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[Lord Shonus]

So I found out today that Savers has decided that their two profitable stores in this city aren't profitable enough, and have decided to close them in two weeks. This was announced today with no warning, to the point where the stores were literally hiring people two days ago.

[martinuzz]

Apparently, for 11 minutes, trump didn't have a twitter account.
Not that that's a bad thing (in my opinion. Commentary on this note is forbooden due to potential flamewars)

It could have been worse. Imagine if an angry, leaving Twitter employee, instead of shutting down Trump's account, had put a dumb message on Trump's account, like 'Missiles to North Korea have been launched'.

There's already some people saying that Twitter employees should be put under 24/7 security service surveillance as long as Trump uses it as a means of sending global messages, if Twitter can't think of a way of making it impossible for it's employees to alter accounts.

TBH, that's just dumb. They should just ban Trump from using it.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

They'll never ban Trump from twitter. Not only does it likely make massive amounts of revenue for them, they'd be fucking with a powerful guy who also has a giant gaggle of followers, some of whom threaten to murder people who stand in his way.

Even worse, Trump could literally pass an executive order or on a good week, legislation ordering Twitter to give him an account. I can't actively think of any way that's unconstitutional...maybe a violation of free press or free association? It'd be one hell of a court case and I'm not sure who'd still be standing when the dust settled.

[Reelya]

So I found out today that Savers has decided that their two profitable stores in this city aren't profitable enough, and have decided to close them in two weeks. This was announced today with no warning, to the point where the stores were literally hiring people two days ago.

"their two profitable stores in this city aren't profitable enough" doesn't make any sense. If that's their entire presence in your city then they wouldn't close them out of spite for not being profitable enough.

Remember that a large company will be made up of many operational units, each of which will have it's own budget and revenue. Each store's net revenue needs to also cover the costs of the other units which support it, which could include regional and head offices, legal team, marketing, logistics, warehousing, transportation, building maintenance, etc etc. Those aren't directly factored into each store's budget, so the local manager who decides he needs extra staff can't see the big picture, but whoever pulled the plug on those stores could.

[Lord Shonus]

No, the stores were fine. They've been steadily expanding business for years, and have long ranked as among the higher performing retail chains. Because most of the goods sold are donations, the only cost is staffing and building overhead, and the stores were always packed.

The parent company is in a precarious financial position due (so far as I can tell) to bad investments, and there's been a leadership change as a result. The new management, solid members of the slash-and-burn business model, has been doing crap like this all year, abandoning entire cities, sometimes entire states, to channel the flow of donated goods to more "lucrative" markets.

Edit for clarity. A toy donated to them can bring 4 or 5 dollars here in Toledo. The same toy will bring 9-12 dollars if they ship it to Cleveland instead. Thus, the Cleveland stores are more profitable than the Toledo ones, no matter how well the Toledo stores are doing. This is an extremely shortsighted business strategy, but that modern American business philosophy in a nutshell.

[Egan_BW]

So they ended up with a bunch of compulsive minmaxers who don't care about the big picture?

[Reelya]

To be honest, I don't think it's a bad business strategy. If the supply of the donated toys is finite, then you should in fact sell them where they sell for $9-12 rather than $4-5.

You say it's "short-sighted" but you haven't explained why that is. If the supply is limited then the guy who will only pay $5 is going to get zero% and the person willing to pay $12 will get the product instead.

If a resource is finite it will only be sold in the market where you can make the most profit per unit, that is how commerce works. You seem to have an unrealistic expectation there or your working off a flawed assumption that if it's possible to make a profit in a certain market they should be diverting product they away from more lucrative markets. but ... that makes literally zero logical sense for someone to do that.

[Egan_BW]

It didn't seem like they were actually low on supply. They wanted to maximize the average revenue from each sale by not selling in places where it was lower, thus decreasing overall revenue.

[Reelya]

Sure, but that would equalize. e.g. if the over-stocked in the high-price market then they'd have warehouses overflowing with the product, and in that case it would be viable to put them into the lower-price markets. But that doesn't mean it would make sense to maintain a shop where they sell for $4. When there could be a whole range of places where it would sell for $12, $10, $8, $6. Each of which could take overflow from the tier above it.

You did say most of the stuff is from donations. So that explains it: this is not a product that they can mass-produce in response to demand, so they need to focus it on only the most profitable markets. The places where they sell for the least therefore have been cut out. This is just normal supply and demand: when the price of something goes up that cuts people out of the market, which allows supply and demand to equalize. In this case, the pricing differential is geographical, meaning entire stores aren't competitive (even though they weren't losing money), because of Opportunity Cost. Opportunity Cost is one of the most common things people overlook when making statements about economics.

[Lord Shonus]

The supply is effectively limitless. The entire store's inventory changes every two weeks or so. They did not have a problem getting stuff to the more lucrative markets, so most of their stuff will now be sitting in a warehouse instead of being sold.

[Reelya]

Yeah well see how that goes. If so then they'll be either slashing prices or opening new stores pretty soon. Remember that it costs money to have things in a warehouse. Business owners don't just sit around paying for airconditioned warehouses for fun.

[smjjames]

Still, the last minute no-notice of closure is the wtf. Also, I wonder roughly how many jobs they provide to the area, though Toledo isn't a rural town which relies mostly on jobs from a few big companies. .

[Yoink]

Communicating by text is remarkably shitty, I'm discovering, particularly if you and your other conversant have different writing styles or mental processes. You can convey so little in a textual conversation that you can in real time, and emotions are lost or misappropriated and there's no face to read and no voice to empathize on and then people get hurt based on a brief summary of ideas you put together to convey when a new, entirely unintended meaning erupts from it in the other's eyes.

...

Bad feelings aren't necessarily bad, Yoink. Sometimes they're misplaced, sure, but they're not wrong to have. Give yourself a little break and see what you come back to, hey? You're doing good things out there.

Hey, thanks. I almost forgot to reply to this.
That's nice of you to say!

Indeed, as much as I enjoy writing long, rambly posts in my usual style, when one is aiming to have more of a normal conversation rather than stacking paragraph upon paragraph, text-based communication is woefully inadequate.

And, of course, unlike a face-to-face chat you are free to endlessly second-guess yourself, tinkering with your message to try and better convey your meaning for hours before finally sending it.
This is a huge pain - I agonise over every bit of punctuation, worrying if I'm 'sounding' too formal (so many people choose to forgo punctuation almost entirely, do I seem weird for doing otherwise?!), if I'm being too blasé, if I'm adequately conveying whatever I mean to say or if any jokes I'm trying to make are obvious enough to shine through the text.

In person, any misunderstandings are generally easy to detect and can be quickly cleared up, so there's less reason to fear opening your mouth.

I used to really, really dislike phonecalls, too - being both rather deaf and very socially anxious - but over the years I've gotten a lot better at that.
They can be pretty convenient, something I will no longer stubbornly deny.


I guess I've greatly improved at face-to-face communication too, come to think of it. It probably wasn't so long ago that I would have struggled far more at actually talking to someone than shooting them a message - but then, I'm pretty sure I always sucked at that, too.

[/battery-wasting on-the-train ramble]

[Greiger]

A few days back, somebody complained about us having a magazine with a picture of a pot leaf as offensive, claiming she'll report us to the ATF for encouraging pot use to children, just because there was an Archie comic on the same rack, that as far as I could tell was not supposed to be there.  Manager on duty took the magazine down (she claimed it was almost past it's display til date anyway).

New magazines go up, one with a big picture of Donald Trump on it.  That same person came in today, and congratulated us for finally having some intelligent reading on our magazine rack and bought a copy.

Pretty sure both magazines were newsweek(?).  Politics aside, how can someone blame a store for the content of the magazines they are selling, and then be happy a bit later for still selling the magazine just because it has a different cover story?

EDIT: memory may be fuzzy, starting to question if they were newsweek or another magazine pretty sure they were the same magazine though

[Ehndras]

I... Wha.... Jus... How... The... Fu...

Hnnnnnng! This is going to be the BEST. PLAYTHROUGH. EVER! ...Provided I survive the NPR.

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JACKPOT