Sears, once the largest retailer by sales volume in the country, has been in decline for the last twenty years and is on its way out of business. Some of its competitors in the brick and mortar and catalog sides of retail merchandising have either already gone out of business or are also on their way out. Sears failed to keep up with the online retail revolution, and a look around its sales website indicates that the company still doesn’t have a handle on it. Sears closed up its famous catalog in 1993, and since it never established itself online, it was left with brick and mortar stores which are not doing well.
The Amtrak train The Cardinal departs Chicago in May, 2009, for points east. The Sears Tower, the tallest building in the skyline, was renamed the Willis Tower in 2009 by the Willis Group as part of its lease agreement. Photo by Russell Sekeet.
Throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, Sears was such a huge merchandiser that it accounted for about one percent of all retail sales nationwide. It was the Amazon.com of that time, which was no small feat considering the supply chain difficulties imposed by an infrastructure that would not become truly nationwide until the 1950s with the building of the interstate highway system. Sears made its name by using its catalogs to reach under served rural customers at a time when the majority of people lived outside of cities. Now online retailers can reach anyone with an internet connection, and shippers deliver directly to the consumer’s doorstep.
It was at this time of year, late summer or early autumn, that Sears used to issue its Wish Book, a shortened version of its catalog, with an emphasis on Christmas gift items. One of Sears’ competitors, Macy’s, still kicks off the Christmas shopping season by sponsoring a Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, though it has also been closing stores around the country. The 2008 recession accelerated the decline of the big nationwide department stores after a slow slip in sales since the 1990s. Specialty stores with a national or regional presence, like Radio Shack and Circuit City, have also either shut down or are close to doing so. What’s most often left then for Christmas shoppers visiting a physical store are the big box retailers like Walmart and Target.
Or people could patronize locally owned shops. The prices may be higher because the small shops don’t have the supply chain advantages of their much larger competitors, but the local small business gives back to its community. In that sense, the two types of stores should not even be considered competitors. Over there are the big box retailers selling goods cheaply, but also taking advantage of communities with unethical employment and supply chain practices. And over here are small businesses that are answerable to the community, because without local support and good word of mouth they are doomed to fail.
Left to right: Adam Gimbel, Frederic Gimbel, and Bernard Gimbel looking at a Luca della Robbia (1400-1482) statue of Madonna and Child, from the art collection of William Randolph Hearst. Parts of Hearst’s collection were sold at the Gimbels department store in 1939-1940. Gimbels had stores in the northeast and the midwest, and a prized location next door to Macy’s in Herald Square in New York City. Photo by Edward Lynch of the New York World Telegram & Sun.
Edmund Gwenn stars as Santa Claus in the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street. The film’s setting is Macy’s department store in New York City.
It could be that the failure of the old retail giants like Sears will prompt renewed interest in shopping at local stores. Online retailers and a few big box retailers have already usurped much of Sears’ more than one century old business model. Sears and J.C. Penney and a few other large department stores have anchored enclosed suburban shopping malls since they first started appearing in the 1950s and 1960s. Now that those stores are declining, perhaps small, locally owned shops will pick up more business. That would be a welcome development, and it might eventually boost Small Business Saturday to a level competitive with Black Friday (it’s antithesis is Buy Nothing Day) and Cyber Monday. Like it or not, Christmas has been a commercial proposition in America for a long time now, and if small businesses can bloom from the ashes of the old retail giants, then at least some good will have come from that mercantile aspect of the year end holidays.
― Vita
Thieves have been using the latest technology to quickly install ever more undetectable credit and debit card skimmers at gas pumps, and even at the card reader inside the gas station. Parts are available cheaply on eBay, and the risks are low while payoffs are high. Installing skimmers on isolated Automated Teller Machines has always been popular with thieves, but now with newer technology that takes mere seconds to install, the greater exposure to detection from passersby at gas pumps over ATMs is not as much of a factor as before. A skimmer placed on a gas pump can offer a larger payoff than an ATM because of the generally higher amount of customer visits.
Diners Club Regular Card with Integrated Circuit, issued in Japan, 2016; own work by Hitomi
The new smart credit cards, which are the ones embedded with EMV (Europay MasterCard Visa) integrated circuit chips, are far less susceptible to skimming than cards with magnetic stripes only, but while the new cards are rolling out, businesses need to maintain backwards compatibility with magnetic stripe cards, and that makes the United States fertile territory for card skimmers. The United States has also been slower to implement EMV technology than other countries because of the huge cost of replacing all the card readers. It wasn’t until the impetus provided by the high profile Target stores identity theft case in 2013 that US businesses and card providers started moving earnestly toward the new standard. Liability shifts by providers, meaning whether they will reimburse losses by card holders to fraud and identity theft or shift the liability to businesses, are slated to begin for the old magnetic stripe cards in October 2017 generally, although some providers have implemented shifts for some types of card readers as early as October 2015, and other card readers won’t incur a liability shift until October 2020.
One to four years until full implementation of the new EMV-only card readers is an enormous window of opportunity for thieves armed with the latest skimmer technology. Gas station owners are trying the low cost stopgap of applying stickers to the pumps for evidence of tampering, but those can only help detect the installation of internal skimmers. Users of the gas pumps will have to be aware of anomalies at the scanner, the keypad, and the pump generally. They should also be aware that using a debit card is riskier than using a credit card, and to keep a close eye on their card statements for suspicious activity. The surest safeguard, of course, is to pay cash. It might be worthwhile for customers as well as business owners to remember the old saying immortalized by the humorist Jean Shepherd in the title of his 1966 novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.
– Techly
