TWO RETAILERS DOWN, WET SEAL & RADIOSHACK CLOSE BEHIND

It’s horrible to base an economy on shit like this.

I never heard of Wet Seal, wife said she heard of it, but not her type of store. Someone must have been having a wet dream to name a girs clothing store “Wet Seal.”.

Heard Dicks Sporting Goods may be going private. We have a new one in my city, and when you walk into it, it is like a morge.

@Welshman: I go to Dicks about once a year just to peruse without buying anything. For the last several years I typically go around Thanksgiving. As I inevitably check out the witner outerwear, I literally come across the SAME jackets year after year. I mean exactly the same size jacket and brand that I have seen for several years. There is no mistake, as I actually look quite closely. In sum, all Dicks does is roll out the same crap year after year, literally. Although anecdotal, from what I can see is that the only thing they sell are the overpriced shoes that I buy online. I don’t know how this chain is still in business.

FWIW – Last night I went to buy a calendar at my usual Office-whatever, and it was closed. I swear I was just there a few months ago. I did see where the empty former book store next door was now a Dollar-whatever.

I used the GPS to find another Office-whatever, it was mostly empty at 7:00 pm and that shopping center – in a good area of town – had two significant empty store fronts.

I live in L.A. and I often wonder about a fairly new store we have here called Fresh n Easy. It’s a wannabe competitor for Trader Joe’s. It has tried to appeal to the same crowd, but it falls short. Almost every time I go there are few people in there. I wonder how they are actually doing financially since they are not particularly cheap, nor do they have great quality.

The big box office and sporting goods ghost towns have to be running on fumes. Too big, too empty, who came up with the make it in china and big box every category (while paying no wages or taxes) model economy anyway?

Tesco has been cooking the books for years, and Warren Buffet has not had kind words for them, as one of their biggest investors.

I will seriously miss the Radio Shack in my nabe. It’s right next to the el, it has friendly, knowledgeable clerks, and it has been my go-to place for headphones, rechargeable batteries, and I got a very good deal on a nice Canon camera there.

Wet Seal? Never go into the place- it is one more outlet for super-skinny 13-year-olds, that was birthed by the credit rampage of the past 30 years, like so many of the “specialty” chains that have caused our retail footprint to balloon from the 4-sq-ft-per-consumer average of 1964, to the ridiculous 42 square foot per consumer average as of 2010. I don’t remember there being any shortage of shopping venues in the 1960s.

While many younger folk see the inevitable contraction of retail back to levels that can be supported by consumers without resorting to obscene levels of debt, as economic breakdown, I see it as a return to normalcy. A lot of people on this site are wont to be nostalgic for the 50s and 60s, which really was an era of economic stability and unprecedented prosperity. However, most of these younger people were not alive then and do not remember how we really lived then. The lifestyles most well-off middle income folk lived in those days were Spartan relative to what people consider “normal” these days. The typical middle class house was a 3 bed 1 bath ranch or bungalow with space to park ONE car. Most families had only one car. My grandparents were affluent and STILL had only one bath in their Cape Cod house, and one car- my grandmother drove my grandfather to the rail stop to catch the commuter train in the morning and picked him up in the evening, and used the car for household errands during the day. If she went downtown to shop, she took the trolley. My young family’s first house was a cheap 3 bed 1 bath ranch, and we of course had only one car. I got two pairs of new shoes each fall- a pair of penny loafers for school and a pair of dressy shoes for Sundays and special occasions. I was the only girl in my high school who owned a good pair of kid gloves, and it was a rare girl who had more than 5 outfits.

Families hardly ever ate out. Better off people did that perhaps once a month, on Sundays, while people of average means did it once every 6 months, at a local “white tablecloth” restaurant with moderate prices. We thought we were very lucky because my grandfather took us to a nice restaurant every month. That was rare.

Ordinary people did not live in 2500 sq ft 4 bed 3 bath houses with spa tubs, and they did not have 3 cars parked in the driveway. And NOBODY but the rich ever, ever had a second home. Nobody but the rich had housekeepers, nannies, or gardeners. And even the rich would have only one servant, usually a maid who came 2 or 3 times a week, and the rich lived in smaller homes, usually 7,000 sq ft at the most, but more often 3000 sq ft or so, not the 50,000 sq ft mega-mansions of these excessive times.

We could actually contract a great deal and still live comfortably if we could realize that a lot of what we consider “normal” for middle class people is actually excessive, and would seem downright decadent to people living in the 50s and 60s.