Are shops in the US usually this run down looking?

Striker@lemmy.worldmod to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 9 points –
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You're in a Walmart.

They claim to be cheaper so they can have that drabby distopian look.

In the good parts of town, they look nicer. In the poor parts of town they're legit worse than that.

Fwiw, I'll pay the extra dollar per shopping cart for the superior look of a target. Target is generally cleaner and crisper looking. As always there are exceptions to that rule.

Also the implication that countries outside the US don't have dumpy stores is laughable. Europe's got plenty of stuff like this, just usually not as large. Here in the Netherlands we have shops like Action and grocery stores like Lidl and they're a shitshow inside most of the time.

Lidl in the US is definitely a step up from Wal-Mart.

Target has been going downhill. Lots of crap in the aisles now, and inventory is stocked during the day. It’s like shopping in a warehouse.

It's incredibly difficult to find anything at Target, especially gender-neutral hygiene products since they hard-segregated hygiene into men's and women's. Just give me regular ass bar soap.
My partner was looking for coffee and looked all over the tea section and nope, naturally coffee belongs next to the liquor and red vines.
I hate going to Target, but I still take it over Walmart. At least I don't feel dirty shopping at Target.

Retail in general is hiring much less staff these days so they always look like shit. I heard on the radio that they are removing self checkout now too because of theft? I doubt they will increase staff back up to compensate. I kind of want to be there in rush hour the first time to watch the shit show.

The economics of removing self checkout are not there. You check 6 customers per attendant at self checkout - the store would need to lose $150,000 in merchandise at self check out per year to break even (assuming $30k/yr for the wage slave).

In a previous life, I did loss prevention. The average shrink rate in retail in the USA is 2%. That means 2% of the merchandise leaves the store without being paid for.

An average Walmart does millions in sales each day. Conservatively 2% of one million is $20,000.

Thousands of dollars of unpaid merchandise leaves a big retailer every single day. It's part of the cost of doing business. That's also why online retailers are cheaper. They don't have to deal with external theft. They still have internal theft.

Shrink is the industry term. It's merchandise that isn't paid for and isn't there when inventory happens. Theft is most of it, both by customers (external) and employees (internal). It's also things that aren't rang up right at the register, damaged merchandise that isn't removed from the system correctly. It's a big umbrella term.

Ugh. Target feels suffocating to me with all the red and the way everything feels like an end table covered in popurrí.

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