Shopping

Wednesday is already here. How quickly the time flies. It seems as if it were only yesterday that we were shopping for Christmas presents. Oh, it was yesterday! And we were checking out the various on-line shopping sites for presents for next year’s big event. And the more on-line the better! I’m following my sisters’ lead on this and I have established a Wish List at Amazon.com. That allows me to browse their many stores and to place items that I like onto a list that can be viewed by others. If I want to know what “Aunt Kitty” really would like, in books for instance, I can search the Amazon database and see which books intrigued her enough to place on her Wish List. Now, if everyone in the family would do that… shopping would be quite easy! Amazon is no longer a book store and so there are thousands of items to choose from.

We experienced two disparate events yesterday that affected how we perceive shopping on-line. One, we stopped at Petco to buy some nail clippers and the person who waited on us was deliberately rude. And not just to us…the person ahead of us got the same treatment from him. (And his name tag stated that he was the Manager?) Later, we stopped at Tuesday Morning and the clerks were overwhelmingly friendly; sincerely friendly. What to do? Our experience is what will drive us away from the brick and mortar store, so if a store wants to survive in the physical world, it has to offer something that Amazon can’t…smiles.

Then I read an article about “Baby Boomers” that made me rethink the whole on-line shopping thing…it seems that a large number of “Boomers” are wary of technology. So much so, that they will not arrange for direct deposit of their Social Security checks. This costs the government something like 80 cents per check versus 8.5 cents for a direct deposit. What are they thinking? Old people, like me, and Gen X, Y and Z think direct deposit is great. So will “Boomers” really embrace on-line shopping?

I once put together a business model for local shopping on-line and the basics of it depended on the answer to the question, “When do you want it?” You paid more for a special trip to put the item in your hands “Now”. If you could wait till the truck was in your neighborhood, you paid less. Now imagine Amazon doing that on a regional basis and involving even more shopping choices. Groceries as well as books. Oh, Oh! Sounds like a Wal*Mart! On Technical steroids!

But my model would make it possible for a local retailer to do the same thing and even better, because they would know the variables that affect the local economy. They would know you…

But what am I thinking? We are in the middle of revolution. This is a time for global economies and since we can’t be a strict isolationist country anymore, we must accommodate the new economy of the world. And use it to our advantage. What happens anywhere and everywhere in the world effects us now. That will require a whole new way of thinking.