Friday, January 09, 2015

"Obama Boom": Major Retailers To Shutter Stores, Lay Off Thousands

by JASmius



Five "recovery summers" later, the "Obama Boom" still resides on the side of a milk carton:

After posting holiday shopping sales on the high end of muted expectations....

i.e. They're barely staying in business.

....department store chains J.C. Penney and Macy's head into 2015 with a focus on smaller operations and fewer employees.

J.C. Penney JCP is shuttering thirty-nine underperforming stores and laying off 2,250 workers, while Macy's announced a restructuring that will shift workers from 830 Macy's and Bloomingdale's stores and close fourteen Macy's stores. The moves could cut up to 2,200 employees as the company adapts to shifting consumer tastes and shopping patterns.

i.e. Consumers aren't shopping and they aren't buying.

"Our business is rapidly evolving in response to changes in the way customers are shopping across stores, desktops, tablets and smartphones. We must continue to invest in our business to focus on where the customer is headed — to prepare for what's next," Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren said.

Yeah - the unemployment line.

His comments came the same day the retailer reported a 2.7% rise in same-store November/December sales.

Macy's also announced a new 2016 Macy's store in Los Angeles and a new Bloomingdale's store to open in San Jose by late 2017. The moves come nearly a year after Lundgren announced 2,500 layoffs and five store closures in January 2014.

Growing, prosperous companies aren't closing stores and laying off employees by the thousands.  Period.  Now that can have many different causes - incompetence, stiff domestic and/or overseas competition, automation - but in the Age of The One, can anybody attempt to say with a straight face that public sector-driven "macroeconomic factors" aren't the dominant reason the U.S. economy still lies in ruins, no matter how much wastepaper the Fed churns out and how many happy-face stickers the White House and its media sychophants rain over the desiccated wreckage?  And that mass layoffs aren't precisely what the Regime is incentivizing by relentlessly pushing minimum wage hikes?

Even the best propaganda gets tuned out eventually when people's actual daily lives bear no remote resemblance to the rosy picture a government tries to paint.  That's one reason among many why the Democrat "brand" is moldering in the electoral dumpster, and why O would be better off talking to Bo, as he's the only life form still listening to him.

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