The Overblown ‘Retail Apocalypse’

This article for some reason went hugely viral a few weeks ago: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning – Bloomberg

The virality, I suspect, is due to some sort of nostalgic fondness for retail stores, even though Amazon offers a superior retail experience in every regard.

Rather than a retail apocalypse, in agreement with my HBD-as-destiny thesis what is happening is that online retail is subsuming low-IQ offline retail (such as Target, JC Penny, Kmart, Toys R Us, etc.), while total retail sales keep growing:

The tech bull market has further to go, and I remain ‘long’ Amazon stock.

This is part of a broader trend of the left-wing, low-IQ ‘cathedral’ of retail, Hollywood, and the mainstream media dying. From the post Silicon Valley is Eating the World:

As CNN gets eaten by Facebook, left-wing, low-IQ retail is suffering a similar fate due to Amazon (although Amazon is headquartered in Seattle), just as Blockbuster was put out of business by Netflix. It’s only a matter of time before these dying/stagnant left-wing industries and sectors are taken over by techno-commercialism. Although Silicon Valley is generally left-wing, there is still a non-trivial libertarian presence, and the current liberalism in Silicon Valley may have more to do with political and legal pressure than personal choice.

Plunging NFL ratings and the Weinstein-Spacey sex scandals are the latest iterations of this decline. The left does not need the ‘right’ to be their undoing; they are perfectly capable of doing that themselves. For example, Target management admits its transgender bathroom policy hurt the company’s earnings.

Regarding the so-called retail apocalypse, closing and openings tracked each other closely, until 2017 when they diverged:

So rather than an ‘apocalypse’ it’s more like a setback.