mess because over the last 20 years it's been an endless runaway mine cart of "survival of the fittest, get what you can get while you can get it" - and as a result, anyone that didn't get it, gets left behind.....and you end up complaining about it on a Nintendo forum for years. In a van down by the river.

@Octane Oh, everybody here pays for landscaping. Some of it is pristine manicuring of garden beds and "popsicle trees" planted just so to match whatver is on the magazine covers and HGTV, and be trendy with everyone else. For other's it's just a lawnmowing, yard care, leaf care service that takes care of the essential maintenance. But I'd say overall (pre-covid where more people are home and thus doing it themselves, 70% of people just pay someone else to take care of it all while they gallivant an wine and dine and seek entertainment in the night life, 30% do the work themselves. Post covid it's maybe 50/50 or even swinging 60/40 DIY.