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Smartphones, Tablets and EBay Send SkyMall To Chapter 11
alphadogg writes SkyMall, the quirky airline catalog, looks as though it may be grounded before long. Parent company Xhibit has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and seeks to sell its assets. In an SEC filing, Xhibit explains that it has fallen victim to an "intensely competitive" direct marketing retail industry that now includes the likes of eBay and Amazon.com. Smartphones and tablets are largely to blame for SkyMall's downfall, according to the SEC filing. "Historically, the SkyMall catalog was the sole in-flight option for potential purchasers of products to review while traveling. With the increased use of electronic devices on planes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog."
I have never understood why anyone would buy anything from those catalogs? It's not like it's cheap.
nothing of value was lost
It could be they failed because it was mostly overpriced junk that was in the catalog.
are someone else's fault too.
Overpriced crap that no one needed, had nothing to do with this. Failure to change business plans to meet changing markets, had nothing to do with this. It should be noted that Obama is also responsible for not passing legislation forcing people to read their catalog while on planes. So many failures on so many levels, it's really sad that a great 'Murican establishment like Skymall will no longer be with us. Thank 'Murica's God we saved Chevrolet at least.
They relied on a mixture of boredom and left over holiday money.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The boom of internet shopping allowed even the uninformed to discover just what a ripoff most of those items were.
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We put a company in our company, so that we can bankrupt while we bankrupt.
Didn't realize that pathetic thing even existed anymore. Can't honestly say I've seen one in 20 some odd years...
And the fact that you couldn't compare prices at 11,000m up. I forgot that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
OK, I've always wondered who actually has ever bought anything from Skymall. I mean, we've all looked, but who has actually done the deed?
Anyone? Don't be afraid to admit it... come out of the shadows and confess.
Sharper Image. God truly does save the queens. And republicans. Many of whom are. Queens. Secretly. I have seen Ted Cruz in lipstick and lace. Not a pretty sight.
Smartphones, Tablets and EBay had very little to do with the demise of SkyMall. Long before those things ever existed people weren't buying SkyMall's useless, overpriced crap. It's amazing they held on for this long. They must have a parent company with lots of money to waste.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with people shopping on their tablets. It has to do with having something to do, so you don't open the SkyMall catalog. I never ever bought anything out of there anyway because everything was so overpriced, but a lot of people are dumb enough. If they don't even see the catalog, though, their stupidity never generates a sale.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yo dawg, I heard you like shopping ...
I used to read it regularly when flying. This was primarily because reading skymall was free, while buying a magazine at the airport was expensive (and I inevitably would forget to pick one up some place less expensive before going to the airport). While it wasn't exactly bursting at the seams with good deals, there were some things selling at reasonable prices in there. The more novel feature of it was that it was a pretty random selection of products; one page might be garden supplies while the next might be pool toys then power tools then kitchen accessories.
Now did I ever buy anything from it? No. So I am in part responsible for its demise as well.
I'm more concerned about the possibility of this becoming an excuse for the airlines to raise fares yet again. If skymall paid the airlines even $3 per seat to have their catalog in every seat back, the airlines will tell us that losing that contribution will increase the cost of every ticket by at least $20 (expect this to show up as an a la carte fee along with pillows, blankets, snacks, and seat belts).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The business model is well established and works. Captive audience, unable to compare prices, boredom and left over holiday money to burn. Exactly the same one that worked so well at airports, until recently. On holiday consumers tend to be in "high spend" mode too, splashing out on stuff they wouldn't buy at home.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Long before those things ever existed people weren't buying SkyMall's useless, overpriced crap.
Obviously false, since people don't stay in a business for decades just to piss away money.
However, the economy is the worst it's been in 60 years (vis-a-vis age-discounted labor participation rates) and so there's just less of a pool of money to waste.
Skymall took some cream off the top but we're down to whole milk now.
Smartphones might have helped it along, but there are people posting here about reading the catalog for entertainment because they couldn't figure out how to bring a book with them on the airplane. Those people aren't planning ahead on their phones either.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It had nothing to do with a melange of overpriced and useless crap in the pages...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Impulse buying is stupid and has no place in a world with internet. The last time I even picked up a catalog was in the early 2000's before smartphones came around.
As a weekly flyer for the past 12 years, I can tell you with certainty people used to pull out skymall and the airline magazine all the time. I used to read them myself, and I used to see people read them pretty much every flight. Since tablets came out, I don't think I've seen them being read since then.
For people that didn't want to pull out their laptop, or didn't have enough battery, it was some free entertainment. (I never had room in my laptop bag for a book, and wasn't willing to spend the money on a book anyway.)
I used to flip through SkyMall just so I could laugh (or cry) at all the stupid things people invented. I couldn't fathom how someone could invent a speaker in the shape of a rock, and then sell it for 3x the price of a normal outdoor speaker. Then there were the pet accessories, tie racks, and a host of other useless crap.
I guess I wasn't alone - people didn't buy enough of it to keep the company alive.
Now I feel better as an inventor of things that can actually be useful.
- The Sigless Wonder
Why is there airport shopping, despite usually being more expensive than anywhere else except for tax-free? Because you have a trapped audience and once you got them wandering their store and find something they like many people will buy it right there. They won't make a note of it that they should check into buying one of those later. The time in the airport and the airplane seat is already a "sunk cost", spending my time shopping when I'm back on the ground is not. It's not cost efficient, but many have more money than time.
I used to travel a bit on an air plane due to work, the in-flight magazine was usually read cover-to-cover because well, there wasn't much else to do after finishing the newspaper. I don't think I'd read a mail order catalog like this seems to be though, but the "infomercial" travel stories, fashion/art items and such I think hit their target pretty well. I mean, it's not every day I read three pages about what's to see in Stockholm/Düsseldorf/Valencia but I know I have done so on the plane. And I'm not the one for buying overpriced crap, but it got me looking and a few times tempted because it was actually stylish.
These days, I'm on the phone. Went flying twice on Friday for a one-day meeting, didn't even consider looking in the seat pocket. Bring your own entertainment and for longer flights the in-flight entertainment system is actually getting pretty good. At least good enough to fill the dead time, which is exactly what companies like Skymall depended on. Which is why I'd love an autonomous car and don't understand the naysayers, spent 2+ hours today watching traffic. I honestly got better things to do, but since I'm driving I don't have a choice.
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You've got it the wrong way around; he doesn't understand it because he's NOT a moron.
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Upon idly flipping through the inflight magazine, she asks, "So when do we get to the SkyMall?"
Bingo. I don't think it's even so much about lack of ability to compare prices, I think it's like how children, while they eat their breakfast, will read the entire text on the packaging of the cereal box because it's the only option.
Before the ubiquity of portable electronic devices that could hold loads of content, there was an upper limit on how much content a person could bring them, and even then, the person had to have the foresight to plan for it. They had to bring paperback books or magazines of their own, and if they didn't, the only entertainment was the Skymall catalog in the seatback pocket. Read something enough and some random thing starts to seem neat, so they buy it out of boredom.
I suppose they are right about Amazon and the like in the sense that before, it was sometimes difficult to find the things in Skymall through other sellers, as most of them are catalog sellers and unless you knew who they were, you simply couldn't find them. Amazon makes it a lot easier to find part numbers and descriptions, and search engines allow one to find the same product through other catalogs, opening up the available options.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
With their profit margin, they only had to sell what, one or two items a day to break even...?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
I'm more concerned about the possibility of this becoming an excuse for the airlines to raise fares yet again.
This really doesn't make much sense. Looking at any kind of macro trend air travel has never been this cheap.
Delta used to give out newspapers I remember one evening I got one that they hadn't noticed the front page had a story (with photo) of an airplane crash that morning. I turned to the woman next to me and said "This flight is going to be super-safe. After all, the odds of TWO airplanes crashing the same day."
My humor wasn't appreciated by her, or the stewardesses ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The airlines might actually be happy they don't have to deal with it any more. After all, there's the logistics of getting it into every seat, the time wasted picking up copies that have been dumped on the floor, the extra weight to carry around ... my guess is that this magazine was there only because of inertia.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It's not cheap and 99% of it was spurious rich people garbage that anyone with a mind for practicality would pass on.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's a couple years old now, but there was this interesting article in the Atlantic about the connection between SkyMall and the company that acquired it, Xhibit. It points out some very suspicious details related to their financial situations.
there are people posting here about reading the catalog for entertainment because they couldn't figure out how to bring a book with them on the airplane.
No, my problem is that I can easily finish a book while I'm on the airplane. How many am I supposed to bring with me? I can bring an absolute crapload with me in my phone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
entertaining part of air travel from us!
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The internet simply changes the impulse buying method.
Instead of catalogues and shelves full of impulse buy items, we now have recommended purchases which other users bought, the ability to buy things without even taking out your debit/credit card and flash sales.
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SkyMall would have been paying them to have it there or the airlines would be getting a cut of the sales. They'll probably replace it with something worse.
I normally skimmed through them. They always had interesting products. I'd buy some if I was super rich, but I'm not.
Most of the comments here assume people were ordering stuff on SkyMall for themselves. My assumption was always that, like holiday catalogues, the target audience was a gift shopper. Someone older who wants to order a nice gift for someone but can't think of anything their giftee actually needs or doesn't already have. Those shoppers have a lot more choices now.
Gently reply
In two very stressful situations our reptilian brains were exposed to, the only forms of entertainment we were allowed were the mind-numbing airline magazine or skymall. Now that we can use electronic devices in those situations, skymall becomes pointless. Some foreign airlines still require turning off electronic devices during take-off and landing. Those could have make use of skymall but skymall was a lazy business. They didn't expand internationally and didn't tap into the new medium. (people could have shopped for free over wifi)
there are people posting here about reading the catalog for entertainment because they couldn't figure out how to bring a book with them on the airplane.
No, my problem is that I can easily finish a book while I'm on the airplane. How many am I supposed to bring with me? I can bring an absolute crapload with me in my phone.
This...
Before portable devices people would buy a paperback, magazine, etc at the airport news stand (or bring them with them), start reading at the gate, and finish reading on the airplane before landing. People would just look through it because they were bored and had some time before landing.
Now, we can take a library of books, movies, TV programs, music, etc. with us on a Kindle, tablet, etc. Not to mention the in flight movies and satellite TV.
That's got to be a large part of it; they're a waste of space. Imagine a stack of hundreds of those things, turned on their sides. They would occupy a whole seat. With Skymall gone they can compress your knees further into the back of the guy in front of you and cram in an extra row of pig crates.
I don't think it's just that. It's b'cos in the past, since people had nothing better to do, and weren't getting sleep, they killed the time buying stuff from those catalogs. Now, people can actually use electronic items like smartphones, tablets and laptops, even if they don't have an internet connection, and that gives them something to do that doesn't involve spending more money. Ergo, they stop buying stuff from Skymiles.
I always looked through the skymall mag just for the crazy products.
Like the hotdog cooker [two holes for the hot dogs, two slots hotdog buns, appeared to work like a toaster].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Long before those things ever existed people weren't buying SkyMall's useless, overpriced crap.
Obviously false, since people don't stay in a business for decades just to piss away money.
Wasn't that either. It comes as a shock to many N Americans to realise that SkyMall catalogs, like the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog and others, are only available in N America. I, like many visitors, would gaze in amusement on domestic flights at the variety of unbelievable tat (and the occasional jewel) that was only available to N Americans.
There are plenty of suck^H^H^H^Hpotential customers in other countries too, but neither SkyMall nor any of its suppliers are aware of this, so (a) those markets go untapped, and (b) SkyMall dies.
So long, assholes.
Sky Mall: When you get to the gate, and remember too late - you should have brought something to read...
Jonathan Coulton's Sky Mall
SkyMaul has more interesting stuff, and only slightly more ridiculous.
When I want to shop for overpriced stuff I didn't know I needed, what search term would I possibly use on ebay? That's where the logic falls apart. Skymall is failing because their products are stupid and rich people, their customers, don't take their brand name seriously.
" Captive audience, unable to compare prices, boredom and left over holiday money "
And often drunk. That's the only explanation I can think of for anyone paying skymall's silly prices.