I don’t want to give away my girlfriend’s gift when she reads this blog, so let’s just say it’s entertainment-related-something you could find in any electronics store such as Circuit City, which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I checked out the giant red box store to no success. Same with a few local stores. Nothing.
I’ve encountered this problem with specialty items before. I go to a store and they tell me while they don’t have it, they could order it on the internet for me. What’s the point of going to a store if you still have to wait for two days, go BACK to the store, and so on? Really, I can use the internet for myself…at home…in my underwear!
But this year I’m not purchasing a specialty item, I’m actually looking for something that should be fairly common. I sighed and checked online, fully expecting to pay some insanely high shipping fee. However, even Amazon didn’t have it available! I ordered it from Best Buy for in-store pickup, but received an e-mail shortly after ordering that their inventory had screwed up; it was not actually available at the aforementioned store.
I don’t mean to get on an Andy Rooney style rant here, but remember when stores would actually sell stuff? You could go to a store, find what you were looking for and bring it home. Heck, there’s even a store in New York where you can browse the items sold on a website, but you can’t BUY anything in the store; you have to go to their website. What’s the point of having a physical store at all?
The nice thing about brick and mortar is their immediacy of getting a physical thing. That’s their convenience. The internet has its own list of conveniences. But if stores make it harder and harder to find products, it will drive people to the internet. If the internet is even too difficult (in my example above, Amazon and Best Buy), then people are just going to find a way to steal it.
People talk about dipping sales all the time (especially in the music business), and some have theorized that a large part of this is because the market is saturated with crap. This may be true, but I would add on top of this the fact that when there is a golden gem out there, it’s simply impossible to find.
Oh, and if anyone is curious I did eventually find the gift far out in Queens. Though a Brooklynite making this trek is similar to when the Simpsons went to Ogdenville for a new TV.
Well, I guess my holiday experience could’ve be worse:
TOPICS: poingly