2433 Limit Sky’s The.

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I haven’t been in a bookstore in years. Not since the one Megatainment is based on closed, and even then it wasn’t really a bookstore. It was a general media store. It had a dedicated and fairly expansive area for books though. It’s kind of horrifying to me that even a fairly large city can function perfectly well without a book store. Realistically though if you want a book you can just order it. How you find out about the book is an unknown, but you’ll be able to get it easily enough. I miss stores. Malls. Shops dedicated to selling one kind of thing. Fuck, I even miss Sears. Maybe I want to go look at a refrigerator up close. Just look at it, touch it, possibly lick it. On some level that’s just kind of over now, unless you go someplace with more people to support them. It’s my own damn fault on some level though. Most of the time I hate going to stores. I like thinking about a thing and then ordering someone to stick it in a box and send it to me without ever having to look them in their watery eyes. My position seems to be that I miss stores, but also fuck stores. At this point cognitive dissonance is barely even a buzzing in the back of my brain since all of society seems to have given itself over to it…

You know what you could give over to me? Money, for making this comic you possibly love. This comic that you have some level of undetermined emotional attachment to or even possibly seething anger over. Whatever the case may be if you are so inclined please refer to the links above for some options.

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Our family went in, + looked at, + bought- our latest refrigerator, at Lowes.

Yep, I know all about the best physical stores, where you can look at + buy large appliances. “They have darn, good buys”.

I’m Sooooo coooool! :P :D

Went to a Home Depot when my refrigerator broke down. Had to get on of the few they had in stock, or else I was waiting for weeks for a new one. Sure, they had a selection, but they were display only.

I did not get the one I wanted :(

I miss going to stores and looking around and I for sure miss the store that the comic is based on.

I get the conflicted feelings about stores. Besides convenience and cost, one of the reasons I think we’ve moved online, though, is that stores themselves were becoming uninteresting, had been for decades. Fewer and fewer stores had anything to offer besides the same, mass-produced goods as every other, similar store (and therefore Amazon). I remember walking through a mall one day and it really dawned on me what I was passing; corporate clothing store, corporate clothing store, corporate clothing store, corporate food in the food court, corporate beauty supplies, corporate glasses shop, etc. I looked at the directory and tried to see how many places in the mall were something just a little bit different, and there were maybe 5 or 6 (like Spencer’s Gifts, which at least sometimes has something unexpected). Ironically, the outlet mall is better than the popular, cool mall–I bought a friend a poncho made of Alpaca hair and a lamp with a Turkish, hand-made, colored glass…whatever the thing is called that goes over the bulb when it’s not a shade.

I’m not really complaining or blaming anyone; the affordability of mass production and easy access, and now instant ordering from online, is a massive boon to our standard of living. But it does make it hard to WANT to go to a store, to enjoy the experience, to find something new and different. It does make me wonder though; if physical stores continue to be wiped out, would that lower the cost of buildings enough to, ironically, make niche boutiques and such more affordable and perhaps common? Will we reach a point where a boring store like Best Buy is naught to be found but hippy healing crystal shops and authentic western wear will be easy to track down?

This is how I feel about indoor malls now. Around the turn of the millennium, there were basically two types of stores in those malls – the big corporate owned ones like you mentioned that sold the same stuff in every indoor mall; and the small locally owned business. The problem is that the big corporate stores bought up more and more of the space to increase the costs of renting a space in the City Mall, so that destroyed the small local stores in the malls.

The upside of Sears and several others blowing up is that the price to rent a space in an indoor mall went down. Like to dangerously low levels. Local businesses looking for a place could easily swarm the malls now and bring back the fun to such a place. One mall here was going to sell to someone who was going to knock it down, but then eight local businesses took over and paid enough to prevent the city from practically giving the land away. We now have a comic book store, a board game store and a video game store in the mall that would have never survived there in the early 90s. And now there’s a bar and a retro arcade/trampoline place going in there.

The serious downside is if the corporate stores were the only thing holding up the mall, the entire complex becomes a ghost town. It becomes undesirable for businesses to start up and stay there. The money to maintain the place will drop until it was too decrepit to leave standing. They would demolish those malls, which could in turn lower the housing prices in the area and commercially destroy others. We’ve seen it happen across the river from us. Once they tore down the local mall, the banks and grocery stores around it closed, until it was miles to the next store (instead of walking distance as before). The entire area is literally condemned now – on the news I read how yet another meth bust or meth lab explosion happened in that area.

I guess that was the problem with surrounding commercial centers with more commercial centers surrounded by residential areas. If the stores fail, the supporting commercial property fails. Then the surrounding residential areas lose a major economic advantage which will lead to their gentrification or destruction.

You would think that would lower the rent at a mall, but if the local mall in my town is any indication, mall owners are idiots. As big stores left, the owners started charging HIGHER rent so that they needed less stores to make their profit, instead of encouraging more stores to come in. They are down to like, four or five stores spread across this mall that, without subdividing, has room for like fifty full size stores. It’s freaking madness.

Yeah, sounds like the building owners went the wrong direction. Real estate people know that the only way to bring in new business to your properties is to stick to the supply and demand model.

If you like board games-

There is the site named: board game geek [dot] com.

I think the site’s staff likes to 1) talk about current board games, and the site also tries to 2) make a description [of current + past board games], + how to play them.

This is the homepage of the site-

https://boardgamegeek.com/ ,

and to search for different board games, here’s the page on the site, that separates the games by categories or genres-

https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamecategory .

[I think the site is from The USA.]

Cheers.

I’ve been a member of BGG for like 10 years now. I’m not really active there, but I do use the site to research games that catch my eye, and if I need to find an older game that’s no longer in print (and trade for it).

Nice way to advertise for them, though.

Hey great! I’m glad you found the site, even if I didn’t show it to you. Heh.

Sometimes- I like games + other fun activities- that aren’t on the web, or don’t require electricity or batteries. :)

For a lot of malls that have managed to remain viable, that seems to be a good strategy: offer more niche and local businesses instead of cookie-cutter chain stores. They’ve also turned to alternatives to retail, such as bringing in some desks, etc. to turn vacant units into co-working spaces or even renting former stores to local businesses who need additional office space. It’s a win-win, since adapting an existing building can be a lot cheaper than building from scratch, plus the office workers may provide a little traffic for remaining businesses, especially restaurants/food courts.

Other malls are still shutting down completely, of course. For many that were already on the ropes, the pandemic was the nail in the coffin. But, hey, retailing has gone through plenty off changes in the past. Malls themselves did a lot to replace large downtown department stores, and department stores and mail-order displaced older general stores. Who knows what further changes the future might bring? Continuing improvements to 3-D printing and related technologies could theoretically replace large sectors of retailing, much the way streaming and downloading have replaced much of the traditional music and video market. Instead of going to the store or ordering online, just fill up your home fabricator with some basic feed stock, and then buy (or create!) a template for whatever new thing you need. How cool would that be, especially if the fabricated items could be readily disassembled and recycled?

Long-time reader, first time commenting. A lot of finding out about new books happens on TikTok and Twitter, but like most things on the internet nowadays, it’s a surprisingly closed-off community that you don’t really see unless you’re an active part of it. Also, not sure how much of that will shift with current Twitter happenings, but yeah, there are still plenty of people who share about books, plenty of people who still love to read.
Also, there are many apps connected to libraries and such, which can be incredible for people who forget to return books, or struggle to read but love audiobooks, etc. According to a librarian I know, most libraries have made a big push towards digital, especially since 2020 when fewer people when out.
Personally I struggle with ebooks, but I visit my local used book store maybe once a week. I’m lucky enough to be in a city large enough to have one, at least.

Re: alphabetizing, at my last job we had a nigh-infinite amount of nick-nacks and buttons, and I was almost always the one who volunteered to organize them. I know a lot of folks hate the tediousness of it, and it’s definitely a lot of work, but I think because I’m autistic I find it really relaxing to organize large quantities of things in a logical way. It’s part of the reason I decided to go back to university to study information technology & library science. Having clear organization and giving things structure is… simply very satisfying.
I suspect autism may also be why I don’t comment online very often, but who really knows?

I worked at a bookstore for almost 20 years, and alphabetising was my favourite job to do.
Partly because it meant that there was no other work to do.

In my store the problem was that you could never do very much before being interrupted & people would mess it up on either side of you if they didn’t need any help. I’m not sure why they were buying books because they acted like they couldn’t read.

I guess the brightside is maybe you got to discover new and interesting books?

But the downside is that you might not be able to find the book you were looking for, even though the store actually had it in stock. I suppose it depends on the individual customer just how that balances out.

I’m with you. Stores are great. There are some things I won’t buy online.

Furniture, for example. I will NOT buy a chair or a bed unless I can sit / lay therein. That and I’m a big fella. I want to be sure I can fit before I go risking several hundred dollars on a chair. I have been tempted by massage chairs–the prices are excellent compared to the few places I’ve found them for retail–but I want to sit in it and make sure I can escape its grip.

Televisions, also. I want to see it and hear it. Yes, the label says 1080p, but what’s the refresh rate? Ultra Sammie 980? What’s that? Oh, it MEANS 60 hertz. Why did I have to decode your marketing speak to find out? No, spare me. I’m not going to buy it.

I miss walking around bookstores and reading books for free. Asshole move, but I will not apologize for not buying that new Dilbert collection and laughing for free.

I miss video stores especially. I miss stocking up for a weekend of chain watching, one right after the next.

I miss arcades. I want to play games against people, and see their reactions.

Dammit, I’m getting old….

I miss arcades, too. :D

They were a place that kids, + others under 19, could go + have fun, + hang out at.

You could win some prizes, at places that had skee-ball[tm] machines.

The arcades were/are sort of like casinos for kids. Ha!

[There are some businesses in the USA, that still have some video-game arcades.
You can sometimes find arcades at fun parks. Some arcades are near busy, tourist traps, + are at beach tourist traps, in the USA.] :D

The skeeball machines were fun.

In my small (pop 10,650) NC town we have two new and two used book stores and one that sells used vinyl albums, cassettes, CD’s and Blu-Ray’s. We get a lot of tourists in the summer and fall, but the locals keep them all profitable. I don’t like department stores. I prefer to shop with local businesses.

Hey, Jackie. Was in your part of the world over the weekend. Went with my nephew who drove from Texas to Grand Island Nebraska to pick up a truck he’d found on facebook I think. Owner described as mostly rust-free. When we got there, almost every panel was rusted through somewhere. Would have been a very long, uneventful trip, but he managed to clip the bumper on a pickup in motel lot. So, hundreds of miles, hundreds of dollars in fuel (diesel), and all he has to show is an insurance claim.

I’m from Nebraska. Jackie’s from Kansas.

I mean, it’s hard to tell where one stops and one begins sometimes, but man – not the same. LOL

Had to drive completely across Kansas to get there. Thought that was understood. Thought I was from the middle of nowhere. Did not see a single Walmart for the whole trip.

You must’ve went through the most desolate parts. Even Garden City has a Walmart.

I think that was a requirement for our gps route. I think we drove for an hour before seeing a car more than once (middle of the night, but still).

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