Post: #51

It's often hard for families with young children to find things for them to do on the weekend as a family activity. That's why those free-play areas in shopping malls are so packed with rambunctious children on the weekends with their parents sitting around the edge watching them.

Toys R Us was an alternative activity. They allowed customers, within reason, to play with most of the toys in the store. You can't do this with online toys shopping, like Amazon. So, I believe Toys R Us had a viable business plan.

Post: #52

(03-29-2018 11:30 PM)speculator Wrote:  

(03-29-2018 07:54 PM)porscheguy Wrote:  I mentioned in another thread, toys r us went bankrupt because they were bought buy Bain Capital through a leveraged buyout. Consumers could care less about SJW shit.

When they were bought by Bain Capital, they had $2.3billion in debt that they were able to service. Through their creative accounting, they pushed enough debt onto toys r us to the tune of $7.6billion which cost toys r us $400 million annually to service. In 2016 they reported a loss of $29 million. They would have generated substantial profit had they not been saddled with such heavy debt obligations.

Like I said, consumers give zero fucks about SJW tripe when Black Friday rolls around. Toys r us is dying because they got fucked by private equity, and weren’t able to adapt to changing market conditions.

Good observation. Very few people know about leveraged buyouts and their disastrous affects on the economy. The same exact thing is happening to Guitar Center stores that are straddled with $1 billion debt due to Bain Capital's shenanigans. iHeartMedia, the largest U.S. radio station owner, filed for Chapter 11 protections due to $20 billion debt. Those fuckers at Bain are bankrupting the companies to sell their most valuable asset, land and buildings.

These buyout and consolidations are also a big reason the media became so leftist. We should do an entire thread on this.

Back in 1996, Bill Clinton signed off on a piece of legislation called the Telecommunications Act. It overturned anti-monopoly laws that banned companies from owning more than one radio station or newspaper per city. It also allowed conglomerates to operate multiple stations.

What happened was that FM radio started to become "syndicated." Local programming fell by the wayside and was replaced with the faceless "Jack FM" format which had no DJs. Other stations kept only their morning DJs and went syndicated the rest of the day.

In the newspaper realm, this act allowed big city papers to buy up local community papers. It also let companies like Tribune Media snap up multiple dailies like The Baltimore Sun and The LA Times.

When you talked to people about this, they'd laugh. Who cared about stupid FM stations or "community papers" (har har)?

And then they disappeared. And we had a lot fewer independent voices. This stuff mattered in ways that weren't obvious. One reason daily papers used to be so great is that they used community papers as a "farm team" and used to pull writers from there. As such, you got all sorts of ideas. Now you get millennial stiffs who come programmed straight from the colleges and all say the exact same thing.

In the mid-1990s, I was working for a big chain of respected community papers that was known for being iconoclastic. But when we got bought out by Tribune Media, we had to conform to their culture, which was "corporate leftism."

You know the drill: Bullshit HR policies, restrictions on what was allowed to be printed, seminar after seminar on "diversity." And then they killed off the community papers as a separate voice when they folded them into the city paper. Oh, and they also killed of the "alternative weekly."*

The corporate behemoth is now affecting everyone in the realm of social media. IMO people were meant to live among small business, not the giant corporate fist.

I probably should have written this as an article. It's a major pet peeve. Anyway, Toys R Us might means one less option for consumers, which means the big companies can collude to jack up prices.

* Funny addendum. The corporation made a big deal of appointing a woman to do these mergers. She laid off dozens and dozens of people and killed off local newspapers that spanned back decades. What did she get for her efforts? Laid off herself! There was no one left for her to manage -- something she didn't see coming. She now does PR. Moral: Beware the corporation than makes you the executioner...because you might be the one who executes yourself out of a job someday.

Post: #53

I always find it funny when someone says we need Federal laws to prevent "leftism"

(DOBA not saying you were doing that, but you hinted at it, and it made me think of it)

Post: #54

(03-30-2018 10:12 AM)heavy Wrote:  I always find it funny when someone says we need Federal laws to prevent "leftism"

(DOBA not saying you were doing that, but you hinted at it, and it made me think of it)

My point was that overturning age-old ant-trust laws in media squelched local voices and replaced them with "corporate speak," which is what we now have.

I used "corporate leftism" as an example because that's what we got. But I would also have had issues no matter what the corporation's thrust was -- be it Buddhism, Born Again Christianity, or the alt-right.

Those anti-monopoly laws were put into place to keep local media local. Now they're gone, thanks to Bill Clinton and his cronies.

Post: #55

Corporatism is a form of central planning. You can have the most libertarian form of government imaginable, but if one corporation controls everything you eat, drink, see and listen to then your lack of official government coercion is irrelevant.

So, no. Anti-trust laws are in fact a perfect example of governments effecting laws toward liberty. Whether they get it right is a whole other issue.

Post: #56

Say, what happened to Toys-R-Us ever since they decided to go full SJW? Does Chapter 11 ring a bell??

Post: #57

(03-30-2018 10:39 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  Corporatism is a form of central planning. You can have the most libertarian form of government imaginable, but if one corporation controls everything you eat, drink, see and listen to then your lack of official government coercion is irrelevant.
...

When has that ever happened in a long-term environment?

Or perhaps I should ask, what are the horrors that have come from long-term corporatism (I assume by corporatism we mean centralized control and influence without legalized physical force (without the use of state/government policing power)). Because most of human history is basically a bunch of stories about real horrors that came from legalized physical force. Go ahead, have a quick read of just a quick sample of real horrors from Japan's Unit 731:

Quote:Frostbite testing
Physiologist Yoshimura Hisato conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water, and allowing the limb to freeze. Once frozen, which testimony from a Japanese officer said "was determined after the 'frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck'",[30] ice was chipped away and the area doused in water. The effects of different water temperatures were tested by bludgeoning the victim to determine if any areas were still frozen. Variations of these tests in more gruesome forms were performed.

I don't think Wal-mart does frostbit testing.

I remember learning that when I was 6, just learning to read. I would flip the first few pages of my children's bible where they summarize all the Kings of Israel as "Great", "Good", "Bad", "Horrible", and scanning the list, I remember thinking, there's way more bad kings than good kings.

"Well Microsoft shouldn't be the only ones making all these computers"...remember that. I'm not that old, but I've heard these retarded arguments come and go. And the idea that the government is actually making things "better" or more efficient by handcuffing companies who are freely entering into exchange with consumers...well it goes against my principals.

I mean, I think conversations about control or (((control))) or the awful things people have done working for big companies and industries are as fun to talk about as the next guy, but I suppose I believe in the full meaning of individualism too much, and that individualism wins out in the long run, in a free society. I really don't want to go into the specifics of this instance, but I will. Big media created some damned fertile ground for honest conversations in podcasts...the likes of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan (his guests), Dave Rubin, etc. Give me those conversations over the "good ol days" any day.

Oh by the way, the entire media was liberal back then. I can't stand this "the media is one-sided now" routine. News flash, maybe it's because I'm a Rush-baby, but the media has been a big lefty circle-jerk since the 60s. CBS, NBC, ABC...I remember the good ol days, they all had the exact same perspective on news. It's just now that average people are seeing it.

Post: #58

The founder was SJW. The company was always SJW. It’s going bankrupt because Bain Capital larded it up with debt payments that the company couldn’t meet.

The stores are otherwise profitable. I’m sure that somebody will buy the profitable stores that amazon doesn’t want and create a successor toy store from them.

Why couldn’t Toys R Us hit its revenue targets? All of those female Star Wars dolls still sitting on the shelves many years after their movie came out can’t have helped.

Post: #59

Bain Capitol founded by Mitt Romney, co-chairman Josh Bekenstein and senior adviser Matthew Levin.

Quote:Bain Capital has a knack for throwing big toy retailers into bankruptcy.

The buyout firm founded by Mitt Romney — which got slammed this week by the Chapter 11 filing of Toys ‘R’ Us — also saw its reputation dinged a dozen years earlier with the shuttering of KB Toys, which at the time had been the nation’s second-biggest retailer.

In both instances, critics say Bain and its private-equity partners left the chains vulnerable by saddling them with heavy debt loads as they took them private, crippling their capacity to compete in brutal price wars that have dogged the industry.

Post: #60

(03-31-2018 12:51 PM)heavy Wrote:  

(03-30-2018 10:39 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  Corporatism is a form of central planning. You can have the most libertarian form of government imaginable, but if one corporation controls everything you eat, drink, see and listen to then your lack of official government coercion is irrelevant.
...

When has that ever happened in a long-term environment?

Or perhaps I should ask, what are the horrors that have come from long-term corporatism (I assume by corporatism we mean centralized control and influence without legalized physical force (without the use of state/government policing power)). Because most of human history is basically a bunch of stories about real horrors that came from legalized physical force. Go ahead, have a quick read of just a quick sample of real horrors from Japan's Unit 731:

Quote:Frostbite testing
Physiologist Yoshimura Hisato conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water, and allowing the limb to freeze. Once frozen, which testimony from a Japanese officer said "was determined after the 'frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck'",[30] ice was chipped away and the area doused in water. The effects of different water temperatures were tested by bludgeoning the victim to determine if any areas were still frozen. Variations of these tests in more gruesome forms were performed.

I don't think Wal-mart does frostbit testing.

I remember learning that when I was 6, just learning to read. I would flip the first few pages of my children's bible where they summarize all the Kings of Israel as "Great", "Good", "Bad", "Horrible", and scanning the list, I remember thinking, there's way more bad kings than good kings.

"Well Microsoft shouldn't be the only ones making all these computers"...remember that. I'm not that old, but I've heard these retarded arguments come and go. And the idea that the government is actually making things "better" or more efficient by handcuffing companies who are freely entering into exchange with consumers...well it goes against my principals.

I mean, I think conversations about control or (((control))) or the awful things people have done working for big companies and industries are as fun to talk about as the next guy, but I suppose I believe in the full meaning of individualism too much, and that individualism wins out in the long run, in a free society. I really don't want to go into the specifics of this instance, but I will. Big media created some damned fertile ground for honest conversations in podcasts...the likes of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan (his guests), Dave Rubin, etc. Give me those conversations over the "good ol days" any day.

Oh by the way, the entire media was liberal back then. I can't stand this "the media is one-sided now" routine. News flash, maybe it's because I'm a Rush-baby, but the media has been a big lefty circle-jerk since the 60s. CBS, NBC, ABC...I remember the good ol days, they all had the exact same perspective on news. It's just now that average people are seeing it.

Wow. That's a pretty big reply for such a small quote.

I've been revealed as a horrible person that would rather have people's limbs frozen and smashed than allow Walmart to bring us low, low prices.

Such rhetoric is impossible to withstand. I are defeated.

Post: #61

I can't wait til Walmart and Amazon start making trans superhero toys. Although they're already doing a comic book for a muslim chick with a burqa who's a superhero (the burqa gives her superpowers or something like that).