Middle class Disappearing, Retail Apocalypse, Inflation -- This is The Worst Economic Crisis ... There are rising fears of inflation and the weakening of the dollar. The price of commodities and gas and just about everything we buy out there is up in price. Plus, you must explain to me how in the world these businesses are going to pay $15/hour to $20/hour without raising the price of the goods and services we buy! That is called inflation. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said Monday that the central bank is not yet ready to pull back on its aggressive monetary stimulus, but could be ready soon." Once this happens, the markets will start to deflate. Was recently told that my primary residence has increased in value by roughly 25% in the past 12 months. NOW I am really getting concerned about the bubbles that we see floating all around us. The FED is really out of control and out of touch. 10 million Americans are currently not paying rent or mortgages. Markets at all time highs. We live in Bizarro world. The coming crash will make 2009 look minor. Just remember that free money still has to be repaid at some point. If corporations cant turn a profit in 5 to 10 years that debt leads to bankruptcies. We are now in year 13 of basically free money and when the free money stops the pain begins. When you have an economy based on consumption and the people are broke, well, what to expect. The retail space is collapsing due to one thing: the disappearance of the middle class. And the middle class disappeared because the rulers shipped manufacturing offshore. Believe me - I was around before and after. It used to be common for father and son to retire from the same company. Even after all these years, I still don't understand how they pulled it off. It is hitting restaurants now as well. Anyone else noticed that Steak and Shake have quietly closed nearly all of their locations and are pretending like they are closed for 'remodeling,' but they have stayed closed since late 2018. Bookstores are one dead category, killed by the Kindle and such. But online sales are also taking a huge hit. Many small online stores will go belly up. Online sales taxes plus soaring postal costs plus free shipping from competitors in China means Doom for USA small businesses. The future of 'brick & mortar' stores was written on the wall when internet shopping became a reality. Also cheap money Fed inflating real estate prices and therefore rents. The easy money created by the FED props up the business model that killed retail. " thanks to a series of loans " The financial houses keep extending loans to all these busted out retail shops. The banks know they'll get a bailout. Online is only 12% of all retail, and retail is failing because people have no money and too much debt. It's not because they dislike retail interactions. Welcome back to The Atlantis Report. You are here for your daily dose of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Please take a second to hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, and don't forget to also hit the notification bell. Thank You. Consumer spending is high because the cost of having a roof over your head and simply staying alive is now too high for the average wage slave. Retail is failing for the same reason that transportation, manufacturing, hospitality, and everything else is failing: the economy sucks. Nobody has any money, and 40 percent of working-age people have no job. Of the other 60 percent, half have jobs that pay peanuts. Let it all fall to zero. Start fresh with non-debt-based money and no income taxes. We'll come back strong. Don't worry about that. Retail Apocalypse is a term used by the media to describe the ways a shift in consumer spending patterns may be impacting the traditional brick-and-mortar retail store, business model. The number of struggling and bankrupt retailers in the United States that have been affected by these changes, including Toys R Us, Macy's, and Sears, has prompted predictions of the demise of in-store shopping and the contentious label "apocalypse," which connotes widespread disaster and destruction. The brick-and-mortar landscape has changed over the years due to a number of contributing factors, including the continued growth of e-commerce and an oversupply of shopping malls. With evidence mounting that the American shopping mall is in decline, if not dead as a door-nail, can we finally say that the Internet, mobile phones, eBay, Amazon, Google, Pinterest, Instagram, you name it, have irrevocably changed how we shop. E-commerce platforms are taking the world by storm, and the in-efficient retail experience that the consumers are facing is serving as a helping hand for the same. So, what is Retail Apocalypse? It is a phenomenon where the traditional retail industry has been eaten up by the exponential growth of e-commerce. This is a problem because e-commerce is projected to make up to 17.5% of the total retail sales in China and the US, leading the race by 2022. However, the Retail industry is not completely dead yet. It can accelerate back up with the efficient use of technology to provide first-class customer experience. Retail stores have been failing at high rates since the 19th Century, over-expanding into marginal or declining communities, too small of square footage, and products carried to extract enough from each customer. The more you see, the more you buy which is the inherent strength of many categories of goods under one roof, fumbling with direct marketing whether catalogs or the internet; losing the merchandisers and buyers who made unusually good choices; cutting back on advertising; being purchased by dumb conglomerates that didn’t understand retailing at all. Especially expensive sites, large downtown department stores, shopping malls, big-box stores that don’t have the actual customer numbers visiting them that the site costs assumed are a reliable store killer, and customer shopping patterns are always changing. Downtowns started emptying out in the 1920s-30s with retailers reacting decades later just as they are 20–30 years after shopping malls were wildly overbuilt and losing their luster as a place for browsing and hanging out. Online buying at 20% or less of retail sales has had an outsized impact, like catalogs 100–150 years ago, by making an enormous selection of goods available at high volume prices and now with increasing near-instant fulfillment and “free” shipping. That changes customer expectations (always unrealistic, chaotic, and unsustainable), and retail stores just 25 years into the Internet boom are increasingly adapting to the new world order. So yes, lots of retail chains will shutter underperforming stores or collapse entirely or nearly so; like Toys R Us, Staples, Hastings, endless grocers, Sports Authority, Radio Shack, K-Mart, Sears, Kaybee Toys, Montgomery Wards, Borders, etc. Even many Wal-marts close over the past 20 years. Just as many E-commerce-based sites have been closing for 25 years, Amazon still doesn’t make a profit at it’s the retail side, E-Bay struggles with no inventory cost at all, and endless specialized sites spend more investor money to acquire customers than the customers’ actual orders will recoup in 10 years. In their heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, the malls outside the "Big City" had a lot of goods not found in a small city, retail district. A lot of folks would make a full day outing of driving to the mall, shopping for hours, and returning with lots of purchases. It was very cosmopolitan; you'd wash the car and get dressed up to go. Now, any small city has a Wal-Mart, Menards, Farm & Fleet, Gander Mountain, and some other Big Box stores of its own. The downtown retail district is full of specialty shops. There's no need or desire for people to travel to the mall. The nail in the coffin is that online retail has everything manufactured anywhere on the planet available for delivery right to your door. Malls and big department stores can't compete on price, selection, or convenience. It's a doomed business model. It was pleasant before everyone stays stuck on their phones. The US has many times the retail square footage per citizen as any other western nation, so it is about time a lot of it got cleared out. AND people have already accumulated enough plastic useless garbage crap that they are beginning to realize they don't need. Garages are full of total crap stuff that people can't give away. Most people can't resist buying a book they won't read or items they won't use. The issue is people are not going out anywhere. They have so much entertainment at home, even going as far as saying there might be a mass shooting or something like that to avoid going out. There is just so much cheap Crap one can accumulate before they are considered a hoarder. If you are an apartment-dweller, you are acutely aware that all the crap you buy will have to be moved every couple of years, and you will resist becoming a collector of Hummel figurines, books, and fine china--and bookcases and china cabinets. People shouldn't accumulate a lot of possessions until they own a home and plan to stay there. People in their 20's aren't having kids and buying homes, so no furniture, no clothing for kids, and no appliances needed. Uber didn't explode because young people are buying cars either. Different world for them than us. Those of us who are older are just trying to get rid of the plastic crap in the attic from years past. Indirectly I would say, no one can blame Amazon for realizing that people wanted a service like them. It’s really the fault of all these big-box retailers that didn't think the internet was going to eventually involve shopping from home for much less money due to not needing a storefront or employees to staff that storefront. The operating costs for a brick and mortar chain are just far too high to ever compete with an all-online retailer, just the cost difference between how large of an area 1 fulfillment center can cover versus how many physically staffed storefronts are needed to cover the same area for a chain retailer is insane. People want convenience, speed, low prices, and tons of variety. Storefronts can only beat Amazon on speed since its much faster to go to the store and walk out with it instantly, but for most people, the effort of driving to and from the store to pay more for the same item just isn’t worth it. Even if the retailer price matches, it still costs more because of the gas needed to get to and from the store. Not to mention the fact that no one wants to come home from work and then have to drive all the way to whatever store has what they want and then hope its in stock and have to stand in a checkout line that moves at a snail’s pace. Much more fun to change into house clothes, open Amazon, see an item that they want, click buy now, and then click over to prime video to watch their favorite movie or tv series without needing to leave the house. Venture capital pouring into Amazon makes free shipping possible. As soon as B&M is gone, they shall drop the hammer on us all. Then their delivery fees and shipping vans will be the primary source of revenue. Wait until gas hits $8. That Chinese plastic crap they sell will be $9 shipping, minimum. They make no money now, but after malls are gone, boom. The bursting of the Amazon bubble can possibly slow down the retail apocalypse, but in the true sense, nobody can stop it. Walmart is a player in the long term. He's here to stay for the next 100 years, unlike amazon. If Walmart gains control over the eCommerce sector, then there is a 90% chance that the retail apocalypse might start because of the following reasons. Walmart has a shit ton of money to become a big player in eCommerce. Walmart is already in the eCommerce sector in America, but it is very small because it doesn't want to waste money. Because it knows that in like a decade or two, the amazon bubble will burst, and so it is currently patient with America and is focusing on conquering India's market by buying out majority equity in the Indian eCommerce company Flipkart. With Flipkart, Walmart intends to control the majority of the eCommerce transactions that happen in a 1.3 billion people country. And so in like a decade or two by the time the amazon bubble bursts in America, Walmart will have captured the eCommerce business in India, and then it would start working on capturing eCommerce in America. Also, eventually, Walmart is gonna transition towards the eCommerce stuff leading to the retail apocalypse, but there is still some time left for that to happen, and so people for now till the apocalypse hits us can start selling their products in Walmart. This was The Atlantis Report. Please Like. Share. Leave me a comment. Subscribe. And please take some time to subscribe to my backup channels, I do upload videos there too. You'll find the links in the description box. You will also find a PayPal link if you want to make a donation. Thank you wholeheartedly to all those of you who have already donated. Stay safe and healthy friends!
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