Citizen Economists » retail

Greed

Simon Grey — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:10:38 +0000

It’s the reason this happened:

Authorities say a teenage girl was trampled at a western Michigan Walmart store and suffered minor injuries after getting caught in a rush to a sale in the electronics department.

The Muskegon Chronicle reports the girl was taken to a local hospital Friday morning. Fruitport Township Supervisor Brian Werschem says the girl was knocked down and stepped on several times in the store near Muskegon.

The difference between prole shoppers on black Friday and the banksters is that one group is significantly better than the other at being greedy.

Simply put, most, if not all humans are motivated by greed. Some may be motivated by the self-indulgent pursuit of vice, others may be motivated by enlightened self-interest, and some may be straightforwardly interested in certain things. Whatever the case may be, all humans are greedy. All humans want things for themselves. There are, of course, varying levels of self-restraint attached to the pursuit of those things one desires, but fundamentally all people act in pursuit of those things they desire.

As such, it is ludicrous to simply blame greed as the root of all of society’s ills. Humans have always been greedy, but not all societies have been unceasingly dysfunctional. Why? Because there have been occasions when social rulers have found a way to mitigate the negative effects of greed. This usually comes by fostering a system of voluntary cooperation, generally exemplified in the free market.

Therefore, social ills—such as people being trampled at a shopping center, or market collapses—should not be blamed on simple greed. Greed can be, and has been effectively channeled into productivity. If, therefore, that productivity lapses into destruction, the blame should be placed not on those who are greedy, but on those who make the incentives.

Holiday Blues

Christopher Briem — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:50:22 +0000

PG has a gloomy picture of seasonal hiring; based mostly it seems on some national punditry. Never fear, regional seasonal trends in retail employment look awfully metronomic (see below). Seasonal spikes of between 6 and 9K jobs spikes from September to December are pretty consistent, even during the worst of the recession here a couple years ago.

The more interesting and more important trend is not the seasonal cycle, but the unabated decline of retail employment overall. Since we really are consuming as much as we used to if not more, the trend looks like the continued evisceration of main street retail. Generally there are more of the largest retail establishments and for sure a lot fewer of the smallest retail establishments than just a decade ago. The exception being the one 1000+ retail establishment that was showing up in 1998, but not there in 2009. I should know what that was, but can’t quite place it? I think it must be the Macy’s regional HQ jobs that were the vestige of Kaufmanns. I would have coded them as the industry Management of Companies and Enterprises, but if they were still coded as retail that would be a thousand or so jobs lost at one location.

At the smaller end of the spectrum, in just over a decade over a thousand retail establishments with fewer than 10 employees went away across the region.

Retail Establishments in the Pittsburgh MSA by Establishment Size
		Number of Employees
	Total Establishments	1-4	5-9	10-19	20-49	50-99	100-249	250-499	500-999	1000 or more
2009	8,447	3,276	2,284	1,577	812	262	198	31	7	0
1998	9,493	3,949	2,657	1,620	750	301	172	38	5	1

Jobs Uber Alles

Christopher Briem — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:50:56 +0000

Can I nominate the most underappreciated economic story from last weekend. In the Valley News Dispatch is this detailed piece: Pittsburgh Mills may be attracting shoppers, but may take years to reap ‘full potential’

Which would have a host of great essay questions for students of economic development. In there is a line about how local officials say the mall has “more than 4,300 jobs”. Anyone want to comment on the veracity of a claim that any retail mall has created jobs on net?

It was an even older Trib piece by Michael Yeomans that looked into the really long history of the site. In the future there may be some interesting assessment issues with the site.

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Beige Book Summary is the Best of 2009

Eldon Mast — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:12:37 +0000

On Wednesday the Fed released its summary of comments received from its 12 regional districts in the November time-frame. The notes represent a collection of comments from businesses and other contacts outside the Federal Reserve and does not necessarily represent the views of Federal Reserve officials.

The regional reports indicate that economic conditions continue to improve across the U.S. since the last report and in general represent the best economic reports of 2009.

The good news highlights are summarized below:

Boston–results show signs of improvement. Some firms are starting to hire or plan to do so next year. Most businesses expect the recovery to take hold in 2010.

New York–The economy has gotten better. No indications of significant price pressures. General merchandise retailers say sales have improved. Signs of a pickup in tourism in New York City. District auto dealers reported a rebound in sales.

Philadelphia–Manufacturers reported an increase in shipments. Retailers indicate sales have been rising.

Cleveland–Staffing firm representatives report an uptick in job openings across a swath of industries.

Richmond–Housing, retail and banking economic activity increased. The residential real estate sector continues to benefit from tax credits for home buyers.

Atlanta–A majority of retailers described activity as exceeding their modest expectations. Office, industrial markets, and commercial construction finally showed signs of bottoming out at low levels. The pace of layoffs has slowed.

Chicago–Economic activity is up. Business spending included an increase in temporary hires.

St. Louis–Economic activity showed signs of improvement. The sales outlook among the retailers for the rest of the year shows 58 percent of the retailers expect sales for the rest of the year to increase or remain unchanged over 2008 levels.

Minneapolis–Overall economic activity was up. Services, manufacturing, energy, mining and residential real estate actually saw moderate increases and consumer spending has stabilized. Labor markets showed signs of improvement.

Kansas City–The economy expanded modestly in October and early November. Retail sales increased and were expected to keep doing so. Manufacturing grew moderately. Residential real estate recovered further.

Dallas–Economic conditions have firmed over the past six weeks. Activity improved in several industries, such as high-tech manufacturing, paper, petrochemicals, staffing services, housing and energy.

San Francisco–Economic activity appeared to pick up modestly. Consumer demand showed signs of improvement. Agricultural producers reported stable sales. Demand for housing showed further modest improvement and banking contacts reported largely stable loan demand.

Overall the economic recovery continues to build momentum.

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Buy a suit at Jos. A. Bank, let them give you a bank!

D H Smith — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:40:46 +0000

Gosh, I’m so sick of their commercials. Where do they get the goofball with the infinitely joyful sing-song voice, who is always offering ever more fantastic deals on clothing that no one needs!

Buy three suits, get five free!!! For what, dude? Don’t have no job, don’t need no suit!

Or if you had a job to which you might otherwise have worn a suit, the Security Department of your company has sent out a memo telling you to dress like a plumber or electrician just in case demonstrators think you’re a bonus recipient and throw garbage at you, or worse.

This is my modest proposal to Jos. A Bank. It’s a variation of the old wheeze where you open a CD at the bank and they give you a toaster. I’ll buy the goddamn suit, and I’ll allow you, Jos. A. Bank, to give me a bank. You’ve got banks, right? That’s why you’re called that! Plus, if you don’t have enough banks to give to the thirteen men in America today who might be persuaded to buy a junky suit if they got a bank with it, you can get more from the TARP. A suit is body cover, and what better to cover bodies than TARP?

Great deal. You unload surplus suits, government unloads surplus banks, I recapitalize my bank by taking Bazooka Joe wrappers and SH Green Stamps to the Fed discount window. Everyone’s a winner.

Why Retail is Doomed Until Corporations Go Away

Evelyn Black — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:00:15 +0000

I read recently that Barnes & Noble may soon be acquiring Borders. Borders belongs to K-Mart which is now combined in some weird and not very successful way with Sears, and K-Mart is struggling. Sears is doing even worse, much worse, and so Borders is about to go the way of all flesh. When that finally happens, there will be exactly one bookstore in the city of 300,000 where I grew up:

Barnes & Noble. King of the hill.

It wasn’t always that way though. Fifteen years ago, we had lots of bookstores, most of them independently owned and operated.

I actually worked in the last independent bookstore in that city for two of its final three years. At the time that I worked there, the store was not making money on selling books. The reason was that the distribution center gave bulk discounts and early release privileges to the big box stores only. So if a new Harry Potter novel came out, it would show up in Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart the day before we could even get our hands on it, at 30% off. We would get it the next day, mark it 10% off, and make pennies per book. Sometimes we would go buy a dozen from a big box store just to have a few in stock the same day.

In order to make rent, the owners, two Jewish brothers, decided to sell Beanie Babies too.

Remember Beanie Babies?

Beanie Babies were little bean bag toys shaped like animals. They all had heart-shaped tags attached with their “birth dates” (the first date they were available for sale in stores) and their names written on the tags: Smooshie the Slug, Stinky the Goat, Tickly the Tapeworm, whatever.

Anyway, Beanie Babie birth dates were a huge deal at the bookstore because on those days, hundreds of insane people, mostly adult women, would cluster around the door waiting for the store to open. We had a drill for those days: one beanie per customer, no inspecting dozens of beanies for the best one, and so on, one by one, until everyone was gone from the store. It could take hours.

But the most important rule of all was this:

Never open the door until the beanies are behind the counter and ready to be parceled out one at a time.

The first Christmas season I worked there, a temporary employee who was unfamiliar with the drill opened the doors just as one of the owners was halfway to the counter with a cart filled with Randy the Reindeer (or, Stupid the Snowman, or whatever). Immediately a tidal wave of customers came crashing in, surrounding him on all sides almost instantly, all shoving and yelling and grabbing for reindeer. You could see reindeer flying through the air, but you couldn’t see the owner or much else, just lots of big behinds, lots of shoving and then, not very long into it at all, a bloodcurdling scream,

“My daughter! He shoved my daughter! Police! Call the police!”

Someone did call the police. Or maybe they just heard all the screaming. At any rate, the police were there in seconds. Once they got Randy and his reindeer friends behind the counter we began our routine of parceling them out and ringing them up one by one, and the crowd shifted our direction. But as they queued up at the counter still complaining and cussing, we saw that the owner, two policemen, and two enormously fat older women (apparently the mother and daughter) were still in the center of the store, all attempting to shout over one another.

Finally, the owner was escorted out of his own store and down to the police station. About an hour after that, the last of the beanie psychotics got their Randy the Reindeer, and we spent the rest of the day not selling books and waiting, worrying, and feeling horrible, especially the new kid, who went to lunch later that day and never returned, not even for his check.

When it was almost time to close, a very frazzled owner showed up with a bottle of peppermint schnapps, a box of chocolates, and a weary expression I will never forget for as long as I live.

“They dropped the charges.”

That was all he had to say about it, and none of us pressed him. Sometimes you can look at a person’s face and know that, well, now is not the time. No words are needed. He tossed the box of chocolates at us on the way to the back room with the schnapps, proclaiming as he strode out of sight,

“Merry #@?!* Christmas.”

And to all of us, a good night.