Bankruptcies like Bed Bath & Beyond might become more common with pandemic spending over with, Steve Dennis, a retail consultant, said on a recent podcast.
Lindsey Nicholson/Getty Images
Some retail stores will face a reckoning as pandemic spending wanes, consultant Steve Dennis said.
Stores like Bed Bath & Beyond are an “unremarkable middle,” Dennis said on the Remarkable Retail podcast.
Dollar General, T.J. Maxx, and other value-focused chains are likely to take their places in malls.
Expect more store closures and bankruptcies like what happened to Bed Bath & Beyond this year.
That’s a prediction from Steve Dennis, a retail consultant, former Sears executive, and co-host of the Remarkable Retail podcast with Michael LeBlanc.
For over a decade, stores like Sears,JCPenney,RadioShack, and others have closed or shuttered entirely due to competition from online rivals like Amazon and the decline of the middle class. Retail experts, journalists, and others have called the phenomenon the “Retail Apocalypse,” pointing to the empty storefronts that the closures have left behind, particularly at shopping malls.
The loss of middle-market retailers reflects the growing disparity between rich and poor in the US. The wealth gap between the wealthiest families in the US and the poorest more than doubled between 1989 and 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. Fewer middle-income consumers mean a shrinking shopper base for retailers that historically catered to the middle class, Retail Dive reported in 2019.
“The apocalyptic part is really about the collapse of the unremarkable middle,” Dennis said on the podcast. “It’s the poorly-positioned real estate, or the poorly-positioned retailers.” Consumers have lots of choices when deciding where to shop, from dollar stores to DTC brands, Dennis said. That’s left department stores and other retailers that once served broad swaths of the middle class in a tough place.
Some of those retailers got a reprieve from their troubles during the pandemic, Dennis said. Bed Bath & Beyond, for instance, benefited as consumers spent more time at home and bought kitchen appliances, furniture, and other goods.
But consumers have spent months shifting money toward food and consumables from discretionary purchases like clothing. That’s putting new pressure on the “unremarkable middle,” Dennis said.
“If you’re one of these retailers that’s stuck in the middle, à la Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl’s, et cetera, your life is not getting any easier,” he said.
“Economic pressure is going to reveal more fragility on the part of many retailers,” Dennis added.
Many of the retailers likely to take their places are focused on giving consumers value for their money, NPR’s Marketplace reported in April. In the last few years, stores like David’s Bridal and Bed Bath & Beyond, which Marketplace called “the declining retail middle class,” have been replaced by Dollar General, Dollar Tree, T.J. Maxx, and Marshalls.
The decline of the retail middle class, and specifically stores like Bed Bath & Beyond, could be a gain for brands like Amazon, Target, and Walmart, as consumers search for value, Insider previously reported.
“The U.S. consumer has only so many dollars to spend, and if they’re gonna go spend it, they want to get as much bang for their buck as they can,” Naveen Jaggi, president of Americas at real estate services company JLL, told Marketplace.
At the same time, luxury retailers like Gucci and Hermes continue to attract affluent customers, who have continued to make big purchases even as inflation remains high.
The Intercept
From a revolutionary socialist perspective, this article shows how the United States is profiting from the sale of weapons to countries around the world, including some of the most oppressive regimes. The US government is using these weapons sales to increase its own power and influence while also helping to maintain the status quo of inequality and oppressive regimes overseas. The US is doing this despite the fact that these weapons are often used to oppress people and cause human rights violations. Ultimately, this shows how the US government is complicit
#imperialism,#warcrimes
To Imagine Is Human: An Evolutionary History
barry
Fri, 02/24/2023 – 19:34
If 2022 offered a narrow escape and a measure of redemption, the New Year is the moment to seize America’s future
The behavior of retail investors is a good contrarian indicator.
Midway through yesterday’s Supreme Court oral argument in Moore v. Harper,the case concerning the “independent state legislature” theory, Justice Elena Kagan took a moment to consider the stakes. “This is a theory with big consequences,” she noted.
Kagan’s comment was a dry bit of understatement. Ever since the Supreme Court first agreed to hear the case, Moore has drawn alarm from across the political spectrum, with liberal activists and grandees of the conservative legal movement alike condemning the independent state legislature theory as a threat to American democracy.
Making a firm prediction on how the Court might rule in Moore based on oral argument alone would be a mistake: Legal scholars and reporters tend to refer to the practice of guessing how the justices will vote following an argument as “reading the tea leaves,” and as the metaphor suggests, this method of prediction isn’t particularly precise. That said, few justices seemed interested in adopting the more aggressive variations of the independent state legislature theory that could throw American elections into chaos. But the real test will be in just how thinly—to paraphrase another comment of Kagan’s in a recent case—the Court decides to slice the bologna.
The independent state legislature theory is frustratingly difficult to understand—which is one of the reasonsMoore has caused such alarm. In essence, proponents of the theory argue that the Constitution grants state legislatures an unusual degree of nearly unchecked power to control how states administer federal elections.
How much power, and how unchecked, depends on what variation of the theory you adopt. In the most aggressive version, state legislatures might be unconstrained even by state constitutions—stripping away constitutional protections for voting rights or against gerrymandering. Or perhaps state courts and election officials would be limited in their ability to interpret laws passed by the state legislature or engage in the discretionary decision making necessary to smoothly run an election. The theory would provide a more active role for federal courts, which would be empowered to weigh in on whether state courts and officials had overstepped the boundaries placed by the Constitution on state legislative power.
Opponents of the theory have warned that this argument, if adopted by the Supreme Court, could generate chaos in state election administration, a flood of litigation in the federal courts by candidates seeking to gain electoral advantage, and a resulting decline in trust by Americans watching the election system flail. Neal Katyal, the lawyer representing one group of litigants opposing the theory in Moore,used dramatic phrasing to describe the potential fallout: The independent state legislature theory, he warned, could have a wide “blast radius.”
Over the course of the lengthy, almost three-hour argument, the justices grappled with how best to interpret the relevant constitutional language. The three liberal justices were clearly skeptical of, and at times outright hostile to, the theory. In one unusually sharp exchange, Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed exasperated with efforts by David Thompson, the lawyer representing the Republican North Carolina state legislators who promote the theory, to scrape together historical support for his arguments. “If you rewrite history,” she told him, “it’s easy to do.”
But even conservative justices who had previously voiced some sympathy with the independent state legislature theory seemed frustrated with Thompson’s insistence on making aggressive arguments for legislative power instead of offering more measured interpretations. The real intellectual energy of the argument focused on just how the Court might sketch a narrower vision of the independent state legislature theory that could provide some level of increased freedom for legislatures without fully unleashing state lawmakers to do their worst. Conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, seemed notably interested in this approach.
This is a welcome sign for Court-watchers concerned about a unified conservative bloc backing the North Carolina legislators’ approach. It would mean avoiding the total election chaos forecasted by scholars apprehensive about the more extreme variations of the theory. It would also, importantly, provide no support for rogue state legislatures seeking to justify an effort to overturn the results of the 2024 election—the nightmare scenario that has worried many commentators on Moore.
But just what would a narrower version of the independent state legislature theory look like? It’s not clear, and the justices seemed dissatisfied with the options presented to them. Any standard will need to be defined enough to provide guidance to the state judges who may now be looking over their shoulders at the federal courts newly empowered to second-guess their interpretation of state election law. And enterprising litigants may still be able to make use of a more constrained independent state legislature theory to cause chaos in the courts—a particularly concerning prospect given a federal judiciary steering sharply to the right. Several times during oral argument, Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether state courts could be trusted to rule without federal judicial oversight on tricky questions that spoke directly to the integrity of democratic self-determination. The idea that the public might not trust the Supreme Court, either, didn’t seem to occur to him.
Amanda Northrop/Vox
Sealing felony records is integral to a bill sitting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.
Encounters with the criminal justice system, no matter how long ago or for what reason, can ruin a person’s life. California is on the verge of an ambitious attempt to change that.
An estimated 70 million to 100 million Americans have a criminal record, a history with law enforcement that turns up on background checks and sometimes Google searches. Applicants with criminal records can be half as likely as those without them to get a callback or job offer. Nearly 9 in 10 employers use criminal background checks; so do 4 in 5 landlords, and 3 in 5 colleges and universities. These practical realities make it harder to successfully reintegrate into society, in what researchers call “collateral consequences” of mass incarceration.
Most states have laws allowing for some form of criminal record clearing. Eligible individuals — generally those with no convictions, or who were convicted of a low-level offense — are typically required to petition a judge or state agency for clearance. Most don’t, whether because ofthe cost, complexity, or simply from lack of information. One University of Michigan study published in 2019 found over 90 percent of those eligible didn’t apply.
As a result, the “Clean Slate” movement was born — a recentpush by criminal justice reformers to automatically clear,orseal from public view, records for eligible offenses.
Pennsylvania was the first state to enact automatic record clearing in 2018, followed by Utah, California, Michigan, Virginia, Delaware, and Colorado. Michigan’s law — passed in 2020 — was the first state to automatically clear some prior felony offenses.
A new bill, SB 731, recently passed by the California legislature and now sitting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, would go further.
If signed, SB 731 would significantly expand automatic sealing eligibility for people who served time in prison. And while people with violent, serious felony records would not be offered the automatic “clean slate,” they could, for the first time, petition to have their records sealed. Virtually all ex-offenders, except registered sex offenders, would now be eligible for relief.
“Clean slate automates the current process, but what we said is, the current process sucks,” said Jay Jordan, CEO at Alliance for Safety and Justice, the criminal justice group that has led the charge for SB 731. Jordan said they’ve been focused on making the petition process easier for individuals with records, so that everyone could have their fair day in court.
Two decades ago Jordan was sentenced to prison for a gun robbery charge. “I did eight years in prison and when I got out at 26 and tried to navigate the world, I realized I couldn’t,” he told Vox. He was rejected from various jobs and he and his wife are still facing barriers to adopting a child. “I’ve dedicated my life to trying to change this,” he said. “If I can get free, then everyone else can get free.”
How SB 731 would work
The bill’s author, state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, wanted to help ex-offenders have an easier time transitioning out of prison. “About 75 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals are still unemployed after a year of their release,” Durazo told the Los Angeles Times. “So something’s wrong there. We expect them to get back on their feet, but we’re not allowing them the resources to get jobs and [have] careers.”
Under SB 731, while landlords and most employers would not be able to view expunged records, public and private schools would still be able to review them during job background checks. Law enforcement, courts, and the state justice department would also still have access to the sealed records, and individuals would be required to disclose their criminal history if asked about it when applying to serve in a public office, among other exceptions. And the law would not apply to sex offenders.
“This is not an über-progressive bill,” acknowledged Jordan. “We worked heavily with folks who don’t necessarily share our vision, the licensing agencies, the DOJ, it went through the rings of fire. But because of that, we’ve got the ‘mod squad’ on board,” he said, referring to the more centrist lawmakers in the state legislature.
If signed into law, record relief would become available for most defendants convicted of a felony on or after January 1, 2005, if they had completed their sentence and any remaining parole and probation, and had not been convicted of a new felony offense for four years. Advocates originally wanted records sealed after two years, but that version failed to clear the state assembly a year ago.
Californians for Safety and Justice estimates at least 250,000 people would be eligible for automatic record sealing under SB 731, and possibly as many as 400,000. Will Matthews, a spokesperson for the group, told Vox they believe at least 1 million more individuals would gain the right to petition courts for record clearance.
What we know — and don’t know — about record clearing’s effects
Criminal justice researchers caution that even if automated record clearing expands to millions more people nationwide, it might not inevitably make it easier for people with criminal records to find jobs or places to live. While some research is in the works, not much is yet known about how these record-clearing policies work in practice.
Beginning in 2004, some criminal justice reformers pushed to pass“ban the box” policies, a bipartisan reform that effectively barred employers from asking about a job applicant’s criminal history until at least after an interview. The majority of states ultimately did it for public-sector employment and at least 12 did so for private employers as well.
But the success came with some unintended consequences. Research published in 2016 found employers were actually more likely to discriminate based on race following the passage of “ban the box” policies, thus increasing racial disparities in job interviews. More recent research suggests the reforms have done little to increase employment for ex-offenders in the private sector.
Last month, three California academics published a new analysis showing that the eligibility criteria for automatic record clearing can also exacerbate racial disparities. California’s record clearing laws — passed in 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2021 — have disproportionately benefited white Californians over Black Californians, the scholars found. “It is easy to see how racial disparities in criminal record relief might emerge, as a range of discretionary decisions by criminal justice actors from the time of arrest through to sentence completion can affect subsequent eligibility,” they wrote.
“Policies don’t start from nowhere,” Amy Lerman,one of the study’s co-authors, told Vox. “We know that Black Americans have historically been much more likely to live in heavily policed neighborhoods, to be stopped and questioned by police, and to be sentenced to prison or jail. That means when you pass a law that limits criminal record clearance to only people who have committed some types of crimes, or who have some types of criminal records, it is going to have a different impact across racial groups.”
SB 731 would be an improvement over the status quo, the California scholars told Vox, but racial disparities would likely persist until offenses classified as serious or violent, such as robbery, are included for automaticeligibility. They pointed to empirical research published in 2009 that found among people arrested at age 18, the risk that they would be arrested again eventually declined to match people of the same age who had not been arrested. It took7.7 years after a robbery arrest, 3.8 years after a burglary arrest, and 4.3 years after an aggravated assault arrest.
The impact of SB 731 would also likely come down to implementation. New notification systems may be needed so that eligible candidates become aware of their new rights; also needed are clear agency guidelines regarding missing data and timely communication between state agencies and commercial background companies.
Data collection and quality have been an issue for criminal justice reformers in the past, and the challenges are exacerbated by the rise of digitized records online. Every year, digital records of over 10 million arrests, 4.5 million mug shots, and 14.7 million court proceedings are digitally released nationwide. Often, outdated or false paper trails create additional barriers for those looking to seal their records.
Tiffany Lewis, a San Francisco-based consultant who advises tech employees on their job applications, predicted that SB 731 would do little to remove the kind of criminal information an employer routinely finds online. Private companies also aggregate, scrape, and share criminal record data. To prevent this, Sarah Esther Lageson, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University-Newark, said states need to issue stronger regulatory standards and limit employer and landlord uses of unregulated background checks.
Lageson told Vox that the best thing states could do is centralize their criminal record disclosure policies. “For instance,” she said, “police departments might disclose pre-conviction mug shots, while courts release a different set of criminal case information online, while the office in charge of releasing rap sheets might only disclose convictions from seven years ago.”
Such disclosure patchworks can cause harm and undermine automatic record-sealing efforts. “States might also consider ending the bulk release of pre-conviction records altogether, reserving the release of some mug shots and arrest or charging information on a case-by-case basis or through more traditional transparency law requests,” she said.
There’s new federal momentum for record relief
While there’s always a risk with criminal justice reform that advocates will pass incremental measures that leave too many behind, early experience with clean slate policies suggest activists are not looking at passing record-clearing legislation as a one-and-done activity.
California is not the only state pushing to expand eligibility from its initial reforms. Following the passage of Pennsylvania’s clean slate bill in 2018, a provision requiring payment of fines and fees for clearance emerged as a major barrier to relief. One analysis found that half of otherwise eligible misdemeanor convictions statewide and 75 percent of otherwise eligible misdemeanor convictions in Philadelphia would be disqualified due to relatively small amounts of outstanding debt. Two years later activists succeeded in removing the fines and fees requirement in Pennsylvania.
On the federal level, two bipartisan bills to aid automatic record clearing have alsopicked up momentum and are scheduled for their first House Judiciary Committee markups later this month. One bill, the Clean Slate Act, would automatically seal federal arrest records for individuals who weren’t convicted, and records for individuals convicted of low-level, nonviolent drug offenses after successfully completing their sentence.
A second bill, the Fresh Start Act, would create a federal grant program to help states build the infrastructure necessary to implement automatic record clearing. President Joe Biden had floated this latter idea while on the campaign trail in 2020.
“Historic levels of bipartisan momentum have continued to trickle up from the states to Congress,” said Rebecca Vallas, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who helped develop the clean slate model.
For now, Jordan and other advocates in California remain optimistic that Newsom will sign SB 731 into law, even though the governor vetoed a bill last month to establish new supervised drug-injection sites. With rumors of presidential ambitions, some critics believe Newsom ducked signing the bill out of fear it would be used against him on a national campaign trail. A spokesperson for the governor, Omar Rodriguez, declined to comment on SB 731, but said “the bill will be evaluated on its merits.”
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also reportedly asked Biden what he’s “done about Shireen Abu Akleh,” the Palestinian-American journalist killed by Israeli forces.
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An economic analysis finds that the actual cost of car ownership is vastly underestimated
