I am looking for fabric right now and am terribly frustrated not to have anywhere but limited quilting shops available. Online is not an answer, because you can't handle the fabric for weight, exact color, and stretchiness.
JoAnn drove all the medium-sized fabric stores out and left us with nothing.
The lack of customer density over time drove out all the fabric stores - medium sized or not.
At-home sewing has been declining since I've been alive, and it was just barely hanging on when I was a kid. The demographics simply cannot support these stores in most locations outside of hyper-dense cities.
Not to mention the folks who shop for fabric tend to be some of the most cost-conscious consumers around. They are more or less the prototype of a customer who will go to a B&M store and then price match on-line,.
I'm honestly surprised even Jo-anne survived as long as it did.
Maybe they don't need to record the conversation at all -- maybe they interpret on the fly and just preserve observation notes (likely to need tires and a birthday gift for 15 year old male).
Absolutely you can make customer service a much better experience for callers!
Here is how . . . .
listen very closely now . . . .
Hire and retain many more human workers. Train them well, treat them well, and pay them well. Give them the resources, autonomy, and time they need to solve problems.
>> shouldn't we see non-PE companies flourish in competition?
It's seldom clear to patrons WHY things have changed. People get stuck in their habits and are hesitant to start somewhere new, particularly with things like medical services. My mom wouldn't recognize PE as the source of a problem at her doctor, dentist, vet or mechanic.
It's a climate and biodiversity concern: overproduction wastes farmland that could be, or used to be, wild. The energy put into food transport and storage was used for nothing. Wasted produce rots, giving off methane, and wasted meat or dairy represents double waste, as the animals were raised on crops.
Land would not be wild if it wasn't producing crop X. That land is put into productive use because it has been bought and sold to be put into productive use. If its not a field of cattle its a field of soy. If its not a field of soy its a junk yard. If its not a junk yard the owners are desperately trying to get a housing development or an amazon warehouse built, etc. No land owner in this country buys land content to let it sit wild generating no money and incurring costs, unless they are rich as hell and don't want neighbors nearby. If you want more land set aside to be wild, it comes from establishing preserves, not changing how one particular land using industry works. That's just cutting off one snake off the head of medusa, there are dozens left you haven't cut, and rest assured two more will take its place.
The “acting responsibly” part costs money in labor, if you apply it to the parts of the supply chain that really matter. This is just another way of arriving at “raise food prices”.
It has to have some cost or we’d already do it. Right?
Recovering waste in production and transportation is labor costs. If it were cost-effective, they’d already do it. Recovering waste at the grocery stores costs labor and/or loss of sales in excess of the cost of the risk of waste. Same at restaurants. Again, if it wouldn’t cost them more to avoid that waste, they already would.
Admittedly, at home, it’s mostly a time cost, but good luck convincing people to spend even a couple more hours a week in the kitchen and meal planning and pantry organizing to save small amounts of money (and really cutting home food waste takes a lot more than a couple hours a week)
There are zillions of good, used, reusable bags and cups already made, emissions and other pollution already committed, available at thrift stores and garage sales.
We have the sole printer (laser) in our extended family, so we wind up printing a lot of shipping labels, tax documents and recipes. Occasionally handouts or flyers for something, map excerpts or directions for a trip where phone signal may be iffy.
They do nest in the cracks between the shelf and the wall, under shelf paper, and even between the pages of cookbooks.
We have had some moderate success with the traps, plus storing big bags of rice and flour in picnic coolers and everything else in airtight containers, but they have to be really airtight -- those little buggers can get under the lid of a mason jar or the tops of a canister set. What happens now is like a lesson in public health and contagion: one container will occasionally get a mess of webs and moths, but the scope is limited.
JoAnn drove all the medium-sized fabric stores out and left us with nothing.
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