I live in Chicago and I really think it's just competition.
Take the 2551 W. Cermak Road location. There's a Costco, Aldi, Target, Marianos, for big name shops, but then there's also at least 11 other smaller local or specialty shops (Betheleham Food Mart, Guzman Grocery, Helens Grocery, etc etc etc).
Walmart just can't complete in big cities. I can find something cheaper and higher quality than Walmart just by walking down the street. Walmart does well in smaller towns where there isn't as much competition, and where they can really push their specialty services. I would never get my eyes examined at a Walmart Eye Center, for instance, since I can find three other places that are closer to me. If you're in a smaller town though those things are super convenient.
Yeah, absolutely- in the last five years people have moved to delivery in a way that they didn't before. Walmart offered a delivery service but was late to the game- I can get whole foods delivery directly, and instacart for other things. During covid a lot more people took advantage of these services and got used to it, driving up those loses further.
I live here- instacart even has the smaller grocery stores now. Why would I ever go to walmart, or use walmart for delivery, when there's so many options that are better on quality and price? Not only that but the niche stores are also really nice.
The only time I go to Walmart is when I'm visiting my in laws in Indiana. There are two other grocery stores there we'll go to for most things, but if we need anything beyond simple grocery stores then Walmart is the only option.
The market in Chicago is different though. Look at Target, which is doing pretty well in Chicago. They don't have four locations, they have at least 22 that I've counted. They've ditched the extras (eye care, pharmacy, etc) and focused on having convenient locations with lower overhead.
Your argument would be more persuasive if you talked about wages. Which is likely the thing that sealed the deal given the low margin business Walmart operates, far more than typical retail operations. Here in Canada my nephew is being paid $20/hr at a big box because they are desperate for workers. Obviously (to a much smaller degree) it was also in combination with the significant increase in shoplifting and security risks for shoppers/workers that typically creates, and the pressure on hiring, which the typical violence in American Walmart stores was bad enough as it was.
But the wage growth + consequences of the "summer of love" when people realized there are no consequences for mass low level property theft happened in 2020... Same with wage growth around the same time with COVID so that doesn't sound like the whole story either.
Your personal anecdotes about local competition in the city and stuff about instacart ignores the massive price/supply advangage that Walmart has, and aren't very persuasive. Typically you'd also see those trends in other urban areas... Why are these 4 stores in Chicago unique? And why 5yrs ago? Are you saying small stores you love + mid tier competitors all suddenly started opening in 2018?
Because otherwise I'd agree that delivery (see: amazon) growth was what killed it but the doubling of losses started happening in 2018. Before COVID.
And there's tons of stats about Walmart's delivery business was booming during COVID.
There has to be some more stuff that happened around then, in combination with these multiple factors.
The Lakeview one has a lot of local competition. However, that location like the one in River north was a freaking mess. It's great for convience.. however Walmart doesn't do well in a small/medium sided format.
I'm just amazed they aren't closing the thunderdome Walmart that is off of North ave.
Some of them because of too much competition and the fact that they were shitty stores (the north side ones) and too much competition and the fact that they got shoplifted into oblivion (the south side ones).
people are going to blame this on inner city crime and while that may be a factor, in general, I have observed, in my lifetime, a degradation of societal trust and increase in blatant shoplifting, even in my smallish city in my red state. I first worked as a cashier at Walmart around 2009, for a couple different stores in the state over the course of a few years. then I moved away, moved back, lots of stuff happened, and I was once again out of a job, so I returned to working at Walmart as a cashier in 2018, at a newer store in my hometown. the older store is in "the bad part of town" that has gotten worse over time—but even at the newer Walmart, in a "safer" part of town, I saw more blatant, brazen, non-petty shoplifting than I ever had seen before.
I'm not talking like, take some merchandise to the restroom, remove the security packaging, leave it in the stall, and walk out with the stuff under your sweatshirt. I'm talking like, just walking out of the store with plural heaping cartfuls of large quantities of food, valued at several hundreds of dollars per cart. and there was nothing we could do about it. I almost got fired for trying to stop a guy from stealing stuff one night, and I really should have been, according to policy, as we got in a fistfight and he almost domed me with a maglite.
obviously, even as a then-employee, I didn't give a single shit about Walmart as a corporation, its bottom line, or anything like that—obviously I knew all about the concept of "shrinkage" at that point. but what actually concerns me is this general degradation of societal trust and cohesion we're experiencing, even here in my hometown of ~76,000 people.
when my mom went to school at the same high school I later attended, kids would leave their hunting rifles and shotguns in gun racks in the back of their pickup trucks in the school parking lot, and nobody gave a shit. the year I was born, someone brought a sawed-off to that high school and held up a classroom. (nobody ended up hurt or killed.) when I was a senior in high school, a kid got a felony for leaving a paintball gun in the (locked) backseat of his sedan from a weekend excursion to the woods, in the parking lot of the high school across town, while all schools in the district, including mine, were put into lockdown for about an hour.
I'm not sure where we went wrong, or even what exactly is happening in general, but it's clear that times used to be better with regards to societal trust and cohesion, both here and just about everywhere, and it only seems like things continue to get worse over time.
Really feels like we need a massive exercise wherein folks have to repeat back what they heard someone say before responding to it, something they have people do in couples therapy.
In the last few years everyone's filters have gotten to the point where it seems like they really cannot even perceive what others say accurately -- literally substituting words -- and continually reframing arguments to the extent that a good portion of fighting online is over things nobody has said.
I mean heck even in the comments on this article, someone mentioned at the end of another comment that they thought this article was "irrelevant" which given this is ostensibly a tech news site that sounded fair (but also: so what?), and the person arguing back said they were "not our arbiter of acceptable content". Relevant... acceptable. The conceptual rift is massive, leaving the second person arguing against a point which has not been made (and then someone else makes a defense of the misconstrued point and so on and so on).
For mice they may have used to be the case, but recently wireless has become more popular (at least in CSGO.) 3/5 of the most popular mice used by pros are wireless (including the #1 spot.)
Logitech X Pro Superlight seems pretty popular and sadly doesn’t work via cable but only Logitechs lightning receiver.
I’ve played with the Superlight for a year or so and and couldn’t notice the difference to the mouse is used before and am using now, both with a cable.
Amazon was the first streaming studio to win oscars about five years ago. Bezos incentivizes those employees with bonuses for emmys, oscars and other such awards.
Now Apple won one. Content production keeps users in the respective ecosystems and this is one of the KPIs.
I dropped out after a year of college and have since weaseled my way into a dev position, your observation could not be more true in my experience. I've since strongly considered going back to school for a degree, but as interesting and probably useful some of the material may be, I'm not convinced it's worth it as an investment into making me better at my job.
If only I could use 529 funds on some of these online course providers.
> Couples splitting up because one is heavily more invested in dancing than the other is a common occurence.
This unnerves me. My partner could and would dance all day, anywhere, any scenario. I have to be unbelievably drunk to come close to anything resembling dancing. Any event we go to together that involves dancing is intensely emotionally debilitating to me for that reason, and sometimes I worry that it's a basal insurmountable incompatibility between us.
Many banks in Spain have the same exact restrictions. My guess is somebody sold the same shitty COBOL backend to everyone back in the 60s, and they keep running it with different HTML layers slapped on top.
That's why the have (had?) all that fun stuff on the back of the cereal box. Or the morning paper. It's not a new phenomenon that we strive to fill our idle time with some kind of stimulation.
