The Biggest Consequence of The Retail Shift to Online Shopping

[BobNJ1960]

Originally Posted by AtkinsonDan

There isn't a better investment. There are no get rich quick schemes that will get the pension funds out of their financial holes. That is why this is going to be a big crisis for certain states that were foolishly over generous with the employee benefits in decades past.

which will lead the Feds to modify laws and let states restructure via Bankruptcy Court

[msgsing]

Another example of how many jobs will disappear by virtue of technology. As an oldster I recall how retail employed significant numbers of people both men and women back in the day. They worked at the big name retailers and were called associates.


Associates worked full time. They received sales commissions and merchandise discounts. Many made it a career. Their kids were given summer time jobs to save for college. Some retailers even had a pension program. They actually offered customer service.

[banjomike]

Another development from the increasing failure of retail stores is more local newspapers will go broke.

The retail merchants, especially the department stores, use newspaper inserts to advertise. These inserts are printed by the big retail chains' own printers and are distributed to the local papers. For decades, the Wednesday and Sunday editions of papers all across the country included these inserts, as those were the traditional sales days, when 24-hour deep discount sales would generate traffic to the stores.

The papers made a lot of steady money from these inserts; the contracts to distribute the inserts was steady as well, so newspapers had a reliable financial base built from them.

In times of decreasing readership, that steady income makes all the difference to many small newspapers, and now the stores are closing, their revenue goes with them.
My own local paper just dropped all the syndicated comics, the puzzle page, and the Sunday comics, along with the little Sunday magazine that was always included as a way to save money. The loss of the comics section and the puzzles really changes the experience of reading the daily newspaper, and a lot of subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions.

But all those extras cost the paper money. My local paper decided more regional news was more important than the comics pages, so they hope the increased regional reporting will make up for the subscription losses, but I'm not so sure it will; people enjoy a morning laugh from the comics, and like to do puzzles while they are commuting or over their morning coffee.

The loss of my paper to the syndicates that own the comics, puzzles, and other features just lost a lot of money they could reliably count on too, as did the print shops, all the carriers that distributed the inserts to the newspapers, and all the other companies that also supported this long chain of advertising.

So the total amount of job losses that will come from every retail store closure is a lot bigger than is realized. Department stores have been a solid American institution for 150 years, and they have threaded their way into our economy very deeply in many ways.

So there are going to be a lot of manufacturing jobs, especially those that are dedicated to a department store's own brands, that will be hit hard by the closures too. This is especially true in the clothing and shoe industries, where the manufacturers really depend on the big chains like Penny's, Sears, Macy's, etc. as a main purchaser of their goods. Some of them only make merchandise for those big retailers, while others have smaller contracts with smaller retail chains.

So the loss of local jobs will spread out much farther than just the store employees, and will spread into unexpected sectors of our economy all across the nation. And in many states with small populations, buying on the internet is either much harder to do or as expensive as going to a local department store.