kurtzfan Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 It seems more difficult for teenagers to get a job. Staples, Target, Sears, Sony, Future Shop, Mexx, . All these companies closed its locations these few years. Is retail a dying industry, especially in Canada? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drummer4now Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Yes. Soon only some grocery stores will be around and big box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco.. Everything else will be done through e-commerce aka online shopping. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Apple Juice Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Food industry always the way to go. Granted, depending on the restaurant or food chain, but food industry is the way to go if teenagers want a stable job. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nux4lyfe Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 About time, History repeats itself, All about the mom&pop shops! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GLASSJAW Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 lol, no. it's just changing everyone is always predicting the death of this, the death of that, and it never really happens. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Webster6 Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 lol, no. it's just changing everyone is always predicting the death of this, the death of that, and it never really happens. Human beings have to fight the urge to be lazy. So when Amazon drone delivery (Or other services) become an everyday thing for almost any purchase. It's gonna be hard for people to get off the coach and pick something up when it could be delivered within 24 hours. I'm not suggesting this will be an overnight shift. Just that a few decades from now the shift will be much more dramatic than you probably foresee. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheFirstLine Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Yes. Soon only some grocery stores will be around and big box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco.. Everything else will be done through e-commerce aka online shopping. I don't think major grocery store chains will ever close down. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GLASSJAW Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Human beings have to fight the urge to be lazy. So when Amazon drone delivery (Or other services) become an everyday thing for almost any purchase. It's gonna be hard for people to get off the coach and pick something up when it could be delivered within 24 hours. I'm not suggesting this will be an overnight shift. Just that a few decades from now the shift will be much more dramatic than you probably foresee. i agree that Brave New World was a pretty good book, but again, for decades now everyone has predicted the technology of their day has finally surpassed their (cynical interpretation of) society laziness and/or convenience will not kill the retail world. been to new york, hong kong, london, paris, toronto, etc. lately? these are social hubs just as much as they are commercial ones. JC Penny in Small Town, Kentucky doesn't define the retail landscape. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DonLever Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 About time, History repeats itself, All about the mom&pop shops! From 1900 to 1960 everyone shopped in local businesses. There were no malls or big box stores. You went to the mom and pop grocercies to buy fruit and vegetables. The first malls in the Vancouver area did not arrive until the 1960's like Oakridge Mall and Park Royal. We shopped at stores like Eatons, Hudson Bay and Woodwards. Brentwood and Lougheed Malls did not come until the 1970's. Metrotown in the 1980's, Costco in the 1980's and Future Shop in the 1990's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocksterh8 Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 I work in a Ma & Pa retail sales and have for 10 years. It's very sad what is happening because of online sales. I am seeing more and more customers coming in to look at appliances or TV's, only to go home and order online. I'm also a consumer but for $10.00 savings they have no problem using your store to see the product in person, then order online. There is a lot of overhead that has to be paid before any profit and the way it's going there will not be anymore brick and mortar stores eventually. There is no way they will be able to compete price wise with a warehouse that has much less overhead. The consumer has it pretty good right now, but when online ordering has a monopoly on consumer spending, shipping charges will sky rocket, with more damaged goods and good luck with any kind of reasonable service after the sale. In the end, this change in consumer buying habits will not only hurt business and employment, but the consumer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mongrel Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 It's just that the model is going to change. Every backwater little town doesn't need their own big box stores but when things were good those companies decided to expand quickly. Plenty of retail stores do it properly ( bog box and "ma and pa") to keep up with online sales and keep people going. Ikea is a good example of a company that has done global expansion properly. Hell I heard that they were going to expand a bunch of smaller stores possibly in old target locations across canada similar to the old catalogue stores. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MJDDawg Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Staples is still here in Canada. Otherwise, yeah it's just changing. Shops that provide high levels of customer service will succeed in the long term. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wash Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 I don't see clothing retail dying as quickly as electronics. Most people I know are more likely to do that in person rather than online. You still get better deals in store on clothes for the most part. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghostsof1915 Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 I don't see clothing retail dying as quickly as electronics. Most people I know are more likely to do that in person rather than online. You still get better deals in store on clothes for the most part. That's sadly the problem. If you go to a mall, all you find is clothing stores. Very few choices in anything else. This is why I refuse to use the self scan stations at places like Safeway and Canadian Tire. And why I try to shop at stores like IGA where there is no self scan stations. I want people to be working. I'd buy from Mom & Pop stores. But the ones in my neighbourhood in terms of food, etc aren't worth going to, for the exception of the place I get my haircut. I will go out of my way if the selection and service is good. For example there's an educational toy store on the North Shore, and a regular toy store on the west side of Vancouver, I'll make a special trip to go to these places to get gifts for my niece's kids. Because they are superior to any Toys r Us store. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hugor Hill Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Another perspective is that consumers are getting more and more educated about their products prior to purchasing. They don't need sales people to help them as much as they did in the past. Sales people is dying, not retail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D-Money Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Radio really killed the piano industry a century ago. And yet, I have a friend who operates a very successful piano shop. The trick for today's retailer is to find a niche. Specialized products that aren't just the same crap they have in the big-box stores, only more expensive. Offer better customer service, offer an experience. There is a family-owned chain of drug stores here in Calgary called Luke's Drug Mart. They are an excellent example of finding niches - in fact, they have found several. Their locations are all in "cool" neighbourhoods, and they make sure to cater to that crowd. For instance, they have a good selection of vinyl records for sale. For the people who think that's cool, but don't have a record player, guess what? They have some good quality record players for sale as well. (The price of the record player seems quite competitive - it would not surprise me if they sell them at cost, knowing that the kind of person who is willing to buy a record player at a local drug store is likely to be a regular customer for the records thereafter.) Then they have outstanding coffee - better than any in the area - and have a selection of fancy scones and pastries from a local baker. On top of that they have a lot of interesting niche products for sale, the kind you'd normally find at those special gift shops. In 2015, a large, family-run chain of drug store in a big city should be a losing proposition. There's no way to compete with Shopper's, Rexall, Superstore, Costco, etc... ...so they don't. They took the best parts of other business types - record store, coffee shop, gift shop - and mixed them together to create a unique experience, that you can't get at any of the aforementioned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
taxi Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 I work in a Ma & Pa retail sales and have for 10 years. It's very sad what is happening because of online sales. I am seeing more and more customers coming in to look at appliances or TV's, only to go home and order online. I'm also a consumer but for $10.00 savings they have no problem using your store to see the product in person, then order online. There is a lot of overhead that has to be paid before any profit and the way it's going there will not be anymore brick and mortar stores eventually. There is no way they will be able to compete price wise with a warehouse that has much less overhead. The consumer has it pretty good right now, but when online ordering has a monopoly on consumer spending, shipping charges will sky rocket, with more damaged goods and good luck with any kind of reasonable service after the sale. In the end, this change in consumer buying habits will not only hurt business and employment, but the consumer. I really disagree. We are switching to a system that will allow the consumer to buy directly from the producer. Retailers in most cases add little, but their existence results in products being increased in price substantially. Yes people shouldn't be using retail stores to handle products. With the exeption of clothes, most products don't need to be handled though. The need to see a product in person is really a reflex based on old retail habits. Online reviews and YouTube videos provide much better info. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
taxi Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 lol, no. it's just changing everyone is always predicting the death of this, the death of that, and it never really happens. Really? Been to a video store lately? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TOMapleLaughs Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 If Elvis the human information gate will please accept a story from a year ago, there is a theory on why middle class retailers are dying: People no longer want to be seen as middle-class shoppers. And in a phenomenon that sociologists and economists have been observing for years, he says watching rich people spend was contagious. Even though he no longer works in retail, Era says the people of his generation ages 25 to 35 are desperate for status and living on debt, and do not want to identify as "Sears people." "It's either you want to live above and beyond your means, or you really absolutely cannot and so you really have to shop at stores like Wal-Mart," says Era. And retailers are noticing. The place that Era and I met to chat was Toronto's flagship Hudson's Bay, which will make room for a branch of the U.S. deluxe store Saks of Fifth Avenue. At the other end of the downtown Eaton Centre mall, the U.S. upscale shop Nordstrom will soon take the place of the dying flagship Sears. It's a location Sears had taken from Canada's ultimate middle-class retailer, Eaton's, now long gone. While the aspirational poor living on credit identified by Aldwin Era may be contributing to the trend, there is a second group driving the move to luxury retailing. The people who actually are rich. Low taxes, soaring asset prices and households with two professional incomes make it worthwhile for business to target the growing group of people who have real money to spend. One of my favourite headlines from the Wall Street Journal last year was "Wealthier Households Carry the Spending Load," which seemed to imply that as well as having to do all the hard work of earning, those long-suffering rich were forced to do all the spending as well! In fact, the article pointed out that as the rich got richer and the poor poorer, it was only the wealthy who could afford to spend. "People in the top half of the income distribution are doing just fine. They're spending enough to keep the economy moving," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told the Journal reporters. "But the lower half is having a difficult time keeping their heads above water." It is the lower half that Era identified as the ones who "really have to shop at stores like Wal-Mart." And that is the second sector that has been growing. Although sales were hit by bad weather over the holidays, Montreal-based Dollarama has been opening new branches and going from strength to strength. Earlier this month, Wal-Mart announced it was spending half a billion dollars to expand in Canada, opening new stores and creating jobs. The question is, what kind of jobs? Statistics Canada data shows that retail remains the country's biggest employer, dwarfing manufacturing, health care and construction. While unemployment remains low at 7 per cent, about 12 per cent of existing jobs are in retail, so the quality of those jobs really makes a difference. "I've heard from a number of luxury retail workers who've said just because consumers are paying more for a product doesn't mean the workers selling them those products are actually experiencing a better-quality job," says Prof. Kendra Coulter, author of the book Revolutionizing Retail, published this month by Palgrave Macmillan. She says the "Wal-Martization" of low-end retail jobs, with low pay and irregular hours, is helping to promote a two-speed Canadian economy. "We are very much at a crossroads in our society in terms of whether we are going to continue down this path toward expanding precarious work - where more and more people are in these very retail stores of which we're speaking, earning very, very low wages, often poverty wages," says Coulter. The danger, she says, is that retail workers are increasingly joining the ranks of a distinct class of working poor too impoverished to shop anywhere but the lowest-end stores. "So this polarization which we've been seeing may continue, and in many ways I think it is both reflecting and affecting the state of the Canadian economy more broadly," says Coulter. However, she says there is hope. A growing body of research, including some from U.S. business schools, shows that paying retail workers better is good for business. It's a lesson already learned by Costco, and she hopes the message will get through to other retailers. Aldwin Era, meanwhile, thought he was going to stay in retail, but has moved on. After graduating, he got a job in one of the last middle-class professions, teaching French at an elementary school. When I met him on his way home from work, he was wearing orange running shoes. He had just been supervising Carnaval for grades one to eight and his wardrobe did not look like it had come from Holt's. He says he's happy to be out of the high-end retail world. "Working in that kind of environment, you feel like you need to buy the things that are around you. You really get sucked up in all that fantasy of the jet-set lifestyle," says Era. "But in reality, when you don't work there any more, you realize you don't need those things." As Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith said in his book The Affluent Society, people with middle class jobs in rich societies can always opt out of the race to keep up with the Joneses. But the slow and painful death of the middle class retailer may be a symptom of something new: That a growing group of Canadians no longer has that option. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/middle-class-retailers-dying-a-slow-death-don-pittis-1.2535685 It ties into the disappearing middle class and when credit is finally pulled, a lot of people are really fracked. I think malls can survive, but they should add more leisure and entertainment options, such as lounges, family entertainment centers, nightclubs, etc. They should also stop charging so much rent based on location alone, otherwise they may find themselves without tenants. The math has to work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nux4lyfe Posted March 30, 2015 Share Posted March 30, 2015 Radio really killed the piano industry a century ago. And yet, I have a friend who operates a very successful piano shop. The trick for today's retailer is to find a niche. Specialized products that aren't just the same crap they have in the big-box stores, only more expensive. Offer better customer service, offer an experience. There is a family-owned chain of drug stores here in Calgary called Luke's Drug Mart. They are an excellent example of finding niches - in fact, they have found several. Their locations are all in "cool" neighbourhoods, and they make sure to cater to that crowd. For instance, they have a good selection of vinyl records for sale. For the people who think that's cool, but don't have a record player, guess what? They have some good quality record players for sale as well. (The price of the record player seems quite competitive - it would not surprise me if they sell them at cost, knowing that the kind of person who is willing to buy a record player at a local drug store is likely to be a regular customer for the records thereafter.) Then they have outstanding coffee - better than any in the area - and have a selection of fancy scones and pastries from a local baker. On top of that they have a lot of interesting niche products for sale, the kind you'd normally find at those special gift shops. In 2015, a large, family-run chain of drug store in a big city should be a losing proposition. There's no way to compete with Shopper's, Rexall, Superstore, Costco, etc... ...so they don't. They took the best parts of other business types - record store, coffee shop, gift shop - and mixed them together to create a unique experience, that you can't get at any of the aforementioned. Could you elaborate? I think I know what you are trying to say but I don't see the relevance between the two.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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