Author Topic: Is This The End Of Retail?  (Read 64764 times)

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #275 on: 05 August, 2019, 03:21:41 pm »
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Woofage

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #276 on: 05 August, 2019, 05:01:05 pm »
They're also predicting in the medium-term a slowdown in e-commerce as at some point consumers will be forced to pay the true costs of delivery; this has to happen at some point because most retailers are not making much money from e-commerce, including - they say - Amazon.

Most (bigger) retailers make a big chunk of margin back on supplier rebates. If the retailer hits a target sales value (from the supplier) they get an end-of-period discount or rebate. Therefore they can afford to sell at very low margins provided they shift enough boxes. A bonus to this strategy is the pushing out of their smaller competitors at the same time.
Pen Pusher

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #277 on: 10 August, 2019, 08:36:55 pm »
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/10/house-of-fraser-year-of-mike-ashley


We don't have one of these in Liverpool.  There are 2 branches of Sports Direct, & Ashley owns a large building in the city centre that used to be a department store (Owen Owens), there was talk of that becoming a HOF, but I can't see it happening.   
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ian

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #278 on: 12 August, 2019, 11:00:03 am »
https://twitter.com/skynewsbreak/status/1158371180325343232?s=21


Tesco cutting 4,500 jobs.

The current model of supermarkets (large and small) – where they can pack umpteen different ones within walking/driving distance of each other really depends on them overcharging customers, cutting costs (internal and suppliers), brand loyalty, and taxpayer subsidy. It doesn't seem very sustainable.

Jaded

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #279 on: 16 August, 2019, 10:52:58 pm »
A knight in shining armour!

OK, sorry, I exaggerated, it's a policy. According to this story, Council officials will be running shops... (after they have sorted out having to close public toilets, youth clubs, blah blah.)

OK - instead of this, what needs to be done?

1) Cut rates in town centres
2) Raise rates to sensible levels out of town
3) Ensure that companies that are doing business in this country are paying appropriately levels of tax.

It is simpler than it looks.

Cudzoziemiec

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #280 on: 17 August, 2019, 11:43:13 am »
Councils running shops sounds pretty daft. Councils enabling community enterprises and small startups to use empty shops presumably free of rent or at very much lower rents sounds sensible, as long as the projects do sensible things and the startups move on to commercial premises as they become established. No, it doesn't help shops but perhaps we have too much shopping.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Cudzoziemiec

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #281 on: 17 August, 2019, 12:19:32 pm »
1) Cut rates in town centres
2) Raise rates to sensible levels out of town
3) Ensure that companies that are doing business in this country are paying appropriately levels of tax.
Perhaps it's not just a retail thing?
Quote
Visitors now prefer to stay in holiday parks out of town rather than the historic, sometimes outdated, guesthouses in the centre, making the resort these days more of a day trip than a summer holiday destination. Which made it even more important, said Plant, that sites built principally as tourist draws were now valued above all by the community.
Once the online holiday becomes a reality – downloading the experience directly into your brain, maybe – this will be The End of Tourism!
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bludger

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #282 on: 17 August, 2019, 12:41:21 pm »
For me what would make the high street more attractive to shoppers would be to ban cars and lorries from them, beautify them with hedges and whatnot, make them actually pleasant places to be. My nearest high street is basically a ghastly through road full of constant maintenance work being done on the road surfaces or utilities. It's just not a nice place to be around.
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Ban cars.

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #283 on: 19 August, 2019, 12:48:52 pm »
Clas Ohlson Now definitely closing their retail sites. Liverpool store has a closing down sale with staggered discounts up to 30%.  Worth a look if you need household/ kitchen stuff or cheapish tools & bike kit.
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ian

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #284 on: 19 August, 2019, 01:08:48 pm »
For me what would make the high street more attractive to shoppers would be to ban cars and lorries from them, beautify them with hedges and whatnot, make them actually pleasant places to be. My nearest high street is basically a ghastly through road full of constant maintenance work being done on the road surfaces or utilities. It's just not a nice place to be around.

This, really. Our local high street is in the doldrums (even the Coop and Subway have closed). Parking seems to get a lot of the blame, though I'm unclear who drives to their local high street – surely the point is that it's local. If people get in their cars, they're likely to drive somewhere else. There's no point competing with that, there's never going to be acres of parking and a warehouse full of stock (and even those venues lose out to the internet). Really, you need places that people want to go, that don't replicate what is cheaper and more convenient elsewhere. So, cafes, boutiques, restaurants etc. There's endless studies to back this up, but to be honest, they could just go look at a successful high street and it won't be a main road. That just takes people elsewhere and, if they stop, it'll be lottery tickets and fried chicken, and that's the high street you'll get, punctuated by charity stores. At which point, why go? The ambience of the occasional drunk and the thrill of watching shoplifting teens do a runner? Or an evening out watching underaged kids drink the booze they're bought from the convenience store followed by a kebab?

But nothing in the local development plan challenges that (though they at least acknowledge the principle that building a high street around traffic won't work, while being unwilling to do anything to change that). They won't stop through traffic (there's a bypass anyway) or pedestrianise, and they're adding yet another supermarket, so basically it's a slip road to the weekly shop, and even less reason to hang around.

At least we can just get the train into London, which is shame, we'd like to do more stuff locally.

Cudzoziemiec

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #285 on: 24 September, 2019, 07:53:28 pm »
I've just heard the big boss of a megaglobal online and offline retail and wholesale marketplace say there is no difference between online and offline, as long as the bricks and mortar data – products, customers, purchases, payments, even how people move around the building – is all captured and subjected to big data processing. They call this an omnichannel which gives "real time insights into customer needs so that we can help our merchants to quickly respond to changing demand and also help them to improve their retail operations."
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Formerly Known As

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #286 on: 29 September, 2019, 08:30:28 pm »
For me what would make the high street more attractive to shoppers would be to ban cars and lorries from them, beautify them with hedges and whatnot, make them actually pleasant places to be. My nearest high street is basically a ghastly through road full of constant maintenance work being done on the road surfaces or utilities. It's just not a nice place to be around.

I recommend taking that one step further.  Ban people from them. 

Roger.


Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #288 on: 30 September, 2019, 11:32:23 am »
I'd never heard of them before today.
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #289 on: 07 October, 2019, 11:21:31 am »
Pizza Express in trouble.  Not a destination restaurant but I’ve always found them a reliable option if I’m looking for a decent quick meal.


https://twitter.com/iandunt/status/1181149894620389376?s=21
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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #290 on: 07 October, 2019, 03:14:41 pm »
Uk retailers had worst September ever - Beeb.
Get a bicycle. You will never regret it, if you live- Mark Twain

Cudzoziemiec

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #291 on: 07 October, 2019, 05:42:31 pm »
But Tesco have found a way to make supermarket home deliveries profitable. Using route planning they've reduced the distance walked by staff per order picked by 8%, which together with a delivery charging regime has put it in the black. Automated picking is something they're trialling now in addition to that. Are they the first big supermarket to make home deliveries profitable? One of the first at least, but where they lead, others follow.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

ian

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #292 on: 07 October, 2019, 08:09:18 pm »
The problem with a lot of these companies is that they're laden with a huge debt burden, so even though they can be run profitably in the current retail climate, they can't meet their interest payments (because it's even not cheap debt). Pizza Express has over £1bn in debt and £100 million in annual interest payments (like I say,  not cheap debt). The majority of the debt is not intrinsic to the business (and generally only is when they're rapidly expanding), but large tranches of it come via the usual merry-go-round of corporate acquisitions, where companies merely become means of profitably shuttling debt around capital businesses, which as the name suggests, are only interested in making money from money, so their main concern isn't the businesses they own, only that they remain viable enough to support the debt they've loaded them with. Of course, that's then used to buy up more businesses on the same model.

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #293 on: 07 October, 2019, 09:46:42 pm »
We have just seen what can go wrong with that business model at Thomas Cook, where the acquisitions were not good businesses and TC didn't integrate them well.
Most of the debt is due to asset stripping shored up by assigning a value to "the brand" or "goodwill".
Borrowing money and leveraging the business is still in vogue because credit is still available.
Central banks are shit scared about restricting borrowing because they know that there are a lot more Thomas Cooks out there.
 

ian

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #294 on: 08 October, 2019, 09:43:16 am »
Basically, any business owned by a fund (nearly all of them it seems these days) is getting loaded with debt. As a bonus, a lot of that debt is at expensive, so the funds that own those businesses are effectively extracting more cash from those businesses, who they have asset stripped. So, without significant assets, much of that debt is ultimately pegged, as madcow says, to intangibles like brand and goodwill. Thomas Cook at least had a few aircraft to sell-off.

Of course, all it takes is for people to make a repayment call on a significant amount of that debt and the entire thing falls over (again).

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #295 on: 18 October, 2019, 06:33:28 pm »
https://twitter.com/SkyNewsBreak/status/1185245287188697090?s=20


  "High street retailer Bonmarche has collapsed into administration putting almost 2,900 jobs at risk"   I've never heard of them, though we do appear to have several branches in Liverpool.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50066623   


Jessops going down again.



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-50098477


Watt Brothers in Scotland.


Nevermind, post Brexit I'm sure they'll spring back to life, fertilised by the unicorn dung......

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robgul

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #296 on: 19 October, 2019, 08:50:36 am »
The LBS that I manage is closing at the end of November  :(   - the parent company's core business is the design and (outsourced) manufacture of a couple of bike brands and UK distribution of some other brands and that's where they're going to focus (with another couple of shops that are staying open).   

Footfall is the simple issue - not enough of it.   The workshop/servicing has held up reasonably well but bike and parts/accessories sales are challenging.

If you're in the Warwickshire area* we have a closing down sale with bikes from Bianchi, Land Rover, Roux, Bickerton, Ridgeback and Scott at great prices + parts and accessories.   Everything must go!

Rob   (who was going to retire - again - in February 2020)

* sales in the shop only.


Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #297 on: 19 October, 2019, 09:11:25 am »
Bummer. Very sorry to hear this.
Rust never sleeps

ian

Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #298 on: 19 October, 2019, 12:15:50 pm »
I think we have to admit that the days of popping to the shops are over, the internet has made it too easy to order up what we want and need. I was surprised that Jessop's still exists in the era of modern phones and their umpteen megapixel cameras. Many retailers have been bought up for cheap and debt-loaded, which is effectively a slow poison. You can order clothes from the internet, try them on at home, and send them back hassle-free etc. There's not an awful lot of reasons to go to the shops. I used to do my once-a-year wardrobe refresh in person because I like the occasional serendipity, but as a skinny, short person clothes shop never have my size these days (short-legged trousers in a 28-30 inch waist are near impossibolium anyway). Shops have less incentive to hold lots of stock when they point to the internet and have you order from a big warehouse.

Survival really is through doing something other than selling the same stuff as is available online. So, shopping as a leisure activity (I know, it seems abhorrent), which relies on making for suitable environment (not a car-stuffed high street), with cafes and restaurants. Offering services that can't be got with a mouse-click.

robgul

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Re: Is This The End Of Retail?
« Reply #299 on: 19 October, 2019, 02:21:12 pm »
I think we have to admit that the days of popping to the shops are over, the internet has made it too easy to order up what we want and need. I was surprised that Jessop's still exists in the era of modern phones and their umpteen megapixel cameras. Many retailers have been bought up for cheap and debt-loaded, which is effectively a slow poison. You can order clothes from the internet, try them on at home, and send them back hassle-free etc. There's not an awful lot of reasons to go to the shops. I used to do my once-a-year wardrobe refresh in person because I like the occasional serendipity, but as a skinny, short person clothes shop never have my size these days (short-legged trousers in a 28-30 inch waist are near impossibolium anyway). Shops have less incentive to hold lots of stock when they point to the internet and have you order from a big warehouse.

Survival really is through doing something other than selling the same stuff as is available online. So, shopping as a leisure activity (I know, it seems abhorrent), which relies on making for suitable environment (not a car-stuffed high street), with cafes and restaurants. Offering services that can't be got with a mouse-click.

Limited opportunities - bike servicing and haircuts spring to mind.

Rob