Now, instead of purchasing a single $3 yarn skein in the color you need at Joann, you can purchase a rainbow of 62 yarns skeins for $35 from Amazon! sigh
I remember when this happened to RadioShack. I went from being able to purchase just the resistor I needed to a $15 pack of 1,000 resistors I'll never use.
I'm not religious, but if Pope Francis survives, then perhaps we can convince him to add profligacy to the list of deadly sins.
One of the reasons cited in their bankruptcy is that they weren't able to keep yarn and hobby materials in stock, diminishing their utility as a one stop physical stock for hobbyists.
My wife was bummed when I told her about it, but I also recall going several times where they were stocked out of many items, so I kind of get it. Hard to justify a 30/60 minute trip if there is a good chance you wind up empty handeded
Going on a rampage against in-store inventory is a classic PE retail move.
In-store inventory is expensive, subject to shrinkage, etc. So by the spreadsheet, less inventory looks good. But of course, if it's not in-stock when your customer shows up, that's a wasted trip. Only has to happen a few times before your customers quit showing up altogether.
> I went from being able to purchase just the resistor I needed to a $15 pack of 1,000 resistors I'll never use
The last time I bought resistors from Radio Shack, which was well over a decade ago, they were $1 a piece. A piece! While I get your sentiment, you can buy resistors in packs of 100 for roughly the same price you used to get 5 for.
But what if you don't need 100 resistors? If I want an oddball resistor size, it may be for just one project/experiment. Now I have to store the remaining 99 somewhere or throw them away. I'd rather pay $1 for one resistor than $15 for 100.
Regarding RadioShack, there are a wide number of non-amazon alternatives if you are willing to move away from prime.
I find that professional websites like McMaster, Grainger, and Digikey do everything I've wanted amazon to do for years. They have excellent search, organized part catalogs, spec sheets, CAD, and no counterfeits.
I checked and Digikey sells most individual resistors singles for $0.10ea, and $0.004ea for 5,000 ($20).
I live in a midwestern city of 50k. The only alternative we have is Hobby Lobby. I can't say I loved the selection available at Joann's, but at least we had something.
Unfortunately not all of us live in dense urban centers that can support boutique craft stores.
My husband crochets, and the problem with most of the local yarn stores is that a lot of them cater to more "boutique" yarn. It's hard to find cheap, standard yarn in a variety of colors for him.
We're an "Amazon family" as much as the next and my wife still went/goes to Joann on a regular basis to purchase material for various craft/sewing projects. I can't imagine buying fabric online considering how "feel' is an important characteristic.
Update: I told her this news and she basically said that every time she was in there, it was a ghost town. I guess we're the outliers ¯\(ツ)/¯
I really miss our local Fry's: my electronics knowledge is basically zero, and it was educational to explore the hardware aisles and look at the individual components.
A lot of places online you can order "samples" for a few bucks. If you like the sample, order a few yards.
But just in general, this suggests to me more of a sign of the public increasingly turning toward passive or, if you will, packaged entertainment. Does anyone still build plastic models, fly RC airplanes, get together for card games, or bowl?
Maybe though someone in my neighborhood will start up a doom-scrolling league that the wife and I can join. And there's always the watercooler where we can suggest to others that they watch some streaming shows we saw that they've never heard of.
I was recently working on an upholstery project and I agree, Joann's selection was excellent.
But I think part of the reality is that most customers, even sewing customers, don't stop and consider the "feel" of fabric. If you look at what the median sewing machine user is doing, it's probably cranking out a tacky quilt made from cheap polyester fabrics. (Certainly seems to be a favorite activity in my extended family).
And honestly, for all the floorspace dedicated to sewing and crafting materials, I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of their sales these days was coming from decorations and art supplies for kids.
I miss RadioShack and the electronics section. I sometimes go to Micro Center but it is not the same. Digikey has been my catalog option since the 90s.
Love all the folks on here asserting that there’s no market for craft supplies. The market for yarn specifically is actually so large that it supports a huge number of local yarn shops in addition to multiple big box chains. Everywhere I travel, I find more than one local yarn shop, somehow thriving in spite of Joann and its ilk charging considerably less for what you might think was a similar product. (In reality, the yarn sold at local yarn shops is much higher quality.)
This is a huge bummer. A few years ago Joann's seemed like it was doing well. The internet offers a vastly inferior experience if you need to do things like try out fabrics. Either people are crafting less or they are putting up with inferior materials.
One of the big takeaways people need to understand is that inventory costs are eating these businesses alive. To keep a hundred different types of fabric available in hundreds of different stores to sell by the inch is expensive, as is the floor space to do it. On a cost basis you are never going to compete with an online store with one inventory, or a warehouse stores that move products in quantity and don't maintain inventory.
There are plenty of businesses that can and do compete with online, or do both (using their distributed inventory to reduce the time it takes to ship online orders).
But saddling a retail company with tons of debt makes much, much harder; profits that should be going to restock instead go toward financing the debt.
We don't really need to read tea leaves here to figure out the cause of death.
Business School 101: Whether you finance your inventory or pay cash doesn't actually make much difference if it doesn't move. Costco or Walmart or any other retailer that is successful right now also uses credit to acquire inventory. (Costco has $10 billion in rolling debt and Walmart has $60 billion, btw. Both seem to be doing fine.)
And again, the businesses that compete with the internet right now are doing it by keeping their inventory costs in check. They have either moved most of their "selection" to online-only, or they have done away with consistent inventory across stores.
The Joanns stores pulled double duty as their online warehouses. When you put in an online order, you got the stock from whichever one of their 800 stores had it. It was an efficient way to have two bites of the same apple.
The debt was a symptom of a bad management team. The first bankruptcy could have been survivable if they had not taken such a hard line against layoffs. They wanted so much to keep all of their stores and employees, which is a lovely goal but was unfeasible.
Had they cut underperforming stores and reduced headcount, they could have survived.
I know first hand how awful it is to lay people off due to your own mistakes, but I also remember my investors advising me to get to sustainable in one round.
There's no equivilent stores to fill these spaces. local card shop? Pharmacy? clothes? Restaurant? What is succesful anymore in person?
We all know what will happen, as has happened over and over.
Amazon or walmart distribution or fleet service location, OR cleared to make way for a hastily/shoddily put up "luxury apartment complex" made of plastic and plastic+.
Absolutely! There is a PMF for stores selling craft goods to hobbyists.
It's not a business model that can justify a cross national big-box store chain, but it can absolutely support local businesses who can better manage margins.
And this was a major reason why Joann's (and similar big boxes like Toys-r-Us or Borders) couldn't compete.
As others already pointed out, shopping for some types of things like this is just doesn't really work online when you need to feel and judge things with your hands.
I also noticed that lots of online stores have minimum order quantities.
There's another store with a long history that I fear will not survive the ruthless dismantling of the brick and mortar stores: WAWAK Sewing Supplies, they sell buttons, button-hole maker, zippers, D-rings, and probably the largest inventory of German-made threads.
Every time I go into a Joanne's it's more and more like a junk hobby shop, and not a nice one. Aisles are dimly lit, you can't see the merchandise, fabrics are stashed in disorderly piles, marked down things at the front; the people who work there aren't sewists and so can't really answer when to use this thing instead of that thing for a particular application. It's never a nice shopping experience. I would rather they had a third of the inventory, but better quality, and the option of buying stuff to get it delivered there.
I'm sad that we're no longer a maker society, there's so much skills and craft that are being lost, perhaps irrevocably. Seems like anytime I go in search for how to do a thing, the first thing I find is something to buy.
Readit News
I remember when this happened to RadioShack. I went from being able to purchase just the resistor I needed to a $15 pack of 1,000 resistors I'll never use.
I'm not religious, but if Pope Francis survives, then perhaps we can convince him to add profligacy to the list of deadly sins.
My wife was bummed when I told her about it, but I also recall going several times where they were stocked out of many items, so I kind of get it. Hard to justify a 30/60 minute trip if there is a good chance you wind up empty handeded
Going on a rampage against in-store inventory is a classic PE retail move.
In-store inventory is expensive, subject to shrinkage, etc. So by the spreadsheet, less inventory looks good. But of course, if it's not in-stock when your customer shows up, that's a wasted trip. Only has to happen a few times before your customers quit showing up altogether.
The last time I bought resistors from Radio Shack, which was well over a decade ago, they were $1 a piece. A piece! While I get your sentiment, you can buy resistors in packs of 100 for roughly the same price you used to get 5 for.
I find that professional websites like McMaster, Grainger, and Digikey do everything I've wanted amazon to do for years. They have excellent search, organized part catalogs, spec sheets, CAD, and no counterfeits.
I checked and Digikey sells most individual resistors singles for $0.10ea, and $0.004ea for 5,000 ($20).
Unfortunately not all of us live in dense urban centers that can support boutique craft stores.
Update: I told her this news and she basically said that every time she was in there, it was a ghost town. I guess we're the outliers ¯\(ツ)/¯
But just in general, this suggests to me more of a sign of the public increasingly turning toward passive or, if you will, packaged entertainment. Does anyone still build plastic models, fly RC airplanes, get together for card games, or bowl?
Maybe though someone in my neighborhood will start up a doom-scrolling league that the wife and I can join. And there's always the watercooler where we can suggest to others that they watch some streaming shows we saw that they've never heard of.
But I think part of the reality is that most customers, even sewing customers, don't stop and consider the "feel" of fabric. If you look at what the median sewing machine user is doing, it's probably cranking out a tacky quilt made from cheap polyester fabrics. (Certainly seems to be a favorite activity in my extended family).
And honestly, for all the floorspace dedicated to sewing and crafting materials, I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of their sales these days was coming from decorations and art supplies for kids.
Dead Comment
One of the big takeaways people need to understand is that inventory costs are eating these businesses alive. To keep a hundred different types of fabric available in hundreds of different stores to sell by the inch is expensive, as is the floor space to do it. On a cost basis you are never going to compete with an online store with one inventory, or a warehouse stores that move products in quantity and don't maintain inventory.
But saddling a retail company with tons of debt makes much, much harder; profits that should be going to restock instead go toward financing the debt.
We don't really need to read tea leaves here to figure out the cause of death.
And again, the businesses that compete with the internet right now are doing it by keeping their inventory costs in check. They have either moved most of their "selection" to online-only, or they have done away with consistent inventory across stores.
>> Sales fell 4.1% to $539.8 million. Same-store sales also dropped 4.1%, including a jump of 11.5% for e-commerce sales.
Had they cut underperforming stores and reduced headcount, they could have survived.
I know first hand how awful it is to lay people off due to your own mistakes, but I also remember my investors advising me to get to sustainable in one round.
We all know what will happen, as has happened over and over. Amazon or walmart distribution or fleet service location, OR cleared to make way for a hastily/shoddily put up "luxury apartment complex" made of plastic and plastic+.
It's not a business model that can justify a cross national big-box store chain, but it can absolutely support local businesses who can better manage margins.
And this was a major reason why Joann's (and similar big boxes like Toys-r-Us or Borders) couldn't compete.
Guessing too prices for fabric, etc. will be higher.
I also noticed that lots of online stores have minimum order quantities.
Dead Comment
Every time I go into a Joanne's it's more and more like a junk hobby shop, and not a nice one. Aisles are dimly lit, you can't see the merchandise, fabrics are stashed in disorderly piles, marked down things at the front; the people who work there aren't sewists and so can't really answer when to use this thing instead of that thing for a particular application. It's never a nice shopping experience. I would rather they had a third of the inventory, but better quality, and the option of buying stuff to get it delivered there.
I'm sad that we're no longer a maker society, there's so much skills and craft that are being lost, perhaps irrevocably. Seems like anytime I go in search for how to do a thing, the first thing I find is something to buy.
Deleted Comment