No shit.
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
- Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man, 1988
Oops, we made excess profits! How did that happen?
No fucking shit.
Executives need to be jailed in order to stop the average American from getting fucked.
But why would American politicians write laws that would effectively send themselves to jail?
But hard agree.
They keep saying we’re doing wonderful and coming out of it, but I hit up my big local mall recently and holy shit. You can really tell when we’re heading towards the shitter by looking at your mall. I’m not in a small town by any means and half the stores were closed at it. I think it’ll get worse and worse and worse until maybe next year this time. And then maybe we’ll start pulling out of this recession, but I’m not optimistic that we’re in a recession, I’m thinking this is normal now
Dying malls are a sign of bad urban planning, not of a shrinking economy. Malls in America have been closing down for probably decades now while there are still new ones opening in European cities.
Malls in the US were killed by the Internet. The ones that are still around are a macabre husk of what shopping malls once were here. There’s a Spencer’s, but no arcade. There’s an Orange Julius, but no record store. Dillard’s and Macy’s are there, but Sears is long dead. Half of the closest one to me is a giant police station.
Malls were bad urban planning in the first place.
Malls aren’t very good economic indicators. They been dying for years regardless of the economic conditions - checkout /r/deadmalls on reddit. Partly due to tastes of consumers, who got tired of walking half a mile to get to a store, and partly due to online commerce.
I’ve heard that the regulatory environment had a big impact on some places. Something like there were a bunch of subsidies/incentives to invest in the real estate aspect of malls. When those incentives dried up, the increased operating costs got passed on to tenants, some of which couldn’t afford the increase. Closing shops make the mall less attractive for customers, which reduces sales at the remaining shops, some of which end up closing down, and the whole thing spirals into the situation we have now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if artificial incentives played a role. It’s also worth noting that in general, malls were built and flourished at the expense of downtown shopping areas, and many cities had hollowed out, dead commercial cores by the era when malls were going strong.
Malls have been dead for half my lifetime lol.
There’s a reason nearly all of them have been converted to city resources centers.
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Maybe, but also people just don’t go to malls as much as they used to.
Water is wet, more at 11.
it seems like either there needs to be some trust busting or that modern communications and automation is so good now its impossible to keep companies from price fixing and that price controls need to be implemented.
Under capitalism there can be no such thing as “excess profits.”
Excess profits == stealing. The trust is broken.
