Stupid Suicidal Stores, Part Two

Stores Confront New World of Reduced Shopper Traffic

Retailers got only about half the holiday traffic in 2013 as they did just three years earlier, according to ShopperTrak, which uses a network of 60,000 shopper-counting devices to track visits at malls and large retailers across the country. The data firm tracked declines of 28.2% in 2011, 16.3% in 2012 and 14.6% in 2013.

Boldfaced added by me.

And they’re blaming online shopping instead of their own suicidal shrinking selections.

Why bother to even visit a store when it’s becoming increasingly obvious they’re cutting back on what they carry?

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The Blacklist: What You Missed This Week

Previously here:

The Blacklist

iPad Mini Clones Status Report

For most people, there’s no longer any reason to order one from China.

Nextbook 8 (pictured above)
Archos 79 Platinum
Each feature the Rockchip 3188 CPU and Mali 400 GPU combo with 1GB of RAM and 8GBs of storage. While they have less storage than most Chinese clones, they can basically replace most 3188-based clones from China, such as the Chuwi V88s and ICOO Fatty. Although some Chinese clones feature 2GBs of RAM, for most people that won’t matter.

iPad Mini Clone MSI Primo 81 Now Available In America

Having been available outside the U.S. for several months, the MSI Primo 81 is now available to order at MSI’s American site. Two colors are available: White and Black.

This is a tablet with the Allwinner A31s CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 16GBs of storage. See the full specs at the links.

Its honest AnTuTu X score is in the 12,000 range. This should be fine for web browsing, reading books, playing web video, watching most non-1080p local video files, and most casual games (intense graphics will stutter). It should also do normal PDFs fine, but struggle with Google Books PDFs.

It features USB charging but note that the specs — which are typical for A31s-based tablets — do not include Bluetooth.

MSI has had retail store presence in the past. But it’s unknown if they’ll be able to get this into local stores.