Swept away in the Amazon's flood?

This is posted in the window of a small local business.

I wonder if its correct?

On a related note, recently some group claimed that the appeal of the Affordable Health Care Act will cost Wyoming 4,000 jobs. That's nearly impossible to believe.  When the AHCA was passed it didn't seem to add 4,000 jobs.   I note this in not taking a position on the AHCA, but merely to note that statistics aren't always on the mark on such things and reality is more complicated that simple, or even complicated, statistics would often maintain.

Which takes me back to the Amazon thing.  No doubt, I think, on line retailing does take away from local retailing, especially on some sorts of things.  On the other hand, particularly in the West and rural areas, catalogs used to fill a lot of the same role, in slow motion.  A person could order darned near anything from Sears including, starting in 1916, entire houses. Even really big houses.

Of course, ordering a house, I guess, from Sears is one thing.  But now a person can order darned near anything over the net and have it come to their mailbox, and that definitely is new.  Indeed, not only can you do that, but it's becoming so that you have to do that.  I wrote here the other day about shoelaces, for example, and even though I've tried once again to find some locally, I just can't find them.

Probably if you are in retail you'll notice this the most and appreciate the impact of it the most.  Contractors don't have to contend with Sears mail order homes anymore (which were quite nice, by the way) but book sellers and the like do have to content with Amazon. And that no doubt does have a negative impact on them, and on us all as well. Quantifying it however, isn't easy.

Sears sells Craftsman

Sears, Roebuck & Co., the ailing retail one time giant founded in 1886 has sold its Craftsman brand to Stanley, Black & Decker for $900,000,000.

That's a lot of cash, but the sale of the Craftsman brand, which Sears has carried since 1927, can't be a good sign.

Sears has been owned by Kmart since 2005.  It hasn't been itself for a long time, in my view.  Here locally its downtown store was once one of the downtown anchors, along with J. C. Pennys, but both moved up to the mall when it was built.  It's been declining as a draw for a long time.  Craftsman tools were at one time legendary for their quality although I've never owned any myself. They may still be very good, in so far as I know.

A Shoelace Story. A Distributist Lament.

I have a pair of dress hoes that have light tan laces.

Big deal, you no doubt say.

Well, they're broken.

Well, that happens. Go buy some, right?

Hence the problem.

 Alas, poor shoelaces. . .

For years, when this occurred, i just walked over to one of  the two downtown shoe repair shops or Wolfords, the downtown locally owned shoe store.

They're all gone now.

And now I don't know where to go to get laces.

I tried Walmart, which I dislike, but they don't carry shoelaces for dress shoes. So no luck there.  I guess I'll try Penny's at the mall, or maybe Kohls, which is nearby the mall.  Both are clear across town, but if they don't have them I'll find myself actually having to order shoelaces, of all things, on the net.

And so we have the irony of retail consolidation 

We're always told that this makes things more convenient for everyone.  The big box stores and retail chains do drive out the smaller locally owned stores. But at the same time, choice diminishes along with that, oddly enough.

Now, if you live in a big city, or even a larger one, this is no doubt not true. 

But if you live in a smaller one, or a smaller town, it definitely is. The retail choices decrease with the competition from big box stores.

And so you are left with the net.  Even for shoelaces.

And of course for shoes.

Dress shoes have been a problem for me ever since 1990.  That's when I graduated from law school. At that time I had two pair of dress shoes and both of them were U.S. Army "low quarters".  I.e., the black dress shoe worn by soldiers with their Class A uniform.  I wore those as dress shoes quite a bit for a long time, although I haven't done so now for quite awhile and one pair is mysteriously missing. Anyhow, I thought they were fine but even early on I knew I needed another pair and my father took me up to Penny's where we ordered one.  My feet, at size six, are so small that about the only shoes I can ever find locally are cowboy boots and athletic shoes, the latter of which I very rarely wear.  Even Wolfords almost never had shoes my size and I don't blame them.  It'd be pointless for them to stock shoes just for me and as more and more men have switched to fairly casual shoes there likely wasn't much of a market for small sized men's shoes.  It did give me the feeling, however that they were likely in their declining days as a store, Wolfords that is.

Anyhow that means that I've pretty much had to mail order dress shoes for a long time, and of the four pair I've acquired since 1990 (all still in use) all of them came through the mail.  Two pairs are H.S. Trask shoes that are made from buffalo hide, including the one depicted above, and they're as tough as nails.  They'll ultimately wear out, maybe, from the inside, not the outside, as the outside leather is indestructible.  The shoelaces aren't, however.

Hence the problem.

Blog Mirror: Matthew Wright: Where did the commercial Christmas zombie frenzy start?

Where did the commercial Christmas zombie frenzy start?

One of my pet irritations about Christmas is the zombie mall frenzy, when shoppers go into a kind of trance amidst the glitz and glitter of the mall and start shelling out cash for chintzy consumer items made of cheap plastic. Most of these gee-gaws break 28 seconds after being unwrapped, and by 29 December they’ve been packed off to the landfill.

Bass Pro Shop swallows Cabelas. . . a Distributist Sportsman's Lament

This past week the news broke that Bass Pro Shop bought its rival, Sidney Nebraska based Cabelas.

Ah, pooh.

News, truly, I wish hadn't come.

Now, why, doggone it, as a red blooded American, am I lamenting the time honored business model of one company swallowing another?  Geez Louise man, aren't I for motherhood, apple pie, and unrestrained acquisition?

Well, I'm for motherhood and I like apple pie, but. . . . 

I'm also for subsidiarity. 

Now, before I go on to explain that, I should note that Missouri based Bass Pro Shop says it'll keep the Cabelaas flag flying, so there will be,  they say,in some form, a Cabelas and a Bass Pro.

Well, I'm skeptical.

Generally, quite frankly, that's not how these thing go long term.   Bass Pro Shop and Cabelas are competitors. While they likely do not perfectly overlap, they do to a large extent, and long term, it won't make sense for both of them to keep on. At some point, I suspect, Bass Pro Shop will figure it makes more sense to just have all of those stores be Bass Pro Shops.  

But I suspect it won't be the best for them, for the same reason. 

Which brings me to subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity, according to Wikipedia, is defined as follows:

Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.

Put another way:

It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry. Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, pg.79

Now, there's a lot to this, but the basic gist of it is as noted above.  The concept is that needs are best met at the local level, and for that matter, the market is best met at the local level.  This isn't always true, but it tend to be.  It's best, generally, for the local employees, and its often best for the local market, or consumer.

As an example of that, I'd note, big chain sporting goods stores (and Cabelas is one, but I'm not pointing at them) often stock weird items for the local market.  We see that here on odd occasion when we'll have a big national chain that stocks something like gigantic fishing poles, or deer stands, neither of which are used here.  One Canadian based sporting goods store that has an outlet here stocks the gigantic fishing poles, and while they're interesting, I'll be they hardly ever sell one.

Which is why I favor a local sporting goods store here that is part of a chain, but just a statewide one.  It's the best store in town, in my view, and this is likely because it knows its market.

Indeed, occasionally there were rumors that Cabelas would come in here and I always hoped they wouldn't. So far they haven't.  But I'd rather have Sidney Nebraska based Cabelas around here than Missouri based Bass Pro.

Which goes to the fact that I tend to still look at Cabelas and Bass Pro as types of mail order outfits that were pioneered by Herters years ago. That is, while they have expanded to have retail outlets, it was really mail order that made them what they were and, in that sense, they occupied a different category than brick and mortar stores.  At least as to Cabelas it wasn't that they were cheaper, as they often were not, but rather that you could order stuff from them that you couldn't otherwise get locally.  So they were like a smaller singular entity in a certain fashion. When they started to have multiple outlets that sort of changed and while I certainly stopped in some of those outlets here and there, I was never really comfortable with it.

The consolidation of these companies always seem to be a market trend and its something that can only occur because of the corporate structure that all large companies adopt.  This gives them the ability to expand to giant size but that also works, at some point, to cause them to absorb their competition.  If corporate business forms didn't work the way that they do, retail operations could not expand like this.  And the absorption doesn't always go that well.  Bass Pro never impressed me that much, for example, as it seemed focused, to my mind, on a certain southern style of fishing that doesn't exist here.  Cabelas seemed more Mid Western to me. 

Well, as noted immediately above, if corporate business forms didn't work the way that they do, retail operations could not expand like this.

And perhaps its sad that they can.