Blame the US Retail Apocalypse on hedge funds and financialization, not Amazon and Walmart

I miss walking in and being hit with the smell of popcorn (which presumably made money for them; it’s how movie theaters have made money for decades).

I have a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old, and (except for a few online orders) I’ve spent their childhoods not shopping at Toys R Us. When the 12-year-old was a toddler, I went in to buy a pinwheel. I don’t know which was worse: that Toys R Us didn’t sell pinwheels, or that the person they hired to sell toys didn’t know what a pinwheel is. I guess my anecdote doesn’t prove anything, but if my experience was typical, then the toy store not being very adept at selling toys (for whatever reason) might have something to do with it.

I can see why that happened with most bookstores, for example, but why should it happen with clothing stores? Has anyone else here tried shopping for clothes on Amazon? Especially for another person, like as a gift? Searching for a particular item might give 100 results, but only 10 or 20 distinct items. There might be 12 results with the same photos, same model, etc. but a different brand name. (And the same model keeps turning up for disparate products.) Each of those listings will say something like “this is the only brand xyz on Amazon! Don’t buy xyz from anyone else on Amazon.” And then when the item arrives, it might resemble the photo, but the one in the photo sure didn’t look like the piece of cheap polyester one now holds in one’s hands.

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