Death is upon some of the most iconic business traditions known in America. The digital grim reaper is sharpening his blade and practicing his death stroke in anticipation that the iconic movie theater and traditional brick and mortar retail stores are headed for collapse. It used to be that drive in movie theaters, movie theaters that showed films outdoors while you're sitting in the car with the radio dialed into the station playing the film you're watching, was the popular date night activity younger folks would enjoy together. Now, rather than buying expensive movie tickets and then paying for overpriced snacks, people are deciding to stream either on Netflix, Amazon Video, or other streaming platforms accessible with high-quality internet access. There are even some platforms, like Kodi, will stream movies completely for free. Although, use caution when downloading software for free content, since there are a lot of fake websites that will install viruses into your computer, making your computer very difficult and expensive to clean. If you insist on downloading software for free content, my recommendation is Kodi because it's a platform that relies on donations, so if anything were to negatively happen on Kodi, it would simply collapse, financially. The digital grim reaper has virtually, no pun intended, destroyed the movie industry as we know it, so our children will view it as something old people used to do. Movie theater chains will be a thing of the past that only millennials will remember when their in the nursing home 60 years from now.
The retail store industry is following in the same footsteps as the movie industry. A decline in traditional retail stores really came down to pricing. Being a kid growing up in the 90s, it used to be the fault of the big department stores as of why small family owned stores were collapsing. However, family owned stores collapsed because department stores were able to sell cheaper goods-manufactured in third world countries that used slave labor. Another important point to keep in mind is that our manufacturing base was offshored in the 80s and 90s, making it so that those same department stores had access to a larger inventory of cheaper goods, thus family owned businesses were unable to compete. Fast forward to today's economy, those same department stores that pushed the mom and pop stores out of business, are now being pushed out of business by the digital grim reaper. Why? Well, because consumers have discovered Amazon and various other online retail stores that offer the same products, but at a cheaper cost than what the traditional department stores can offer, simply by the fact that online retailers have less overhead. Online retailers can keep costs down by not having to pay a plethora of employees, as well as being responsible for maintaining and financing real-estate, limiting their liabilities to just managing an online store. Online retailing is a much cheaper business model than traditional retail stores; therefore, offering consumers more options to either buy or sell locally, including doing business internationally, while cutting out the middle man in the process.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-15/dicks-ceo-retail-industry-panic-mode