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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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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.
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
Being expected to pretend to be happy being an over-worked and grossly underpaid flesh-automaton is the most demoralizing part of the whole thing.
It's part of why I quit working and had a mental breakdown until I got on disability.
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.
Piggly Wiggly didn't have pocket computers that make picking easier. Customers also couldn't send in orders digitally.
has this other guy heard of Amazon, like they seem to think warehouses don't work when i'm pretty sure Amazon isn't being bankrupted by the labor costs of not having customers making a mess of their stock through shopping
Have you seen what Amazon has to do to make their warehouses cost effective? It's a massive endeavor that requires incredible infrastructure. They aren't just converting random retail storefronts into fulfillment centers.
whatever you say hoss, I've worked retail and I can assure you that customers are morons who cause unimaginable amounts of busy work for people and I could have served a vastly greater quantity of goods to people if they were not physically present.
I can't tell you how many hours of my life have been wasted folding shit just so it looks nice only for it to be torn through again in a matter of moments. Or how many hours I've spent doing online order fulfillment looking for shit that, without the storefront, would simply be stored in a bin, but woops, no, I have to search literally an entire store because customers take shitc and put it in random places, because they're too fucking lazy and inconsiderate to even return the items to an employee if they don't want them.
Retail is a fucking hell of work that should not exist, and its workers are treated like dogshit servants
also doing online order fulfillment without the customers shopping is literally what this is about. I was ALREADY DOING IT. Just with the task made infinitely more difficult by people ALSO shopping. Idk what you're on where you think removing the customers presence from this is somehow untenable
As are warehouse workers. I understand that retail workers suffer. I just don't think that you could convert every retail shop into a micro-fulfillment center. It just wouldn't be cost effective.
I mean, this is just silly on the part of the company and won't last because, as you say, it won't actually be cost effective to do it. Retail shops are not meant for warehouse operations and cannot be converted effectively. They're not better off converting every retail location in a micro-warehouse, they're better off closing 75% of locations and consolidating into larger warehouses with actual fulfillment infrastructure.
But the people working them are going to be abused, over worked, and underpaid all the same. It'll be a different qualitatively, but trauma isn't comparable. Both jobs are terrible under capitalism.
I think the biggest problem with what you're saying is that stores are already doing it. What does happen, can happen. If having customers check out their own groceries and pick their own product is so profitable, and the other is not, then why are they doing pickups? On the one hand these retail giants are so smart they're using the Piggly Wiggly model because it's the most cost-effective thing but they're also throwing all that away on apps and online ordering?
Distribution chains already flow from larger warehouses to smaller stores. A store that is a last-mile micro fulfillment center works just fine in the distribution chain. In fact, when you order online they already ship stuff to their stores for your order. They're already taking things from the larger fulfillment center and moving it to a store. Then an employee gets it ready for you to pickup. They don't actually have stock of everything listed on their site. They even bounce inventory from store to store.
Walmarts are warehouses. Lowe's Hardware and Home Depot are warehouses. Sam's Club, Costco, BJs, etc. They're not distribution centers but they are warehouses.
It's a valid point. I would say there are two hypotheses - one is that running fulfillment out of those stores is cost effective. The other is that online ordering is a required customer experience to compete with Amazon despite it being less cost effective.
I think we're seeing the death of retail, not its transformation. Retail still hold all of this real estate, so they're trying to make a go of it, but drop shipping from centralized fulfillment centers with robotics and fit-to-purpose infrastructure and technology is going to beat Instacart and gig-economy serfs on a cost basis.
The only reason DG might try to turn a store into a mini-fulfillment center is to liquidate it's inventory as cheaply as possible and then shutter the place. They are reporting themselves that their customers are literally running out of money. More than likely, when their customers can't buy, they'll just shutter the store and pay a Big Lots to just liquidate all the inventory.
All these shops are sitting on dying commercial real estate. That whole market is falling apart. In the end, it's just gonna be bankruptcy proceedings and consolidations, because no one can make your local dollar general into a fulfillment center without a major capital investment and that's highly unlikely to turn a profit.
It would be nice if all these spaces could convert to housing. I want to tank home prices from the sheer amount of housing options available...
Oh don't worry. We can leave it up to the anarchists to turn derelict commercial space into housing.
AND FURTHERMORE, I would really like to stress AGAIN the HOURS OF MY LIFE wasted on cleaning up after customers like they're toddlers.
Multiply that by every person working retail. That is untold millions of labor hours spent fixing problems that should not exist.
You go off about efficiency or cost or whatever, but guess what you're not considering? The current model is only cost effective because the cost of these MILLIONS OF LABOR HOURS are artificially depressed by capitalist labor relations and low minimum wages. You think people want to be servants picking up after grown adults who act like children? Fuck no, but they have rent and groceries to pay for, or they'll DIE.
Like tell me more about what's cost effective when this is only "cost effective" or even POSSIBLE because of wage slavery
Uhhh, warehouses also have the exact same benefit of capital labor relations and low minimum wages and they still employ far more people than retail outfits do because, again, the customers do the picking. I don't know what to tell you. Go work at an Amazon fulfillment center?
you, a genius: so what if people working in stores are essentially servants reduced to base drudgery, literally in some cases cleaning up actual shit. This is the same as people doing actually productive labor, i'm very smart
I don't understand why you are so belligerent.
The thread started when someone said that the move is to turn every retail Dollar General into a fulfillment center. Now you're trying to establish that you are part the most oppressed class of workers - retail workers.
I'm done.
it is a wild thread, the introduction of economies of scale on the one hand vs I shouldn't have to do this on the other. I've got no idea how this played out like this
Pain, trauma, suffering, the need to be seen, the need to be heard, the anguish of alienation.
And yet what you do is more important than a huge amount of tech & office bazinga BS jobs. Society needs grocers. You are helping feed people!
But yeah, in an ideal world both warehouse and retail, whatever that looks like, is run by machines. Let robots move the goods from a bin to a car/bag/shipping box and let us focus on art, music, enriching ourselves.
ordering stuff for in store pick up is the best. Roll up, grab your shit, leave. No wasted time wandering the aisles
But I like 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.
Lmao returning to tradition of the old-timey grocers' then, but in a tech-broey way
My building have a mini market with no employees, you just take what you need and pay with the app. I guess they still have at least one employee supplying a couple of different buildings, but that makes its less that one employee for store.