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Kougar
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 4:45 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Hard to beat the $1.50 hotdog and a drink in the Costco food court. Although you can't get chili on it, it's a decent hotdog. Big and juicy.


Definitely, any of their prices are nigh impossible to beat for a quick bite.

And yeah, I noticed that about the Costco pizzas. Sam's does the same thing except worse, the deli pizzas aren't anything like the pre-mades they sell right in front of said deli. Costco does sell chili, so if enough people ask for it on their product requests book they will consider it. They care about high-volume first and foremost.

A long ways back Costco even partnered with some chili maker to make their own Cattle Drive brand recipe chili, and sold that for a couple years. Was sad to see that eventually get phased out.
 
MOSFET
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 5:38 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
The ONLY reason I go to my local Home Depot, since Lowe's is much closer, is for the hot dog stand where I can get a foot-long big fat chili dog for $3.50.

I once asked Lowe's about this and they claimed that local zoning prohibited them from installing their own hot dog stand.


Opposite side of US from Vermont, it's the opposite. My local Lowe's has the hot dog stand!
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just brew it!
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 6:15 pm

Kougar wrote:
A long ways back Costco even partnered with some chili maker to make their own Cattle Drive brand recipe chili, and sold that for a couple years. Was sad to see that eventually get phased out.

I remember that stuff, it was pretty good! There was also a recall, where customers were warned that some cans might contain "electronic calculator parts". None of our cans had any foreign matter in them (that I could tell); we'd already eaten it all by the time we got the recall notice.
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Glorious
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 8:15 pm

JBI wrote:
where customers were warned that some cans might contain "electronic calculator parts".


"Now with more crunch!*"




* When compared in a blind taste to previous generation's "accidental" infusion of mechanical calculator parts.
 
whm1974
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 8:36 pm

Glorious wrote:
JBI wrote:
where customers were warned that some cans might contain "electronic calculator parts".


"Now with more crunch!*"




* When compared in a blind taste to previous generation's "accidental" infusion of mechanical calculator parts.

How in hell do "electronic calculator parts" in end up in cans of chilli con carne?
 
LostCat
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 9:26 pm

whm1974 wrote:
How in hell do "electronic calculator parts" in end up in cans of chilli con carne?

That is the best question I've heard in the last ten years. Or maybe my entire life.
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bfg-9000
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 9:51 pm

Perhaps it's like the meatpacker in The Jungle that fell into a vat to become sausage, except he had a pocket calculator?

Tried the Costco food court's new $5 Shake Shack cheeseburger clone and it was pretty good! It replaced the chicken sandwich. I don't like that they got rid of the gelato for deli sandwiches though.

Costco is like Target in that the store manager has wide latitude to stock whatever sells well locally, from lobster salad in New England to canned Wahoo in Hawaii. If you think about it that's how it should be, and retailers should be budgeting to constantly try new lines of goods every year even at a loss, as that's the only way to find new things that sell. Contrast that to Radio Shack which was so sure they knew what they were doing that they told store managers what to stock and only paid them minimum wage. They weren't paying them to think after all, as thinking was for centralized corporate far from the sales floor. That kind of top-down thinking didn't work for Hillary's campaign either, or any socialized economy. It's magical thinking to believe it would've worked if they only had a smarter head honcho--nobody is smarter than the market, and nobody is closer to the pulse of the market than the grunts on the ground.

Cattle Drive Chili is "distributed by" Hanover Foods of PA and made by Castleberry's Food Co of GA so is still around, even on Amazon. The Costcos around here only seem to stock the 6-packs once a year, and there was a big recall for botulism in 2007.
 
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Re: End of an E®A

Mon Jul 03, 2017 10:31 pm

I don't like NY style but I could see how you'd expect it where you are.

Want to read about truly awful pizza? Look up St. Louis style. Basically processed cheese and crackers.
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just brew it!
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Re: End of an E®A

Tue Jul 04, 2017 5:04 am

bfg-9000 wrote:
Costco is like Target in that the store manager has wide latitude to stock whatever sells well locally, from lobster salad in New England to canned Wahoo in Hawaii. If you think about it that's how it should be, and retailers should be budgeting to constantly try new lines of goods every year even at a loss, as that's the only way to find new things that sell.

Our local one tried replacing about half an aisle of wine in their liquor section with bombers of craft beer (including stuff from small local breweries). The experiment only lasted about a year, much to my disappointment. I asked why they stopped doing it, and the guy in the liquor department said they were only moving about $1,000 worth of it a week, so they switched it all back to wine because "we'd rather sell an $18 bottle of wine than a $6 bottle of beer". Oh well, hard to argue with that.

The area also has a sizable Asian population, and the Costco regularly stocks stuff like seaweed salad and kimchi. The seaweed salad is good. I haven't tried their kimchi because -- while I love kimchi -- a half-gallon jug of the stuff is a bit much! :lol:

bfg-9000 wrote:
Cattle Drive Chili is "distributed by" Hanover Foods of PA and made by Castleberry's Food Co of GA so is still around, even on Amazon. The Costcos around here only seem to stock the 6-packs once a year, and there was a big recall for botulism in 2007.

I prefer the crunchy calculator style over the botulism style.

derFunkenstein wrote:
I don't like NY style but I could see how you'd expect it where you are.

Want to read about truly awful pizza? Look up St. Louis style. Basically processed cheese and crackers.

There was a bar near campus when I was in college that used to serve pizza like that. I never understood the attraction. Especially when there were two local chains with fantastic Chicago-style pizza (sorry, Ned).
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Vhalidictes
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Jul 06, 2017 12:33 pm

just brew it! wrote:
There was a bar near campus when I was in college that used to serve pizza like that. I never understood the attraction. Especially when there were two local chains with fantastic Chicago-style pizza (sorry, Ned).


Chicago-style pies are fantastic food and I love them. But they're just not "pizza". I grew up outside Philadelphia so that's probably why I feel that way.
 
Hawkwing74
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Re: End of an E®A

Wed Nov 08, 2017 11:38 am

More bad news for Sears and Kmart.

The one that's been in my parents' neighborhood for like 30 years is closing.

No Sears profit since 2010.
The company expects to lose $525 million to $595 million this quarter, which would be an improvement from last year.


http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/08/investi ... index.html
 
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Re: End of an E®A

Wed Nov 08, 2017 11:49 am

Hawkwing, Sears/K-Mart are already dead, they just haven't stopped moving yet. IIRC it was simple asset-stripping by a holding company, but they would be in trouble in the current environment even without that.

Physical stores that aren't low-end, high-end, or super-specialized (and I have doubts about that last category) are going away in the short-term.
 
just brew it!
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Re: End of an E®A

Wed Nov 08, 2017 12:28 pm

You know things are bad when losing half a billion dollars is "an improvement".
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Re: End of an E®A

Wed Nov 08, 2017 1:40 pm

The Sears Black Friday flyer has all the prices in "Weekly payments". Who in their right mind would finance something from a company that is likely to go out of business soon. Then again, maybe you wouldn't have to pay off the balance if they go bankrupt?
 
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Re: End of an E®A

Wed Nov 08, 2017 1:46 pm

Usacomp2k3 wrote:
The Sears Black Friday flyer has all the prices in "Weekly payments". Who in their right mind would finance something from a company that is likely to go out of business soon. Then again, maybe you wouldn't have to pay off the balance if they go bankrupt?

I would be more worried about the debt, including unpaid credit balances, being sold to a new holding company with no interest in customer service or business reputation. Lost payments, heavy handed collection agencies...
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Re: End of an E®A

Wed Nov 08, 2017 11:12 pm

Vhalidictes wrote:
Hawkwing, Sears/K-Mart are already dead, they just haven't stopped moving yet. IIRC it was simple asset-stripping by a holding company, but they would be in trouble in the current environment even without that.

Well, you're not wrong. I buy a couple of things from Sears so their passing will be noticed, but the writing's on the wall. Like a lot of industries, including my own, there's a race to the bottom (Walmart, Amazon, etc.) and a race to the top (luxury goods, local/boutiques, etc.) and Sears fits into neither. Is what it is.
 
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 5:32 am

The future of physical retail is called: Good luck if you have nothing to do with cheap food, recreational drugs, healthcare, or an Apple Store.

BTW I always liked the term about how IKEA is an eatery that happens to sell furniture.
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 7:27 am

I haven't shopped at a Sears B&M store in several years. The last time I set foot in one it was weird. Lots of empty shelves, half of the lights off (presumably to save electricity... it was like ever other fixture, not random dead fluorescent tubes), and not an employee in sight (most of the check stands were unmanned). They've been a shambling zombie corpse of a business for some time now.
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MileageMayVary
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 9:37 am

Last time I was in a Radioshack, their background music or radio station was interrupted with news about the Columbine Shooting. So now that massacre and Radioshack are forever linked in my head.
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DancinJack
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 9:47 am

The last time I was in a Sears and a Radioshack were similar experiences. They were both SUPER messy. Crap strewn about everywhere. Piles of discounted items in the isles/corners. (To be totally fair, every Radioshack I have ever been in was always a bit messy and unorganized) It was pretty depressing.

I recently saw the brekaup of Whirlpool and Sears. That's A LOT of products that Sears won't be selling anymore that have probably helped keep them afloat for a while now. I'm not really sad or anything, it's just Sears was a fixture of my childhood.
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The Egg
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 10:59 am

At this point, Sears should be able to do about 15 minutes of basic math and realize that it just isn't gonna happen. What's the point continuing to bleed millions every quarter?
 
notfred
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 12:31 pm

Executive retention bonuses. If they wind up the company now then the poor execs don't get lots of fat retention bonuses and the workforce may still have money in the benefits pot. See Sears Canada for reference.
 
MileageMayVary
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 3:15 pm

DancinJack wrote:
The last time I was in a Sears and a Radioshack were similar experiences. They were both SUPER messy. Crap strewn about everywhere. Piles of discounted items in the isles/corners. (To be totally fair, every Radioshack I have ever been in was always a bit messy and unorganized) It was pretty depressing.


And somehow Ollies and Biglots are still in business.
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 3:28 pm

MileageMayVary wrote:
DancinJack wrote:
The last time I was in a Sears and a Radioshack were similar experiences. They were both SUPER messy. Crap strewn about everywhere. Piles of discounted items in the isles/corners. (To be totally fair, every Radioshack I have ever been in was always a bit messy and unorganized) It was pretty depressing.


And somehow Ollies and Biglots are still in business.

Stores like that make no pretensions of offering you anything better than an inner-city Goodwill experience, and price down to match.
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 3:31 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I haven't shopped at a Sears B&M store in several years. The last time I set foot in one it was weird. Lots of empty shelves, half of the lights off (presumably to save electricity... it was like ever other fixture, not random dead fluorescent tubes), and not an employee in sight (most of the check stands were unmanned). They've been a shambling zombie corpse of a business for some time now.
The Sears here is vibrant and kicking. Its a major anchor for the only mall in the area.
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MileageMayVary
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Re: End of an E®A

Thu Nov 09, 2017 5:07 pm

ludi wrote:
MileageMayVary wrote:
Stores like that make no pretensions of offering you anything better than an inner-city Goodwill experience, and price down to match.


Yeah, they are pretentionless but their prices are the same as Walmart and the like. /shrug
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