Big Box Demise -- January 4, 2017

Rigzone blog: what was the biggest oil and/or gas industry surprise of 2016? This is pretty cool. Rigzone's top surprise, or top story, was the very same one I had. These were the stories listed.

• without question, the election of Donald Trump as president was the #1 energy story for the oil and gas sector in 2016
• disintegration of the highly anticipated HAL-BHI deal was unexpected by some analysts
• the somewhat surprising BHI deal with GE as the response to the failed HAL-BHI
• one analyst surprised that major oil companies did not take advantage of low oil prices to make big acreage buys (the majors were lucky to survive; buying more acreage was hardly an option)

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Will The Parade Be The Next To Go?

Over at "the Big Stories," I have a section called "the Doomsday Chronicles." And there I track "the demise of the Big Box store" which just coincidentally began with the Obama presidency. I say all that to note this article over at MarketWatch:

Macy's and Kohl's [shares] plunge after weak holiday sales. Macy's said it will slash more than 10,000 jobs -- ten thousand -- and detailed plans to close dozens of stores after another holiday season of weak sales, providing more evidence (as if more evidence was needed) that department stores have lost their once-central place in American retailing.

The story is also over at The New York Times.

The announcement on Wednesday continued a trend for Macy’s, which announced last January that it was eliminating about 4,500 jobs in a major restructuring. Then, too, it said slumping holiday season sales had hurt its bottom line.

The company, which now has 730 stores, announced in August that it would close 100 of them. On Wednesday, it identified 68 stores to be closed.

The 158,000-square-foot store in the Douglaston neighborhood of Queens, which opened in 1981, will close. Stores at the Marketplace Mall in Rochester; at the Oakdale Mall in Johnson City, N.Y., near Binghamton; and at the Preakness Shopping Center in Wayne, N.J., will close.

Of the 68, three were closed by the middle of 2016, 63 will close in the spring and two will be closed by the middle of 2017. Three other locations were sold or are to be sold. The company said it planned to close about 30 other stores over the next few years.

Cramer has something he calls FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). FANGS (adding Starbucks) would also work.  FANGS might be better; FANG could be confused with the ticker symbol for Diamondback Energy.