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The hidden culprit driving America’s apocalypse of boarded-up storefronts is the banks
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Culprit?
You say it like its a bad thing.
We dont need brick and mortar storefronts for most industries now, only a small handful still need people to go in person.
All of these stores and parking lots could become affordable housing instead, and the companies can move to warehouse+distribution models which work infinitely better, are better for business, better for consumers, and better for the environment.
1 truck delivering 20 deliveries uses a fraction of the gas as 20 individual people driving to the store to pick up their item.
Dozens of locations can amalgamate into a single warehouse, using a fraction of the footprint and centralizing all their storage, production, distribution, and management.
Required workers to get the product into a persons hand reduce substantially, which means overhead costs go down, which means better profits for the company and better ability to compete on the market.
And consumers have the luxury of items being delivered right to their doorstep.
The only industries that still actually need brick and mortar shops really are:
Restaurants, for obvious reasons
Clothing/shoe/etc stores, since it's extremely difficult to gauge if clothing will be a good fit for you over the internet so you still want to be able to try clothing on in person before purchasing.
Any other "You really wanna try and verify it is a good fit before purchasing" style industries, like mattresses.
A small quantity of locations specifically targeting emergency needs, that typically are open 24/7. Convenience stores, late night pharmacies, etc. Anything in the realm of "Its 1 am and I need this right now" is worth having a brick and mortar shop for.
Pretty much everything else is just strictly better to just order it online.
Ew. No. Give me small curated stores. Give me people to talk to and items to physically look at. Give me a walkable area so there isn't an absurd amount of energy usage past the initial delivery which bulk reduces. Give me people getting to pick their work and lifestyle rather than all working for monopolies.
I really don't think warehouses and delivery is the answer for everything. I get that you like that from Covid but to some people that sounds awful, and I think you should hear that.
I care way more about the environment. Hundreds of people driving over to many individual stores is a big contributor to why things are the way they are.
Deliveries are just way better for the environment.
Centralization of the stores is not the same as a monopoly.
It just means instead of owning 8 individual locations across your city, they have 1 large location they can do everything out of. Manufacturing, storage, management, and delivery.
Ok first of all that sounds like a literal ~~vertical~~ monopoly. Also yeah not likely either. Manufacturing in the same location? Not all businesses can or should be doing that. Chemicals are still toxic and dangerous, even 3d printing is potentially/literally toxic and even wood shops know to have ventilation systems just for wood dust.
Also I literally said people walking to their corner store which is wayyy better than a fleet of delivery vehicles driving out to each individual house the logistics of that which are insane considering just how often they would have to do runs to cover all times of the day when people might want or need items. And all this ignores the constant return rate of online purchases.
Again I like it in theory too but like actually take a step back and take a rational look at what you are suggesting for everyone. Trapped home alone with interactions only with delivery drivers. It sounds like the lawyer from Idiocracy where we sit and ignore our garbage that piles up from all the wasted returns and climate change fucking us over.
Fucking Dystopic. Capital D.
That is not what a vertical monopoly is at all, lol. Thats just a normal warehouse.
Vertical monopoly would be if they also owned all the companies that manufactured the parts they use to make their product, and the companies that collected the raw materials to make those parts, and they owned the land those raw materials were gathered from, and they owned companies that had a stake in the consumption of those end products.
IE if a company owned:
Then that would be a vertical monopoly.
What I am talking about is just a "mom and pop" warehouse that purely owns one of step 4, 5, or 6.
There's a difference between centralizing where your books are delivered from (a warehouse) and literally owning the company that delivers the books and owning the company the books are delivered to (THAT is a vertical monopoly)
Yeah... thats not an issue mate. Warehouses are big, it is 100% the norm to have both office space and the actual production in the same building, as they are usually an entire city block apart in terms of distance, sometimes more.
Its also quite common for the office space to be disconnected, still on the same property but just a second building that perhaps is connected by a walkway or pedway or whatever, or a hallway, etc etc. Typically the office space, the warehouse, and the manufacturing are very far apart.
Anyone who has ever worked at these types of facilities would know this.
It is indeed a very complex logistical problem.
The nice thing is pretty much every developed nation in the world solved it countless years ago via something we all know called Mail. Literally everyone uses it everywhere, and many of the big nations even have several mail options to choose from between their nationalized public service mail or competing privatized mail companies.
Not exactly an issue in 2023 to mail something to someone.
Do...
Do you...
Do you only socialize and go outside explicitly just to buy stuff? Do you literally never step outside and go interact with people unless you have to go and buy a thing?
Do you need help? Are you doing okay? You're exhibiting some chronically online symptoms mate, I'm gonna prescribe a healthy dose of "go touch some grass"
SpongeBob above, you are a pedantic nerd who locked onto one thing to over explain to prove you are smarter than me.
Ew. Alright you have picked your side you could just say that.
Also what a garbage way to talk down to people. It literally shows you don't care you just want to feel the dopamine of feeling superior.
...Building hundreds, thousands? of multiple block large warehouses that serve where? How many? Insane. Still dystopian.
Id recommend, in the future, googling some basic stuff before making a bunch of assertions about common knowledge about how a city works before saying stuff like
Cause you instantly out yourself as chronically online and out of touch with reality.
I dont know how to break it to you, but you literally just described the basic premise of what a city is, and in your prior post you literally described the basic premise of how a warehouse works, and the basic premise of mail, following up with postulating about how it sounds "dystopian" and "insane" and whatnot.
Mate you are describing basic infrastructure that is part of modern life, you have described problems that were solved like a hundred plus years ago as "insane" solutions that you must actively engage with daily if you are a grown ass functional adult.
"A system where thousands of people deliver parcels across a giant infrastructured network, right to peoples doorstep? Poppycock, how could anyone ever accomplish such a thing, why first you would need to have every single house assigned its own unique identifying number, and then you'd have to give that number to the other person, and then they'd have to use this third party network their parcel, which would then require to be handed off across multiple nodes of delivery to finally arrive at the other person's doorstep. The infrastructure and effort would be insane, no one could achieve that"
Bitch thats fucking mail
Then why not mention that walkable communities are better. If communities are built so people don't need to drive across the city to actually do anything then it would be better.
You fundamentally just cannot fit the entire necessary amount of goods that an entire community of people needs within walkable distance.
You absolutely 100% can fit the common things they need day to day, like a doctor, optometrist, dentist, grocery, convenience store, vet, etc within walkable distance.
But there's a behemoth of random other junk that people want/need, and everyone is diverse. They have their own hobbies, their own needs, and you cant cram all of that within walkable distance, period.
You're gonna have random people that want to order LEGO, people into knitting, people into carpentry, people into skiing, people into kayaking, etc etc etc etc. The list is borderline infinite.
You need those to be somewhere within distribution distance, which is a very large radius (~100km is pretty reasonable), it can be an entire city over even.
But when you scope out to an entire city of people with a population in seven digits, you will check off pretty much every box you can think of.
So if you have a few thousand Kayakers distributed across a ~100km radius between 2~3 towns/cities, you really dont benefit from having the mom and pop kayak shop having like 8 locations to try and reach them all.
If they have 1 single warehouse where they make, store, and manage their kayak orders and simply just deliver them out to order, that pretty much always is simultaneously more cost effective, cheaper, and better for the environment.
Compared to if those ~thousand or so kayakers make individual trips to their nearest stores to buy a kayak.
So a warehouse for every single good a person would want? A blender warehouse, a tire warehouse...
If you wanna be reductive about it, sure I guess