Category: Business

Forward Buying

Business, Food & Drink, SHTF

This term defines when one buys something in greater quantities than normal, in anticipation of the supply thereof being interrupted, or to hedge against price increases.  Which was all brought to mind by this post of Insty’s:

“The U.S. plans to swiftly impose tariffs on $7.5 billion in aircraft, food products and other goods from the European Union after the World Trade Organization authorized the levies Wednesday, citing the EU’s subsidies to Airbus. . . . The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said it would impose the tariffs starting Oct. 18, with 10% levies on jetliners and 25% duties on other products including Irish and Scotch whiskies, cheeses and hand tools.” [emphasis added]

In other words, this weekend should be devoted to laying in a hefty supply of yer favorite single malts, and those snot-textured Frog cheeses (if you’re that way inclined).

Aaaargh.  As always, this is never a simple operation for me.  Do I go for variety?

…or volume?

And don’t give me that “embrace the power of and ” nonsense.  If I do both, then I can’t buy any more of this:

It’s hell being in the working class, I tell ya.

Luddism

Business

It began, as so many of these things do, with the French, over two centuries ago.  Now we have this:

UK workers are sabotaging and assaulting workplace robots in an attempt to stop them taking their jobs, finds study.
…
But for some manual workers they have found their own ways of stopping the robots’ rise to world domination – by confusing them.

I predict that this is going to become more, not less common.

“But why, Kim,” you may ask, “is this happening at all?  Aren’t robots / A.I. / Smart Stuff going to be the Way Of The Future? ”

Here’s a hint:

The report also predicted 20 million people will have been replaced by the machines in the work place by 2030.

That’s just in Britishland.  And let’s not hear the tired old “buggy-whip maker” argument again.  With the trend which is taking place, robots and A.I. will soon have the capacity to take over jobs which may now seem intrinsically human, but aren’t, e.g.:

A backlash is not at all out of the question.

Part Of A Trend

Business, The Gun Thing

A number of people have been angered by Walmart’s recent decision to stop selling guns and ammo of various types.  I’m a little angry myself, but no that much — because I was wise to Walmart’s game a long time ago.  Here’s what I wrote about the giant chain back in 2003 (!!!):

Guns, And Walmart

February 26, 2003
8:10 AM CDT

I’m aware that a whole bunch of people out there buy guns and ammo from Wal-Mart (not to mention all the other household stuff), and that’s fine.  A couple of people know that I don’t especially care for Walmart myself, and have written to talk about it.

I’ve worked in and around the retail industry for over twenty-five years, for small operations and huge chains, and on two continents, so I know a little whereof I speak.  Here are my thoughts on the matter.

1.  I don’t like one organization, especially a retailer, to have a huge (or near-monopolistic) market share.  I don’t think it’s healthy for the economy, despite the short-term consumer savings that a large organization brings to the market.  When most of the smaller operations get put out of business, the community suffers, both economically and in spirit.

2.  Despite the folksiness of their public demeanor, Walmart is a pretty damned predatory company in their dealings with both suppliers and competitors.  They go after competition with a ferocity and lack of conscience that are truly disturbing.  That’s fine, of course—it’s good business—but at some point, that attitude will turn around and bite the consumer too.  When you become the only game in town, eventually you become arrogant.  If Walmart tries to deny that this will happen to them, they’re ignorant of history:  it always happens.  Always.

3.  Most insidiously, when one store becomes the sole channel for a specific product, it becomes progressively easier for that product to be controlled by legislation.  When there’s only one faucet, it’s easy to stop the flow of water—when there are thousands, it’s more difficult.

4.  Along the way, eventually, product choice becomes narrower when only one or two stores control all the sales.  When all a store cares about is what sells now, the more esoteric items disappear because they either don’t move quickly enough for the store to generate profit, or the price is increased to generate a larger profit.  So you either won’t find it, or it will be too expensive.  This is Retailing 101.

That’s it.  I don’t think that Walmart is good for the country in the long-term:  near-monopolies seldom are.

As far as the gun business is concerned, I don’t think Walmart is good for the country right now.  To their credit, they’ve made guns and ammunition cheaper in rural areas, and many people swear by them.  But when you live in Wahoo WY and Walmart is the only game in town, don’t think for a moment that you’re going to have the ultimate gun store in Walmart, because you won’t.

Frankly, Walmart doesn’t give a shit about the gun business.  It’s just another product category to them, like shirts or jeans, and most of their decisions are made at head office in Bentonville, not at the local level.  If guns and ammo become too problematic for them in terms of regulation, product movement or return on investment, they’ll drop the category without a second thought—once again, that’s good business, and you can’t fault them for it—but gun owners will be totally screwed.

Sure, the gun store is more expensive:  because he doesn’t have the daily profits from other categories like toys, CDs and sweatshirts to keep him in business.  I know how it works:  you shop around at the local gun stores, get all the information from the guys behind the counter, and then go to Walmart because that Remington 870 is $80 cheaper there.  Congratulations.  You got a great deal—and shafted the guy whose entire living depends on your dollars.  If you’ve done this kind of thing before, and this paragraph didn’t give you a twinge of conscience, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Walmart can survive without selling guns and ammo.  Your local gun store can’t.  Think about it.

Then in April 2006, I noted this development:

Walmart Stores Inc. has decided to stop selling guns in about a third of its U.S. stores in what it calls a marketing decision based on lack of demand in some places, a company spokeswoman said Friday.
The world’s largest retailer decided last month to remove firearms from about 1,000 stores in favor of stocking other sporting goods, in line with a “Store of the Community” strategy for boosting sales by paying closer attention to local differences in demand.

Once again, Walmart demonstrated that as far as they’re concerned, guns are no different from jeans or audio CDs:  no sales, bye-bye.

None of our Plano-area stores sell guns or ammo, I suspect because there are about a dozen gun stores (including Bass Pro and Cabela’s) in the immediate area;  and I suspect that we’re not a price-sensitive group anyway so cheap shotguns aren’t going to attract too many buyers when for a dozen dollars more you can get personalized service from a proper gun store.  And as far as I can tell, most gun owners up here have been buying their ammo online for over a decade — I being one of them, for sure.  So it’s unsurprising, from a purely merchandising rationale, that Wally World doesn’t stock any gunny goodness in this neighborhood.  Frankly, I wish WalMart would make it policy across all  their stores (although I don’t think they will because of their rural stores’ contribution).

Now read what the CEO of Hornady has to say about dealing with these assholes:

In my previous life, I worked for a company that lived and died by Walmart.  And like many companies, Walmart treated them poorly.  And, as we were going through these things with Walmart, I decided that if I was ever in a situation where I didn’t have to do business with them, I would not.  And when I got to Hornady, we were doing some business with them, it wasn’t a lot, but they started to become difficult to work with again.  I was in a situation where I made the decision for our company to walk away and everybody in the company supported my decision. And we have not looked back.

And here’s my favorite part:

“As long as there is a Hornady at Hornady, we will never sell Walmart direct. They don’t support our industry.” – Jason Hornady, 2007

He points out, by the way, that if perchance you see Hornady products at Walmart, those would have come through a wholesaler — and from his tone, I don’t think Hornady is too happy about it.

So there you have it:  Walmart is not our friend.  Make changes to your own shopping habits as it suits you.  And support your local gun store, regardless.

So Much For Progress

Business, Technology

…at least when it comes to buying food:

A checkout-free Sainsbury’s branch has reinstalled its tills after just three months because customers chose to queue at the helpdesk to pay in the traditional way, rather than use the app.
The Holborn Circus shop was made till-free in April this year, with customers able to pay for products using the company’s app on their phone – in a drive to speed up shopping.
Shoppers download an app, called SmartShop then scan the barcode of the items they want to buy.
But the experiment resulted in long queues at the help desk, as people tried to pay for their groceries in the traditional way.

See, I know where this came from.  Some twerp in Finance looked at the staffing costs and recommended to Management that the company eliminate people altogether from their stores.
“But how do we do that?”  Management cried.
“Fear not,” said IT (or a $2,000/hour team of consultants from Bain, after a 2-year study), “We can just force people to use Technologeh!”

So now Sainsbury’s has had to re-install checkouts and hire staff — but the Finance / IT / consultant wizards are not dangling from lamp posts along Holborn Street, as would have happened under the reign of World-Emperor Kim.

And more’s the pity, methinks.

Fallen Giant 1

Business

I have had a relationship with British clothing store Marks & Spencer for twenty years.  Every time I go to London, I visit M&S and buy underwear, socks, shirts and trousers — enough to last me until my next visit.  While I’ve occasionally bought a shirt or two from U.S. outlets like Target or Kohl’s and casual trousers from Sam’s Club, fully 80% of my wardrobe carries the M&S brand — and because in terms of its fit and endurance no other brand has come close to M&S, over the past twenty years, I’ve never worn underwear or socks from anywhere else,.

Nor have many Brits:

One in three British women buys their bras from M&S — 45 bras are sold every minute in-store — while two pairs of knickers fly through the tills each second, which equates to more than 60 million pairs a year.

And from memory, about 50% of British men in the 1990s bought their socks at M&S, simply because they were the very best you could buy, at any price.  With that kind of market share, how could they fail?

M&S also screwed up royally before 2000, by the way, by not accepting any credit cards other than their own charge card.  It was that, or cash.  I discovered this blithering idiocy the very first time I went to their flagship Oxford Street store, went to the cashier with about six hundred pounds’ worth of merchandise, only to have to leave most of it behind because they wouldn’t accept my Visa card and I only had a hundred-odd pounds in cash.  I remember ranting at the floor manager at their arrogance — “throwing good business away” was the phrase I used — and meeting with complete indifference.  Later (much too late, I think) they changed their policy to accept other cards.

At some point in the early 2000s, things began to change, and not for the better.  Instead of selling the M&S brand exclusively, M&S started to sell branded clothing — “tied” brands (exclusive to M&S), but the boutique stuff was more expensive than the house brand, a lot more, but with no discernible difference in quality.  Actually (and this is just a personal observation) I think the M&S allowed their brand’s quality to slip so that they could use the lower prices to compete with the cheaper High Street- and online competition.  Underwear that I’d bought in the mid-1990s lasted for at least five years, while the M&S underwear I bought in 2017 has already started to fall apart.

When online sales came along, M&S was always going to be the first one clobbered, and they were.  Probably the only thing that saved them was the expansion of their business into takeout convenience foods (which, in all fairness, are excellent albeit rather pricey).

Now the company has been kicked off the FTSE 100 (the Brit equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average — DJIA) because their corporate value has declined to the point of disqualification.   (And note BBC TV personality Jeremy Paxman’s complaint, because it’s very much the way I feel about their loss of quality).

The nearest American example of a corporation’s similar fall from grace is Sears — which once had a market share and customer esteem similar to that of M&S in the U.K., but is now in its death throes, for pretty much the same reasons.

I don’t think that M&S is going to fold any time soon — gawd, I hope they don’t, because where am I going to buy undies when the ones I have start falling apart in five years’ time? — but they have a hell of a job ahead of them.

Another Fucking Nanny

Business, Gummint, Health, Technology

In Britishland, there’s a grocery delivery service called OCADO, and just to set this rant up, here’s a customer’s story:

Ocado, the online supermarket, had a suggestion for me recently. I’d got to the point of paying for my weekly groceries when a suggestion popped up on the website page.
‘Swap the products below and you could save 1,216 calories,’ it promised, suggesting I substitute ordinary coconut milk for a reduced-fat version.
It wasn’t the only ‘handy’ tip. I’d need to run for just over two hours, or walk for more than six hours to burn off the calories I’d be consuming should I stick to my original choice, I was reliably informed.
Of course, Ocado isn’t unique. It’s almost impossible to walk down the high street without seeing something suggesting we’re all too fat and need to eat less. Wetherspoons, Pizza Express, Nandos and Wagamama now display calorie counts on their menus.
In May, the Government announced that this scheme would be extended to smaller local restaurants and popular takeaway joints.

And the word “Government” is what triggered me.

Because I think (and I don’t think I’m being overly suspicious here) that with this kind of fucking intrusive software, it’s only a question of time before the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) incorporates snooping software into your household purchases and as with All Things Government, what starts off as a “guideline” somehow always seems to end up “compulsory”.

We all know that Corporate America is only too ready to lick the hands that enslave others, so if HHS (or the poxy CDC — talk about mission creep) decides, For Our Own Good (of course), that we should be hectored into reducing this or that in our diets;  or that (even better) we should be prevented from buying  doubleplusungood products (e.g. cigarettes, booze or Hostess Twinkies) — why, it would be A Good Thing.

Just not for us.  But Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Shylock Inc. would be glad to oblige the Gummint, lest said Gummint do things with laws that take chunks out of the banks’ bottom line.

I’m not ready for that Big Brother shit, and I suspect I’m not alone in this.

And by the way, when I wrote Prime Target  in 2012, I tried to imagine the most outrageous, far-fetched and outlandish government-run data mining scenario possible.  Less than two years later  it was out of date, and the federal alphabet agencies (along with their lickspittles at Google and FaceBook) were strip-mining the most intimate details of people’s lives for their own advantage.

So here’s a little warning to all of these cocksuckers:  the minute I see this shit starting in my private affairs, I’ll quit using the service altogether, no matter what the inconvenience may be.

I also need to start stockpiling cash and other kinds of currency against the day.  Fuckers.