Look, I find nothing heart warming about the experience of shopping for things in physical stores.
I liken the rise of Amazon as something analogous to the agricultural revolution. Before agriculture, everyone had to hunt and gather food, it was a laborious process similar to shopping. Once people discovered agriculture however, and similarly Amazon, it was no longer necessary to spend so much effort in getting life's basic necessities, freeing us to spend our time on more noble pursuits.
This is the world I would much rather live in. I do not care for the retail days of olde.
I agree. I do some shopping online but by default stick to brick and mortar. I like keeping excuses to be out in the real world interacting with people, as the need to do so is vanishing.
Though appealing to Amazon, of all companies, about humanity where workers are involved is sadly, comically unfitting.
The reconstruction of the American retail landscape that consumers experience only as "buying I guess kind of a lot of my stuff from Amazon" (or Walmart, or a very few other entitities; and their lesser-known agricultural oligopoly peers),
is so total at the manufacturing/logistics/supply chain/fulfillment level, as to defy our comprehension.
The world that we live in has had the mechanisms of how it produces and delivers goods to its citizens changed in more far-reaching ways within the last two decades than since the industrial or agrarian revolutions.
AND,
this reorganization has meant millions of people worldwide have had their utility redefined, and "optimized," to their detriment in terms of opportunity, income, stability, benefits, etc. ad nauseum.
But that is literally one of a thousand examples; the "gig economy" and its infinitely examined (and litigated) sharp edges provide as many more as you would like.
Fast-fashion and next-day fulfillment and fungible goods from Chinese "companies" with machine-generated meaningless names clogging Amazon results pages, do not come at no one's expense.
It's not the mega conglomerates they are putting out of business. It's the bike stores, the hobby shops, the clothing boutiques. In the US with the purchase of Whole Foods, they are also moving more into groceries and everything else. After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is, and decided if I had to choose between the two I would choose the physical experience.
Once you do that you start to realize just how much of the consumer goods world Amazon has already put out of business. I live in silicon valley and there is no where I can go for electronics any more. My last amazon purchase was getting some 2.5A fuses because every store that would sell them locally has closed ( either before the pandemic, or because of it ). I tried to buy a video card, and the local computer equipment retailer literally couldn't get allocated any stock from the manufacturers, somehow Amazon managed to get first dibs on supply. I don't like that world, and I don't want to live in it.
The thing that bothers me, about the retail space at least, is the increasing amount of waste and the increasing amount of consumerism.
Many people buy PC components from Newegg or household goods from Amazon when they might be an entire $5 more at a retail store. The retails store version you can actually see and touch (more important for a bathmat, less important for a video card) and they're shipping in packages of 100 or 500. Stores typically do recycle all their cardboard.
You buy it on-line, and it comes in a box. And those boxes add up, and many of them don't get reused or recycled depending on what part of the world you live in.
Amazon pushes people to buy more through their ecosystem. We're buying more stuff we don't need than ever, and generating more waste than ever. Their dash button felt like the ultimate consumption waste tool. Amazon is pushing us into a world where we are continually buying.
I'd rather we live in a world where we buy more are, fewer goods (with what we do buy being more expensive but durable). What a great world if our cellphones and devices lasted 8 years instead of 2. A world where we could buy independent games and media and know the creators got a full 85%~90% like with Bandcamp instead of the current bullshit 66% they get from Apple/Google/Amazon/Steam/Gog.
A world where we spend less on goods and the goods last longer; a world that lets us spend more on art, could greatly reduce our overall pollution (not just the symbolic and useless measure of carbon) and could help create a more Army of Davids type world where people can legitimately live off their art.
Sorry, but I just can't get on board with this point of view.
Shopping has always sucked. Badly. Going to the shops has to be one of the single most annoying and unpleasant day to day experiences I deal with[1].
If you live anywhere even remotely populous when you visit the shops there are people milling around just ####ing everywhere. Dithering, dawdling, standing around chatting at every choke point in the aisles, demonstrating a spectacular lack of spatial awareness - but, honestly, who can blame them when the entire environment is so overstimulating and overcrowded?
And after all this there's a damn good chance you're not going to find what you want anyway.
I dare anyone to visit a department store in a city for half an hour on a Saturday and come out afterwards without having entertained a single murderous thought.
But nowadays I can do a bit of research online, which might be quick or might take a while depending on what I want, find exactly what I want, find somewhere that sells it (generally not Amazon because I just don't trust them that much these days), and either order it for delivery, or click and collect (very handy at places like Screwfix, Toolstation, and B&Q).
It's just way less stressful and way more pleasant. I mean, still not necessarily the most fun thing in the world, but it makes shopping suck a lot less.
[1] There are clearly far worse problems to have, and this may be a #firstworldproblem, but in terms of the normal humdrum routine of daily life, visiting the shops often really sucks.
I suppose the same question could be asked about all those saddle makers and horse breeders when the age of the automobile arrived.
Online retailing is a great innovation; it makes sense, it's convenient, the selection is 1000x better, the service is excellent (at least at Amazon), and it saves people having to drive somewhere. The reviews and comments are useful, the related items and "what people bought" sidebars are handy.
By contrast, retailers have lost their edge. They hire low wage non-specialists, often high school students or other non-professionals who would rather be doing something else for a living.
So when you go to a store to purchase a gadget or article of clothing or book, your chief human interaction experience is distressingly often with a bored, under-motivated person who hates his job and hates you too.
I treasure the exceptions to the above rule, the dedicated doing-it-for-love guy or gal who really knows their stuff, like the extremely knowledgeable handyman guys and gals at the local hardware store--which is why I still patronize my local Ace whenever I can. Except they sometimes have a teenager who doesn't know where anything is, who doesn't scan my frequent buyer card, who can't offer me any advice whatsoever, who screws up the price. That kind of morbidly useless experience drives me (and millions of others) to redirect my money to smart, helpful businesses like Amazon.
> But there’s a reason that we used to have shoe stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, bookstores, and all the rest: Those specialized retail spaces allow products, and the people with knowledge about them, to engage in specialized ways of finding, choosing, and purchasing them.
There's a reason why so much commerce has moved online in general and to Amazon in particular: We often value price and convenience and oodles of consumer reviews and easy access to competition and related info more than we value meat space salespeople with specialized knowledge laying on personalized sales pressure.
Not always. I drove for three hours to shop for an office chair in a brick and mortar store, because I had to actually try it before paying the big bucks. But often enough to remake the economy.
I don't like it. I also don't have time to run all over town (or web) trying to find a highly specific bicycle seat post, or go to every sporting goods store to get the one brand of bouldering chalk I like, or every housewares store shopping for the specific coffee grinder that will fit in my 300sq-foot apartment.
Maybe I should go Thoreau and live in a cabin, but until then I'm very busy. I do a lot of other things to adapt my life to try and improve the general world, but ecommerce habits just isn't making the cut yet.
After Amazon threatened to close my paid Prime account because I was returning too many things (totally false) I'm now going back to the brick and mortar stores too. As more and more people get alienated by policies that aren't even written down, applied transparently and randomly by stupid algorithms, I think more people will deal with the inconvenience of shopping in person or at the very least look for online retailers that don't tell their paying customers who have been spending $10-30k a year regularly for many years to go fuck themselves.
I think there's a lot of chances for retails stores as people realize that the promise of online technologies is incredibly hindered by their actualization and the artificial limits imposed by such unscrupulous vendors as Amazon.
I’m not sure why everyone continually romanticizes brick and mortar retail. Its terribly inefficient, and wasteful of time, energy, space etc.
Think of all the Walmart, Dicks, Big Lots parking lots and strip malls that could be converted into better space. Think of how much waste there is when you have to pack, unpack, stage and repack merchandise.
Amazon’s distribution is a superior business model which is why it is popular. I’d also reckon that the carbon footprint per package is lower if you account for the driving that is required for more traditional shopping.
I’d rather see more competition using a similar business model than a return to concrete strip malls full of big box retailers.
I hate the no people future, therefore, I hate this service. Unfortunately for me, that means nothing.
I see this service taking over, at the very least, a large percentage of the 7/11 bodega type of stores. I see a future where the corner store will return. Over the last few years, companies have gone large so they can take advantage of the economy of scale. This service will reduce labor costs and have costs fall relative to similar stores previously.
Pundits were talking about Amazon opening stores with this tech. Why bother when you can get someone else to do it while expanding your core business. Imagine this, a one-man store where I order my inventory from Amazon and have it delivered daily or close to that. They brought their multivendor Amazon model where anyone can sell online using their online tech to the real world. This is a case of most retailers playing checkers while Amazon is playing chess. Yikes.
I partially agree, however... the future is already here, just unevenly distributed.
In the old days shopping online meant fast delivery because they were selling luxury items in competition with overbuilt brick and mortar retail. Unless you get that music CD tomorrow afternoon, supposedly you'll invest two hours in going to a music store, waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to park, waiting for mass transit, waiting to find your new CD, etc. But it hasn't been 1995 in a long time.
The future will look like my existing amazon subscribe and save delivery, I get periodic deliveries of stuff like shaving cream and toothpaste and all that kind of junk at a huge discount in a giant monthly box and I'm sure amazon makes stacks of cash being able to predict demand into the future and balance across distribution systems. I even buy my looseleaf tea from S+S. So in the future shopping will only be cheap, or at least affordable, if you're willing to wait till the 14th of the month when you get your monthly giant box. Frankly if I had to pay shipping out of my pocket and I didn't have Prime for other reasons, I'd probably wait until my monthly shipment.
UPS spends a lot of time and money driving those trucks all over creation to drop off a tiny little package of nothing at my door, often multiple times per week. Note the USPS was talking some years ago about abandoning 6 day service and going to 4 day deliveries.
My gut level guess is delivery will be like peapod but not food. An amazon warehouse will collect large shipments from all over the planet for a month, then toss my months worth of stuff into an amazon owned reusable shipping bucket, then fill an amazon owned truck with an entire subdivisions worth of buckets, then an amazon employee drives to my subdivision and drops one bucket per house and picks up my empties, and says "see ya next month". Or maybe every week. Or two weeks. I bet people will select neighborhoods based on how often amazon (and perhaps the USPS) service the neighborhood.
Soon, delivery is something a neighborhood will get, not an individual. Just like picking up the garbage is enormously cheaper to hit the whole district every thursday than to dispatch a truck to my house every time I fill one trash bag.
Finally you have the 1%er meme. As the last of the wealth concentrates at the top, you can't have billions of dollars in infrastructure for a quadcopter drone to deliver nothing important to a couple rich people at crazy expense without that world also being full of a hundred times as many people getting wood crates of rice delivered roughly monthly. Perhaps by horse carriage once the cheap oil runs out.
The partial agreement I have with you is the franchised pizza company a block from my house currently for insurance and licensing reasons cannot accept packages for me at their fancy truck dock. That'll change once the owner gets hungry enough for cash. Right now retail establishments, especially chains, are very silo'd and pretend the world outside their franchise or suppliers does not exist. When they get hungry that'll change. The only question is how it'll be financed. So my entire neighborhood uses the pizza restaurant or dive bar as their delivery address... do they rely on me leaving the waitress a tip or buying a round of drinks when I pick up my packages or do they extort money from the delivery company or the sender or maybe even me?
An interesting example of the future being here already is I keep trying to buy into a popular local CSA that delivers to my local food store and I always fail (probably popular because they're awesome). I'm not even sure CSAs are legal in every state. But the future is already here for CSA organic produce, if I ever get to buy in my delivery point is my local independent food store. (I'm told the food store is making fat stacks of cash off the CSA, empty cooler space makes them no money anyway so theres no loss, and people who take possession of heads of tend to buy salad dressing from the store, store sales are booming, etc)
You make a good point, and candidly, we're not sure. The crux of the problem as we see it is that:
- If you enjoy shopping, you're probably pretty good at it, and don't need a lot of hand-holding.
- If you don't enjoy shopping, then a store is a bad solution. A better solution is "don't go to the store at all, we'll ship you the stuff," aka Amazon
What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this? i.e. Willing to go shopping, if stores can just make it bit easier when you get there.
I liken the rise of Amazon as something analogous to the agricultural revolution. Before agriculture, everyone had to hunt and gather food, it was a laborious process similar to shopping. Once people discovered agriculture however, and similarly Amazon, it was no longer necessary to spend so much effort in getting life's basic necessities, freeing us to spend our time on more noble pursuits.
This is the world I would much rather live in. I do not care for the retail days of olde.
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