Lower-income American households are running out of money at the end of every month, the discount retailer Dollar General said as it released dismal results that drove its shares down more than 30 per cent for their sharpest one-day drop on record.
When the American economy is too rough for Dollar General…
i think the future of most stores is just to close the inside, turn it into a mini-warehouse that you use an app to preorder or place an order at a window
no joke i work in a retail sector and a former co-worker asked a C-suite guy what the company’s “vision” was for the future and he basically said that
so won’t even be 3 jobs eventually. 1 maybe.
Honestly in store retail is a fucking nightmare of work that only exists because customers are careless and lazy. Customers will upend an entire table of folded clothes like pigs rooting through the brush for forage and SOMEONE has to fix it. It can take hours to fold and reorganize a section of clothing only for some shithead to come fuck it up again in 2 minutes.
I got fired from Walmart for looking too sad. Working in apparel was Sisyphean for this exact reason and I was expected to just be happy about it.
Working in apparel was Sisyphean
it really really is, thankfully I was mitigated from most of the clothing stuff (working in electronics, then housewares, etc, only having to fold sometimes) but it was still fucked. I hated every second of it. And doing the online order fulfillment, which was honestly the best work in retail because you’re just going around looking for shit all day and not bothered by people, was still intensely frustrating because you’d have to literally check everywhere for things sometimes because people just put shit wherever. Every time I was given an order for an item that was in the back room, it was like, fuck yes because I wouldn’t have to go digging for it
my first girlfriend was like that… when we were first dating we used to go ShopKo because there was nowhere really to go and it was air conditioned, but she pulled clothes off the rack, held them up to herself, then threw them on the floor one after the other to my horror. I immediately picked all the clothes up and started putting them back on the rack, while she laughed at me. Then she saw how disgusted I was and she never did that again.
We should RETVRN to storefronts where you can see 1 (1) of every item so you know what is available and then you put in your order. Or you just put your order in in advance. The supermarket experience of poring over rows of identical packaging is a marketing hellscape that harms both customers and workers.
like literally just kiosk screens outside (or an air conditioned waiting place idk)
they can literally put cameras in the bins if they need to “see” the produce or whatever, if it’s groceries, or just like idk fuck em what you get is what you get. it’s less of an issue with household goods that are essentially identical
man, add to my complaints about wasted hours, the number of times I’ve had to painstakingly figure out how to put stuff back into a box, because some customer wanted to look inside, and if I don’t put it back just right it’ll be obvious it was tampered with and nobody will buy it
The whole point of the reail shop was to make the shoppers do the labor of walking the storehouse, finding the items, picking them, colating them, and transporting them. Converting every store into a mini warehouse will increase labor costs. It will require consolidation to achieve the vision you have put forth.
A store like Walmart has a back storage/staging area. Employees have to move product to the salesfloor anyways. They get interrupted by customers asking for stuff. They also have to worry about cleanups and security and organizing for customers rather than quick picking.
Dollar general takes that and scales it down. They remove the storage/staging. But it works the same way. The story is designed for customers and employees must support customers. Removing the customer presence eliminates a lot of friction from a systems standpoint.
Either way employees must walk the floor. You can’t really offload the cost of that onto the customer. One employee picking 5 orders at once eliminates a lot of foot-traffic in the store.
I think if you did the analysis, you’d see exactly why retail stores exist and why Piggly Wiggly was an innovator in creating a massively profitable model - picking is a laborious, time consuming, human activity. If you can make your customers pick their own orders, you save massively on labor.
ordering stuff for in store pick up is the best. Roll up, grab your shit, leave. No wasted time wandering the aisles
I had a couple of experiences with online grocery shopping, specially during the pandemic. One was in a fancy web store where I had to see every product to select what I needed, the other one a small minimarket where I sent my grocery list in a whatapp chat and was done, if there was something missing they just chat me back. From what brands, I just said wharever except Nestlé. When I moved to another part of the city that minimarket was a great loss from us.
