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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