Why ‘structural’ vs. ‘cyclical’ matters. November 13, 2026

Scott Phillips (0:04)

Welcome to Motley Fool Money, the podcast is not about to outsource jobs to India, at least not this week. I'm Scott Phillips from the Motley Fool. He is Andrew Page. He's the man who put the straw in straw man, the man in straw man, the raw in straw man, the all man in straw man. And at that point, I have to start giving up.

Andrew Page (0:21)

The nah.

Scott Phillips (0:23)

The nah.

I like it. Mate, straw man, of course, is Australia's premier online investment club as well. It should be given the time, effort, and energy you've put into it. How are you, mate?

Andrew Page (0:36)

I'm good. Yeah, really good. Just, you know, every day is AI Christmas. So you wake up and-

Scott Phillips (0:43)

It really is.

Andrew Page (0:44)

There's a new gift from the AI overlords.

SPEAKER_3 (0:47)

And yeah, I'm just, I'm in a delirium.

Andrew Page (0:50)

I think I've got, it's been, um, called AI psychosis for the condition of just people like me, just like giddy with excitement with this stuff and only looking at the positives, which I'm very hyper aware of that, that particular bias.

And yes, there are, there are two sides to that particular coin. But yeah, I just, it's just things are, things are moving so fast. I cringe a little bit in just even mentioning it. And because it feels like we're just coming back to this well again. And again, and again. But every time you kind of think, yep, it's done. Something else sort of comes out and you go, whoa, okay.

And it's got implications for personal life, for business life, for the economy at large, for investing. Just, it just touches everything. And my head's spinning, man. And I'm loving it.

Scott Phillips (1:44)

It is really cool. Yeah. I mean, you and I generally started off our chats with, this week in AI. What'd you do this week?

Andrew Page (1:51)

I did this, I did this.

Scott Phillips (1:53)

And there was so much stuff around. There was so much going on. And the pace of change is incredible, which is very, very cool. Let's, we'll be back to that, I'm sure, at some point. Let's start though, we're speaking of AI. Is there anything more anti-AI than physical department stores? In terms of different extremes on the same continuum. On one hand, you've got AI, on the other hand, you've got DJs still trying to pretend it's 1952

And we talked about last week, so we're not gonna do a whole heap on it this week. Other than we got some extra information, I think there's a couple of angles, mate, it's worth kind of just throwing out a little bit more than what we talked about last week. So most people would have caught on to the news by now. We're recording this on Thursday morning, and again, because these things move quick, I'll just say that because whatever changes between now and then, we'll see. But essentially, DJs has 38 stores currently. That's after closing five already recently. They are now going to shutter another 19 of those 38 after Christmas. And apparently seven more are under review. And this is a little bit of a little bit of, I don't know how to describe it really from the DJs manager. He said, well, this is always the plan all along. It's like, well, you guys signed stupidly long leases and you went broke because you couldn't execute that plan. Cause to be fair, it wasn't, it's not current management's fault. The previous manager signed them up for, you know, multi, multi, multi year lease. In some cases, 10 to 15 year leases. And DJs is like, well, they can't shut their stores anyway. And again, it's hard to talk about companies cause it's not the same people. So it's easy to say, well, David Jones said, but realistically, it's like a footy team, right? The footy team made 10 years, they're still wearing the same jerseys, but they're not really the same team they were a decade ago.

But yeah, they're saying, this is the plan all along. Closing 19 stores, another seven, as I say under review, leaving them with 12

I would take pretty short odds on those seven actually being closed, unless something dramatic happens between now and Christmas time.

If they're marginal, they're marginal, right? And here's the other thing. They've got a chance now, this is the benefit of an administration, to effectively, I mean, it sounds like it's, I mean, it is kind of a bit, it's interesting questions to who, where the obligation should lay, because there are counter parties here, right? But effectively, what administration does is it lets you walk away from every binding legal agreement you previously had as an entity. It's like, yeah, sorry, Westfield, we have a 15 year lease, but no, you're not giving them the money, we're going. And again, that's what bankruptcy allows. And on one level, it makes five Eurasian.