Retail deals with debt (11/15/17)

About retail (from nakedcapitalism.com):

Retail: “Retailers are increasingly charging ‘personalized’ or ‘dynamic’ prices based on your online footprint. They manipulate prices, trying to charge you the max they think you’re willing to pay. You could be sitting right next to someone, looking at the same online product, and be charged more just because of a website you visited” [DuckDuckGo]. “You’re probably familiar with how common this practice is in the airline industry. That’s all thanks to Google’s ITA QPX Software, which provides solutions to airlines to price ‘by market segment, point-of-sale, channel and even user.'”

Retail: “In the U.S., retailers announced more than 3,000 store openings in the first three quarters of this year” [Bloomberg]. “But chains also said 6,800 would close. And this comes when there’s sky-high consumer confidence, unemployment is historically low and the U.S. economy keeps growing. Those are normally all ingredients for a retail boom, yet more chains are filing for bankruptcy and rated distressed than during the financial crisis. That’s caused an increase in the number of delinquent loan payments by malls and shopping centers…. The reason isn’t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share or twenty-somethings spending more on experiences than things. The root cause is that many of these long-standing chains are overloaded with debt—often from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms. There are billions in borrowings on the balance sheets of troubled retailers, and sustaining that load is only going to become harder—even for healthy chains.”

...hmmm, so maybe not the internet vs. bricks-and-mortar!