I was driving down Rt. 17 yesterday, taking care of some errands, when a semi-interesting notion struck me. I passed the closed-down Tower Records and pulled into the lot of the Barnes & Noble in Paramus, figuring a meander through its extensive used book section would do me good. I’m weird like that.
On the way out, I stopped to check out a new book that I was thinking of getting. It looked interesting, and my first thought was, “I’ll pick that up on Amazon when I get home.” After all, the list price of the book was $30, but Amazon would likely have it for $20. Plus, I wouldn’t have to stand on line.
And that’s when I had this odd notion: for many consumers, a brick-and-mortar store is only intended for impulse purchases.
I don’t like to extrapolate from my experiences into the world-at-large, but I know there are an awful lot of people who buy almost all of their books, music, movies, etc. online. For us, isn’t a place like B&N or Borders only there for browsing purposes?
Of course, there are times when you need to pick something up in a bookstore, record store, or DVD store, even though those are all converging into single locations. But in my experience I only buy on-site if the item is a gift for someone and needs to be in-hand that day, or if Amazon has a delay on the product.
That said, even gift-buying is something I take care of online for the most part (supplemented by purchases during my travels). In fact, I wanted to pick up a CD for a coworker for the holiday, so I stopped at the nearby Borders. The CD was $18.99, which I found utterly ridiculous. Back in the office, I ordered it on Amazon for $11.98.
So, maybe I’m asking something obvious, but does it seem to you that a physical location for “content” (books, music, movies) is pretty much a browsing library? Let me know.
The Internet has basically destroyed the used bookstore frameworks some of us used to count on when visiting bigger cities, so I think the answer is obviously yes, and increasingly so all the time. It’s more a question at what point and using what model physical retail sustains itself, industry by industry.
There’s probably a really good argument to be made that first Wal-Mart type stores and now on-line sales have actually improved the retail experience from its mall-driven nadir in the late 1970s when cities coast to coast emptied themselves of nearly every shopping destination. If you consider shopping to be an activity above and beyond the pursuit and purchase of necessities, and thus likely to exist at some level outside of basic cost/supply requirements, then the existence of these options means that what retail exists becomes more specialized and local and experience-specific.
My father introduced this concept to me in a roundabout way when discussing the move of franchise restaurants into the resort area I spent my summers as a youth. He rightfully guessed that these restaurants would mean death to the little burger and pizza joints around the lake, but that eventually they’d be replaced with things like Chinese and seafood restaurants, which turned out to be the truth. Proving causation is a bitch, of course, and direct causation nearly impossible, but the experience repeats if you think about it, at least enough to suggest there might be something to it. We used to have a downtown grocery here: now there’s Albertson’s but also a gourmet grocer, and a food co-op.
A more interesting question to me, Gil, and one I’ve been thinking about lately, is whether or not we treat on-line destinations with the same rigorous competitive sorting mechanism that brick and mortar stores allow by the simple fact we can walk into them. It seems to me that we buy from fewer places on-line than we do in the real world, in part because there are fewer places, but also I think because there’s an form of abstraction that’s harder to overcome.
For example, I buy my older brother Whit Hong Kong and Korean movies for his birthday and Christmas. But I only buy them from one place, dddhouse.com; so much so, that I think solely in terms of buying them there, event though there are plenty of places to do that. However, my cousins for whom I buy southwestern pottery, I think in terms of going out generally to shop here in Silver City. Do you know what I mean? My suspicion is that this is slowly passing and will continue to do so, too, and that there will be a time when we speak of “shopping” and “buying” as too separate experiences, and the distinctions we make in each area won’t be physical vs. virtual at all.
I brought this subject up with Paul Di Filippo when we visited him on Friday, and he brought up another interesting corollary to this: there are fewer outlets for people to sell their used books. Sure, they can sell individual titles on Ebay or something, but there aren’t many options for showing up with a few boxloads of books for sale/trade.
It’s an interesting point you bring up about shopping in fewer online locations. When I was foolishly picking up the last few volumes of Cerebus a couple of years ago, I had to find an online comics store that stocked them, and it was a psychological hassle for me to buy from a less-than-Amazon-ian storefront. I’m even pretty particular about buying from Amazon instead of its third-party vendors, largely for reliability issues. (I assume this phenomenon isn’t general, and is just one of those Gil-quirks we’ve come to know and love.)
Now, my wife shops for clothes & shoes online, which is something that simply never occurs to me. Likely, the hassle of having to return stuff that doesn’t fit would be greater than the hassle of getting out to a mall or clothing store. Also, I’m not exactly a fashion plate.
That said, I do treat malls as destinations. I like walking around through the more extensive ones up here, both for shopping and for gawking. It’s like a dummy-version of the Greek agora, in which the conversation is non-verbal, instead played out in significations like wardrobe choices.
Yeah, I think all of it is very much in flux. My brother and I were talking about this, and we realized that a friend of ours was using Amazon to grocery shop and that this was something our dad could have used.
Shopping will always have an appeal on a certain level. Heck, I get most comics published for free and I still bought stuff when I was in Chicago Comics on the 16th. I’m not sure exactly why, but it was pleasurable.
BTW: I think you only ended up responding so you could use the word “significations.”
You caught me; I’m pretty sure I mis-used “significations” there, but I’m a rebel.
I feel a strange wistfulness when I go to shops where I’d once find lots of neat things to buy, especially comic shops and bookstores. I’m inclined to believe that this is just because of my reverse-mid-life crisis, in which I’m not interested in buying much of anything, because I’m doing pretty well, have plenty of books and great comics to read, 30,000 songs in my music library, a nice stereo, and otherwise decent trappings.
Of course, what I can’t buy is time to get all that reading in. And don’t get me started on having time to write. . .