Our Culture will Collapse by 2030. (119)

The great retail purge is coming. The alarm bells have been ringing non stop since 2021. Internet shopping with next day delivery is fueling the carnage. Store entry doors that require credit card or drivers license I. D. card access and exit doors are helping cut the crime wave of shoplifting that has been sweeping the country. In-store cash machines that issue store specific prepaid credit cards will reduce robberies and till shortages by eliminate the cash registers in the store.

Work-from-home is reducing the restaurant lunch crowd. There are 200,000 fast food restaurants in the U.S., half will close in the next three years. IHOP the famous pancake franchise added hamburgers to their menu, in a last ditch effort to survive. Wendy’s largest franchisee of 61 locations filed for bankrupt last November in Florida. Burger King, Popeyes, KFC, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Taco Bell and a dozen more saw multi-unit operators go belly-up due to struggles with inflation, low traffic, rising costs and labor shortages. Too many locations with high cost retail locations, clustered within a few blocks of each other, are competing for a shrinking customer base, and increasingly scarce and expensive workers. Absentee Franchise owners relied on hired managers, supervised by area managers. Job content of their workers were reduced to repetitive motion stations at an assigned machine. Worker training reduced to only a few minutes. Job longevity was measured in months. Food quality has been suffering, along with portion sizes for years. Fast food restaurants had a great ride, for many years, but it’s over.

Markets chains have been consolidating for 20 years. Producers “rent” retail shelf space. Refrigerators are for the specific brands that own them. Stocking is done by representatives of the products like baked goods, cosmetics and beverages. Meat and poultry is prepackaged and stocked by wholesale distributors. A store that has professional butchers, or a bakery is a rare exception. Self checkout is nearly ready for prime time. Each human cashier they replace saves the store $60,000 in payroll per year.

Drug store chains are at the end of their economic ropes, as they look to add more products to help pay for their cavernous locations. They’re competing with the markets next to them, that’s not going to continue. CVS and Rite Aid will reduce the number of their locations by half by 2025. They will do what Costco has done, move their pharmacies inside a market. Win — win.

The laborers who are affected and that will be in the future, will move into other work. Either where they are, or to another area. The need to work will present an opportunity to more satisfying, engaging work.

Have a nice day.