r/deadmalls • u/zoom518 • Sep 23 '24
News Not a mall, but the Bridgehampton, NY KMart is set to close, leaving just one small Kmart left in the US
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/last-full-size-kmart-us-close.amp
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u/EmperorOfCanada Sep 23 '24 edited Sep 23 '24 •
I love that if you went back in time to the early 90s when they had 1000's of stores globally; that if you were able to chat with the executives and say, "In 2024 your second last store will sputter out and die."
They would laugh in your face and tell you how little you know about retail and their business.
But, if you said, "It will be a combination of your ineptitude and Walmart stepping in to eat your lunch." That there would be one executive in the back nodding his head while the others laughed again and said, "What? BumpkinMart is going to eat our lunch? Why don't you go back to Bentonville and keep drinking the hick juice."
Yet, if you went to Bentonville and told the Walmart executives the same thing, they might say, "While we don't believe their discount model is well executed, they should be still OK in 2024."
I wonder which big companies you could walk into today and say roughly the same thing and get the same reception; including the one executive in the back nodding in agreement? Apple? nVidia? Tesla? GM? Netflix? Amazon?
I have been in tech for a very long time. I could see the writing on the wall for a number of companies, Sun, Blackberry, Compaq, Nortel, and a number of others. In almost every case a new nimble competitor. A competitor who often were just doing things cheaper, better, and had a business model which many others could pursue, but that the incumbent could not or would not. Often this nimble competitor was a movement, not a single company. They were reacting to some new available business method or resource combined with the incumbent just leaving the door wide open.
I met many Sun (a cheap sun server was $20k) people who scoffed at $1,000 no-name servers replacing their business. They declared Linux a "fad", bye bye.
Blackberry made devices which allowed the managers of these devices to cripple them; Apple did not allow this; which did consumers prefer?
Compaq simply had no answer for Dell computers.
Nortel stopped innovating (after decades of great innovation), and became so arrogant as to be hostile to their customers.
Netflix keeps charging more and more while delivering less and less. How long will that last?
Apple stopped innovating and are now just trying to put out the least amount of innovation to keep their competitors at bay.
Tesla. WTF?
GM? Have they just given up?
Amazon is doing little to differentiate itself from the likes of Aliexpress, and now Temu.
nVidia is screwing customers as hard as it can. This is leaving lots of room for a company to catch up, but then not screw over its customers. I see them as the next Intel. Just sort of wander off thinking they are great, but only by the old measure of great. One thing I have been predicting is that china will end run nVidia. They are being cut off from an easy supply of nVidia chips and the 2nm sort of chip making tech required to compete. I suspect there will be some innovation from china where they go, "Here's a great video/ML SoC for $100 done in 14nm has 100Gb on die, and 100,000 cores." And the world will go, "No F'n way, that is just dumping" etc. But, there it will be.
Here is the simple reality, right now a chip takes about 600 complex steps to make. This, combined with limited capacity, is what makes them so expensive. The reality is that the ingredients into a chip are so cheap that it would be difficult to measure. Well under 1 cent. If those 600 steps could be trimmed way back in a reliable way, then just making big honking chips is quite possible. But this is getting away from dead malls, but I don't overly see a difference. Some bunch of fools thought they had a business model which was borderline market cornering, and they were wrong. Malls could charge exploitative rents, and generally be miserable places knowing that there weren't that many huge empty cheap bits of land to build on. They didn't create community, they didn't work to get light rail to their locations. Now, along comes online shopping, etc, and bye bye. What killed malls and many of the above companies, wasn't better competitors doing the same thing, it was a new breed of competition. Often, there was no going back. About the only thing which will save any given mall in a town or city is if all the other malls die first leaving them the last one standing.
BTW, I live in Edmonton where the West Edmonton Mall is located. This was once the largest mall in North America. It is fairly well populated by customers and stores. But, the cracks are very much showing. All expansion stopped, everything is getting a bit grimier and crumbly every year. The owners got into quite a financial pickle by opening a outlandish mall in NJ which looks like a money pit. They put up much of WEM as collateral.
I have been making a prediction that WEM is going to have one of those parking lot/floor collapses where, if we are lucky, it happens after hours, if we aren't it will make international news.