Retail Apocalypse

US oil actually is booming recently America became the number one producer in the world. But the prices are still low and that impacts the oil industry’s profits a great deal.

It won't last much longer.

Yep and the bosses paid themselves severance packages and fucked the workers as you'd expect.

Retail is dying due to a number of reasons, including:

1) Long term downward pressure on wages combined with runaway inflation and the ever rising cost of living.
2) Lack of worker protections/conditions, a ineffectual political system and the sad joke that is fiat currency combining into a general sense of uncertainty and unease.
3) Small retail businesses being driven to the point of extinction by industry super-giants.

All of these problems could quite easily be addressed by a government that cared for systemic reform.
Unfortunately the very same people that would need to give up the majority of their assets in order to address these problems are also the people who have de-facto control over the political system of almost every government on earth.
Every day that goes by without such necessary reforms (basically a more extreme form of keynesianism tbh), is a day closer to violent, forceful reform of either the far-left or far-right variety.

Anyone else get this strange sense of satisfaction when news breaks that a large corporation is going bankrupt?

Are you retarded, there has been no inflation for years. Fiat currency? Fucking hell Lolberts cant hide their shit at all

Hello Holla Forums.

I'm not the one with a Lenin hat user flag, friend.
There has been, ~1.5% annually.
But that is not quite the problem that I was getting at.

The problem is that there have been very little in that way of overall de-inflation for decades.
While ~1.5% on its own may not be much of a problem, it is over the long term.
Because a number of factors that effect the average consumer (such as minimum wage) are not adjusted with the cumulative growth in inflation, you end up with a consumer that who has less and less in the way of buying power each year.
Raising consumer confidence and certainty would be central to any attempt at refloating the retail sector.
Knowing that your money is actually pegged to a tangible commodity is one way of building such necessary confidence.
Please do try and not show off how new you are.

In this case, no, although normally, yes I do
Biggest issue here is porky isn't being overthrown or anything, wealth is just transferring to Amazon and Walmart primarily. Walmart happens to be particularly exploitative.

How is this a reason? Average person working at a chain isn't paying health insurance for their employees, they purposefully hire people under the maximum amount of hours to be considered full time, for the sole reason of avoiding the need to pay out for benefits. It might contribute but I would think its minimally.

this seems counterintuitive to me, shoes can run large or small dependong on brand and ordering them online would hence seem to be more trouble than it's worth
they're still around? lol
they also don't need any e-help to fail at life
I know the brand existed, this is the first I heard of them having actual stores
literally who
I guess I kind of live under a rock

Inflation refers to price stability Howard, an increasing cost of living is related to purchasing power. Words have meanings you know.

LMAO you dumbass you think that consumer confidence is in anyway related to whether the money is commodity backed or fiat? Consumer confidence is dependent on the savings of the private sector. Sales = income, but of course you wouldn't know this with your Austrian-school tier economics.

Fiat currency is backed by the power of the state, and gets its value from the productivity of the state.
There's a reason why the whole world accepts USD and that's because it has the biggest guns.

I honestly don't know if this is real or just a troll but I'm laughing. Well done Holla Forums.

Well they had to get paid running Sears Canada into the ground. How can you have a meritocracy of such failure isn't rewarded?

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I worked at a Payless.
Nobody except poor people and stuck-up suburban moms with too many coupons shop at Payless.

Wow. All tripfags really are this dumb. Where do you get your news? Mises.org?

it kinda is

Building a guillotine and taking over the store would be a start.

It totally is. it's a concentration of power in to a monopoly that will compete others in do bankruptcy. it always works that way it always happens that way that's the inevitable conclusion and then the two big dogs are either going to absorb each other or battle each other out until one of them fails for whatever reason that was completely out of their control to begin with.

If it gets to that point then maybe the government steps in and does what they did with AT&T back in the whatever's.

Good post

Retail imploding would deliver a pretty bad system shock. 16 million people employed in the US, and it's been the sector that sucks up a lot of workers otherwise no longer employable.
And beyond that, it's a sector that is set to shrink badly regardless. There is ongoing centralization of brick and mortar stores, the increasing efficiency from starting automation and digitization increasing the intensity of remaining work (Amazon notoriously pushing the cart), and at the same time the pressure from on-line shopping. I'm not sure how much the new employment here compensates though.

What would taking over the stores accomplish in itself? For it to be workable there would have to be worker controlled suppliers up the supply chain.

At the very least if they took over the store and ransacked it, or at least managed to sell off everything inside it, they'd have a cushion to fall on before whatever shitty company they work for kicks them all out and does it themselves.

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