➡ The retail industry is struggling, with CVS closing over 900 stores in the past two years and planning to close another 270. A home furnishings chain, At Home, is also preparing for bankruptcy and plans to close all its 270 locations due to financial difficulties. The speaker also discusses how the television industry has changed, with prices dropping significantly over the years. The speaker warns that more retailers are likely to go out of business and advises consultants to ensure they are paid promptly to avoid financial issues.
➡ The text discusses various business and economic issues, including the potential downfall of CVS, Tesla shareholders demanding Elon Musk work in-office, a drop in pending sales, the high cost of filming in California, John Deere’s investment in gasoline-powered machinery, the financial strain of divorce, scrutiny of FICO scores, and the lowering of academic standards in San Francisco. It also mentions a woman finding a large gold nugget and a store chain preparing for bankruptcy.
➡ A large retail store missed its debt payment and tried to restructure its finances, but it’s now preparing for bankruptcy. Despite having a wide variety of items, the store is often empty, suggesting it may be the next retailer to go out of business.

Hi, this is I allegedly welcome back and I’ve got a good one for you today because retail is dead guys. It is absolutely falling apart all around us and there’s a lot to cover on this. Please hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, don’t forget to join our email list, the link is below. Very simple to sign up for that because one’s going out this week. Now, couple things. CVS. Over the course of the last two years, between 2022 and the end of 2024, they closed over 900 locations. 900.

Well, they just announced this week that they’re closing another 270 stores right now. 270 more. Now, they have 4,732 stores right now, so it’s basically just over 5% right now. But again, we don’t need drug stores. I guess we don’t. Yes, we don’t. There’s a full list. If you use the link below, it’ll be the top story. You’ll see all the stores that are getting closed. You know, I want to point out a couple of them in California that are closing. They’re just crime-ridden areas. They’re horrible. And one of them’s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, which again is a flipping war zone.

Okay, so it is just disgusting. I mean, it’s funny. I was having dinner with somebody last week and talking about how romantic San Francisco was and how it used to just be such a great place to go to and walk the streets and everything. You wouldn’t be caught dead doing that now. You would need to be strapped and you know, you need a bodyguard because it’s so dangerous right now. They’ve just let it go. Now, the next one is a store that I have in my own hometown that I’ve never walked into.

And this was, it is a place called At Home. And At Home has 270 locations. And of the 270 locations, they’re gonna be preparing a bankruptcy right now to close all of them right now. And the problem that they have is that they had to borrow money to get through a debt problem that they had. They missed a interest payment on May 15th. They’re freedmen. And they have no money right now. So they missed their debt payment on the 15th. They made a separate deal on the 23rd of the month. And it just doesn’t look good for them.

So again, another chain selling home furnishings. And again, guys, tell me, have you seen any ads for that company? Because I’ve never seen one. Never seen a circular, never seen a commercial, never seen radio, TV, nothing for this place. But it’s owned by one of those big, you know, finance companies that took it over and expanded. And now it’s going down for the count. Bravo, bravo, bravo. You know, we’ll end the video. I’ll end this video going there so we can see the store, me for the first time, and you can see what the hubbub is and why they have no sales.

But, you know, here’s the thing, guys. When you have a down economy and things are turning, that’s, you know, if you know that, you can make money during this time. You can make money when things are not good. My ex-wife’s uncle was, you know, a pseudo, you know, celebrity here in Southern California. And his name was Paul. Paul the king of big screen. I am the king. And this guy started with one store in Harbor, California, and ended up selling $35 million worth of TVs a year. But this is when big screen TVs were three grand.

I mean, I’ll never forget the first flat screen TV. He said, you got to drive over and see it. And it was $10,000 to see that. Now you can buy, you know, I’m looking at 100 inch TV right now, guys. They’re $1,600 right now. It’s insane. A buddy of mine, or he graduated from college in his 40s out of USC, or excuse me, I’m sorry to say that, of Pepperdine. And his wife bought him a $3,500 flat screen TV that was 36 inches. That was his graduation gift for graduating college, which is a great gift.

But I mean, those are $199 bucks now, if it’s not cheaper than that. So the industry’s changed. That guy sold his store to a company that did something really interesting. And they went out to a place called Living Spaces, where they went and the people that bought this put up stores inside of Living Spaces and set up these locations all over the place. And the one thing that this guy told me, and I’m like, how come you don’t have another store? How come you don’t have this? Well, then I’d have to have two mortgage payments, two managers, you know, two sets of sales forces on and on and on and on and on.

I’m telling you guys, buying big screen TVs used to be a big deal during the Super Bowl, Super Bowl weekend, because I drove around as a sales rep around Southern California so much, you could tell me areas in San Diego, you could tell me areas in Los Angeles, the Valley, wherever, and I could get them to his store in La Habra. And I would work his phones, and he paid me great to do this. I would work to sit there and answer the phone one call after another, because he would do, you know, basically a million dollars of, excuse me, he would do two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day in newspaper ads during that time.

It was crazy. He spent all this money on his Super Bowl ads and ended up spending over a million dollars on his ads with radio, TV, and everything else. And it just paid off. He killed it with it. But I would just come on in. This is how you get here. It’s crazy. Now, times certainly changed. You want to buy a TV? They’re free right now. You can buy TVs and get, you know, a free Starbucks basically. It’s nothing right now. So that industry changed. But again, he knew that and he sold it and retired, and he’s since passed away, but he retired knowing that the industry was done.

It was dead. He told me when Vizio came out, the Korean company that made monitors, when they came out with a $99 monitor, it was just a matter of time until this Korean company came out with TVs, and he was 100% right. And how many of us owned Vizio’s TVs in our lifetimes over the course of the last 15 years? A ton of us. So with that being said, it changed the economy completely for him. Another one was, I used to have a marketing group that I would go to. My friend Jeff Moore from high school had every month, and people would get together.

I met some great people. Clint Arthur and all these other different executives and stuff from there. But, including Jeff too, for that matter. But there was a guy who owned a hamburger place. It was a high end hamburger place that we would have the meetings at sometimes. And sure enough, he had to go out and he had to expand. He did $1.6 million from one hamburger joint. Now they were high end bitchin’ burgers, I won’t tell you the name of it, but it was a high end place. And then eventually had to open another and another and another, and that was his frickin’ downfall, because it’s just, you couldn’t be happy with $1.6 million.

No, because you got to be bitchin’, and you got to have another six locations. And sure enough, as the economy went down, he opened up near the Orange Circle in Southern California, and it was just awful. Okay? I mean, the food was great, but it was just everything I talked about. All the different managers, all the expansion, all the expense, and then you’ve got to try to keep everybody going to bitchin’ burger, and it didn’t work out. So, we’re seeing this over and over, guys. It is just such a problem right now with these retailers going out of business, and you haven’t seen anything yet.

And I’m telling you this right now, for those of you that are consultants or billing, it’s funny, I had dinner with an attorney, and she’s like, yeah, I got to get on my billing. And I explained to her how you got to get on it now. You got to have people owe you nothing right now, because even if you deal with municipalities and cities, and they normally take 30 days to pay you, they’re about to take 45 to 60 to pay you. Can you live with that? Your bills come due every month, but the cities, they’ll slow pay you, and, you know, till the cows come home.

Don’t get slow-played. Remember that. But, again, you know, how many CVS stores are going to go out of business? You know, Rite Aid’s done. Big thing with Rite Aid was they had thrifty ice creams. Thrifty ice cream was a staple inside the Rite Aid. At one point, it was a nickel, a scoop. I think it’s now two or three dollars a scoop now to get an ice cream cone. But it’s 500 of those counters inside of the Rite Aid stores. Who’s going to pick those up? They’re not. They’re not going to add that.

It’s going to kill that business. So let me know what’s in trouble in the area. Let us all know what you think about this. Do you think CVS is going to go down for the count? Are they going to be the next Rite Aid? Let me know. Let me know what you think about this. We’ve all seen it, guys. We’ve all seen businesses in our lifetime that were once so successful, and people just can’t be the hot guy. You’ve got to be the big shot. You’ve got to go and expand it to the moon.

And at home, I’m telling you, Joanne’s Fabrics, we’ve seen this over and over and over again, where you get these investment companies that buy the business, they lease the locations, they sell the real estate, they think that they’ve just got it, and it’s just a matter of time until these places are out of business. Let me know what you think so far. There’s a lot more to cover. First things first is Tesla and SpaceX. The Tesla shareholders have spoken out to Elon Musk and insisted that you have to work in the office 40 hours a week now.

So the whole idea with this is to make it, if you want us to return to office, you have to return to office, which I think is great. I think it’s funny, though, you know? Because people do this. I don’t know what’s showing. They’ll all vote and we’ll have him make him be here. Okay, well, he’s going to be there, guys. He’s going to be there. So, now think about this number. We talked about the number of sales that were off, actually closed escrow. Right now, we have the number of pending sales, transactions in progress, dropped 6.1%.

They thought it was going to drop 1%. And when they did the numbers for April, it was off over 6%. Lowest since 2014. Uh-oh. Vice is still high. Again, closed transactions were off. Pending transactions are off. People still want to demand more money. And it’s not working right now. We’re starting to see problems. There is a report circulating out of Hollywood. And here’s the thing about California. California is insane right now. It’s incredibly expensive to be here and to run a business. The entertainment industry is completely broken. The unions, the cost of production, the cost of permitting, multiple permitting, having a cop there on site.

I mean, I can tell you guys stories. When I wrote screenplays and I got the education of this, I was blown away with this. This is 20 years ago, guys. This is completely different. Now, the Michael Milken Institute. Remember the Jump Bond King? Well, the Milken Institute’s a big deal because it does all these different reports on how to bring business back and things like that. But right now, they want to bring the entertainment industry back. And I included the report for you below. It’s broken, guys. It’s completely broken. Rob Lowe’s TV show, The Floor, the one that has 100 contestants, it is cheaper to fly everybody to Ireland and film in Ireland than it is to have them drive to the studio in Los Angeles.

Think about what I just said. They fly Roberta to Ireland. They put them up for three to five days in a hotel. That’s cheaper than filming in Los Angeles, California. It’s insane. It’s absolutely insane. But here’s the report on how we can fix this. Okay. Now, here’s some good news. Dolphins. Here’s some good news. John Deere plans to invest $20 billion in America to have more gasoline-powered tractors, lawnmowers, things like that. It’s funny. The guy that cuts my lawn was there today. And I asked him, what’s the deal? Because I showed him the report. And I said, what do you think about this? He said, yeah, we hate the electric blowers.

We go into certain home associations and we have to pull the electric out. It just takes us twice as long. And they don’t last nearly as long as they say they’re going to. And it creates nothing but problems for us. And then we go to guys like you, and you just want to get in and out of your house as soon as possible. And we can blast everything that you don’t care. They’re 100 percent. So John Deere is going to make tractors here in the States. I like this one, millennial divorce. People that go through divorce saying, oh, my God, it’s so expensive.

I got married when I was 23, and now that I’m 31, I have two kids and I have $50,000 in student loan debt. And this divorce is going to kill me. It’s going to absolutely destroy me financially. It is. It’s going to destroy everybody. So the problem with it is that’s what’s happening more and more and more. More and more right now. People spending it from $70,000 to $150,000 in their divorce right now, just with the lawyers. Big business for them. You get wiped out. The businesses get closed. But hey, don’t worry. The law will work out, OK? So FICO scores come under scrutiny.

And lenders are trying to figure out new ways to verify you over a FICO score. Guys, understand that your FICO score is a history of your payment records. Now, are they always fair? No. Are people upset about this? 100%, OK? They are. People get furious over that. But with that being said, what’s the alternative? What’s the alternative over a FICO score? The idea with this, you understand this is to get you in debt. You understand this is to have you go out and buy, you know, a million and a half dollar house.

Doesn’t that sound good? Let’s justify that. I got an alternative for you. All into the money. You need this thing called a job or a business or a way of paying your bills. If you don’t have that, you’re doomed. That’s the thing. My one of my favorite things that people send me is, you know, I found a quick way to pay off my credit card debt when you’re $30,000 in debt. Yeah, it’s called write a check, guys. Oh, there’s methods, you know. Yeah, don’t spend money on worthless crap and pay your bills more often and faster and you’ll get your debt paid off faster.

Oh, it’s kind of like losing weight, guys. It’s not the answer is no zempic. It’s exercise, eating right, moving. Oh. And you’re terrible. I would rather take a pill and be done with it. Let’s see this couple more. Oh, I love this one. Woman found a nine pound gold nugget, seven and a half inches wide. Right now, the bids for it are $400,000 for this gold nugget. Great story below. And final, final story is, you know, think about this. We’re talking about, you know, San Francisco earlier, and they came up with a great solution to solve the poor.

This dog’s done. Dog’s like, I’m not going to participate. So they came up with a novel solution to get rid of low test scores. What they’re going to do is lower the standards. So, you know, you want a college graduate from San Francisco? Odds are the bar was lowered for them. So insane. This is you sell out what what lunatic bill this is that we live in here in California. You just it’s it’s got to be fair. Well, how about this, guys? I’m telling this, I don’t know of anybody in their fifties or sixties that didn’t have it tough.

And everybody says, that’s the thing. I swear. I thank God all the time that I raised my kids a certain way. Sorry, you lost. Get up and move on, you know, and you learn more from losing than you do anything else. Maybe I should study for this test. No, no, no. We’re just going to lower the standards. Oh, my God, I got an A in that class. Imagine that. Imagine that that’s your future. That’s America right now. Let’s just lower the standards. I don’t want to arrest anybody. I don’t want to clean up that beautiful city that one that is not beautiful anymore.

Up at the dock out here on Newport Beach. It’s a beautiful, beautiful morning out here. So let me know, like I said, before I end this video, I’m going to go to that at home store for you. Let’s go take a look at this together. And don’t forget, we have the private channel I allegedly live. You sign up at I allegedly TV. I love doing content on that. We have over 300 videos on it and it’s all uncensored and it’s just fun. OK, let’s go to at home real quick. So as promised, we are at home.

This is the store chain that is preparing for bankruptcy right now. This, to give you an idea of how big the store is, used to be a Kmart. I have never seen one ad. I’ve never seen anything for the store. I couldn’t pay any merchandise in the store. I couldn’t pay anything about this place. So it will be interesting. Wow, this is huge. Look at this. Pots. This is massive. Wow, OK, fairly seasonal stuff. You got Fourth of July gear. You got summer stuff. You got umbrellas and things like that. Wow. You know, what does it have a feel for? It’s kind of like a Michael’s feel, you know? Interesting.

Burglar, all this stuff, all the umbrellas back there. Guys, this place is huge. But again, missed the debt payment on the 15th, tried to restructure on the 23rd, have a deal worked out to where they don’t have to make payments until, like, the end of June. But it’s done. They’re putting together the bankruptcy package right now. So anyways, guys, what do you think? What are the retailers going out of business next, guys? Let me know. Let me know. Let me know, let me know. So again, guys, another retailer is going to go down for the count.

That’s sad. It really is. Again, I’ve never seen an ad for this place. Have you guys ever seen an ad for at home? All the different patio furnitures. All the push-ins got it all, guys. Hit the Like button, subscribe to the channel. Let me know what you think. Email me hello at iallegedly.com. Again, guys, big store. You know, nobody’s here. Me and five other people are in the store right now. So let me know what you think, guys. I’ll see you soon. Onward and upward, guys. [tr:trw].

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