What We Would Miss in an All-Amazon-Shopping World

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From The New Yorker:

A few Saturdays back, I stopped to visit my friends John and Miriam at Mellah, a Moroccan rug shop they opened last spring in Toronto. Mellah is a small store in the city’s West End, set in a neighborhood that’s rich in coffee shops, young families, and dive bars, but not home to a lot of high-end home retailers. Still, the space they leased has one big advantage: a huge south-facing window, which allows pedestrians to glance in and pretty much see every single rug and textile for sale.

Though they are adept at social-media marketing on Instagram and Facebook, the majority of their sales come in through that window, by people who walk by, stop, and enter their shop. A few days before I visited, a lawyer who lives nearby stopped in on his way home from a Christmas party, pointed at a thirty-five-hundred-dollar rug he’d seen through the window, and handed John his credit card, telling him to “charge me now, before I change my mind.”

The story was good for a laugh, but it left me thinking about two big trends in retail today, which predict that sales like these could become increasingly rare. The first is the continued rise of online shopping in America. Online sales during Thanksgiving weekend broke all previous records, garnering more than five billion dollars (up eighteen per cent from last year), according to Adobe data cited in a Bloomberg article, while sales at brick-and-mortar retail stores declined by one per cent.

Though online retail still represents a relatively small percentage of total retail sales (8.4 per cent, according to the most recent Census Bureau figures), e-commerce continues to expand. While the prediction that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen made three years ago—that traditional retail stores would soon be extinct—still seems overblown, there is a brutal logic behind the popularity of online shopping. It is efficient and succeeds because it brings goods to consumers, often at the cheapest possible price, in a convenient way. No matter how nice the selection at Mellah, there are more Moroccan rugs, at a lower price, just a few clicks away—and you don’t even have to leave your warm bed to buy them.

Now digital commerce is ready to infiltrate the world of brick-and-mortar stores. The physical retail of groceries and food products has remained robust in the digital age, but that may change with the arrival of Amazon Go, a new concept from the leader in e-commerce, which recently opened a demonstration grocery store in Seattle. Customers can fill their shopping carts and simply walk out of the store, as the eggs, milk, and Cheerios they have selected are instantly charged to an Amazon app on their phones. Good-bye to long checkout lines and pesky, eye-rolling cashiers. Hello to the Uber of shopping!

. . . .

Alison Medina, the executive editor of the trade publication design:retail, told me that no one should be worried about the death of physical retailers, and she cited a number of convincing reasons why stores, and the humans who tend them, have a bright future, thanks in large part to the unique way they sell goods.

First, there’s the obvious tactile satisfaction that comes from physical shopping. In a store where you can touch the products, you know exactly what you are buying. Online stores can only provide you photos, descriptions, and a snake pit of questionable reviews. “You can’t touch a dress on an iPad” or smell a cantaloupe to tell whether it’s ripe, Medina said. There’s an unimpeachable trust when you walk out with the product you’ve just bought, but also instant gratification, in a way that even the fastest drone can’t deliver.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are also better suited to generating impulse purchases. The tipsy lawyer was unlikely to wander home and buy a thirty-five-hundred-dollar rug on his phone, but the sight of it in Mellah’s window, and the fact that he was there to see it, made his purchase seem almost inevitable. “In part, it’s the distinction between browsing and searching,” Adam Alter, an associate professor of marketing at N.Y.U., said. “You can’t browse online very well. There isn’t room for serendipity online.”

Link to the rest at The New Yorker and thanks to Dave for the tip.

PG finds tons of serendipity online, far more than in a physical bookstore. As he looks around his cluttered desk, he sees all sorts of things he didn’t know existed before he found them online.

Examples?

Gear Ties have done wonderful things for the rat’s nest of various and sundry computer, cell phone and photo cables that accompany him when he travels and multiply like rabbits in his photo bags.

Absolute War is the best account of the Soviet Union’s battle with Nazi Germany he’s found, based in large part upon documents released only after Glasnost. This is a much-neglected part of most World War II histories. The book was published in 2008 and PG is certain he’s never seen it in the military history section of any bookstore.

Much of PG’s “browsing” takes place as he reads different types of articles online. He’s not consciously “shopping”,  but if he sees an interesting product hyperlink, he’ll check it out.

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31 thoughts on “What We Would Miss in an All-Amazon-Shopping World”

  1. I’ve been buying books and music online since the first years of Amazon. I’ve also bought computer motherboards, video cards and assorted gadgets. And I’ve been happy with them, but there are some things I simply will not buy online again and they are clothing and shoes.

    Why? Because the few times I’ve tried, I’ve been bitterly disappointed and had to send them back because they did not fit. I’m not sure I’d buy a rug online either. RGB colours on a screen do not translate to the exact same colour in the real world, even with careful calibration of your monitor. Plus you can often tell the quality of an item by the ‘feel’.

    As they say in the classics, ‘horses for courses’.

  2. I was reading an article online and in passing it mentioned a true story I had been trying to research years ago. I was able to go directly to abebooks and purchase the book (that hadn’t been written yet when I was researching) about this woman for under $5.

    Do you remember the bad old days when you wanted to order a book from the bookstore and it wasn’t in Flourish and Botts system?

    I remember wanting a book by British writer Penny Vincenzi (?) and the only way Borders could get it was to order it from Hong Kong.

    The New Yorker used to have the BEST cartoons.

  3. From your mouth to the ‘Net’s ears, Jamie. The revolution happened quite a few years back and I’m still waiting.

  4. I’d miss trying things on. In clothing I’m a tough fit, being short-round and not into teenager ripped jeans and kleenex tee shirts. Save for a few noteworthy sites that cater to women shaped like me, nothing I order online ever fits.

    • Ah, here’s what I’m waiting for: the day when there are foot and body scanners that get your measurements and then let you buy shoes and clothes customized to fit and flatter you. Think of those Doris Day movies where she gets to sit and chill while models show off clothes. Only now the models will be your digital avatars that demonstrate how the clothes will look on you before you push the “make it so” button to have the clothes made.

      Those lazy science bums have let us down on the flying car front, and the vacations to Mars front, but surely the clothes thing can happen? At least let us be able to buy clothes based on measurements?

      • I remember Alvin Toffler wrote in a book from the 70s that, in the future, all clothes would be custom-printed from paper as you needed them, and you’d just burn them when you were done. That didn’t quite happen, but in a few decades you’ll probably just make them in your basement from the clothes printer alongside the 3D printer.

        Of course, by then, it won’t really matter as we’ll just sit around in our underwear controlling our VR avatars or drones.

      • But people will protest that their digital avatars don’t look like them, and will tweak them until they match how they think they look, and then the clothes won’t fit, because you aren’t that shape. Really, you aren’t. 🙂

      • Ah, here’s what I’m waiting for: the day when there are foot and body scanners that get your measurements and then let you buy shoes and clothes customized to fit and flatter you.

        That’s history.

        My tailor in Austin had such a scanner. Stepped in, closed my eyes, breathed in, let in half out (like firing a rifle), he tripped the switch, and lasers measured me. He sent the measurements off to the little elves and two weeks later my suits arrived. That was more than 15 year ago.

    • Yup, I shop in person for anything that needs to be tried on. Or is perishable. Everything else I get online.

    • Here in Canada, Canada Post is introducing new delivery centre hubs with change rooms in them. You can have your packages shipped there, open them immediately and try on the items, and also immediately ship the returns back. It makes it a lot more feasible to order multiple sizes if you’re not sure which one is right, since you can return the wrong sizes right away.

  5. If all you do is buy mass-produced goods, then you won’t miss bricks & mortar so much. I find, however, that I do best with handmade and locally made items when I shop in person. Yeah yeah, Etsy, but the thing about handmade is that photographs can hide a lot of faults.

    I shop on-line for books, shoes, t-shirts, jeans, electronics. Most other things I shop in person for.

  6. Immediate gratification:
    Much is made of the fact that in a brick and mortar store you can obtain your item immediately and not have to wait for the drone drop delivery.
    But for most things, just having it in your hands only gives you that: the gratification of immediate possession. You probably can’t use the item until you actually get it home, in which case, the drone drop might have been faster.

    • I have never been able to get anything “immediately” in a store. I always have to hunt because an item I buy every week has been moved to a different aisle or has been dropped from the store’s inventory, then try to find a clerk to tell me where the item I want is, then stand in line to pay. Time spent is in the half hour range.

      On Amazon all I have to do is type in the name, then do a couple clicks. Time spent is 2 minutes.

    • Instant gratification is important if you’re bleeding to death. Or two years old.
      Most other cases, adults can plan ahead and wait.

    • I have found it’s the Passive Voice comments have an effect on my budget 🙂 Barbara and her fountain pens, plus all the books people have read/written. I’m keeping a tight reign on the budget right now, and I hate temptation when I’m in no position to give in to it.

      Impulse buying a $3500 rug? Yeah, I don’t relate to that problem 🙂

  9. “What We Would Miss in a non-Amazon-Shopping World”

    All those stories trad-pub hadn’t thought worth printing.

  10. a lawyer who lives nearby stopped in on his way home from a Christmas party, pointed at a thirty-five-hundred-dollar rug he’d seen through the window, and handed John his credit card, telling him to “charge me now, before I change my mind.

    LOL. I’m never gonna have to worry about my doing this kind of impulse buying! 🙂

    • $3500 for a rug? On impulse?
      Nope.
      $3500 carpeted my whole house.
      With change.

      I just spent a week debating whether to get the cats a $45 kitty condo. The clincher? I was near PetSmart so I popped in. They wanted $120.

      Hel-looo Amazon!
      Whiny cat had better appreciate it.

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