Anyone got a reasonable way to synthesize those competing thoughts?
But I think there will be significant, very painful collateral damage to people during this transition and I've very sympathetic to people hit by the job losses. Retail is one of the few remaining sectors in small towns. Most other work is becoming increasingly concentrated in big cities or automated away. The days of the US as a patchwork of thriving small towns is ending, but many people still live in those towns. Worse, the ones still there are often there because they are the least able to move — poverty, family commitments, etc.
The US is rapidly turning into a country that has no place for the unskilled, but is also failing to provide the education needed to deal with the millions of unskilled citizens.
I'm also confident that in all of this, it's not the finance industry that's going to be hurt. They'll pull another "too big to fail" maneuver and we taxpayers will bail them out, yet again transferring money to the ultra-rich.
I was wondering about this forcing stores to provide more expertise and more flexible inventory. In my town 2 stores in a specific industry went out of business 3 years ago and made a big deal in the papers about how too many people were buying direct from manufacturers instead of visiting their store. I had been to both stores, asked some questions about products, got dumb answers and bad attitude, so I went home and bought everything online. In the last 2 years, 3 new stores in that same industry, 2 of them MASSIVE, have opened up near by (one of them in the same strip mall), and are doing very well. The difference? When you walk into these stores the employees know what they're talking about and they VERY quickly adjust inventory based on current market trends. Now I make most purchases in one of these 3 stores and not online - because I can do research better by talking to them and I can get most things immediately. It's required bigger investment from the owners, but they have thrived where previous stores failed and blamed e-commerce.
Doesn't work with a lot of commodities, but if you're in retail, I think it's clear you need to specialize and add value - and that requires more investment. Don't just be there and expect to keep existing.
I knew a guy who ran a shoe store and provided a high level of personalized service when selecting the right shoe for your feet, gait, use, etc. Hiring and training employees who were knowledgeable enough to do that, plus having to spend a lot more time with each customer, made it a lot more expensive to sell shoes, and when Amazon and other online retailers started offering shoes for a lot lower prices (because they didn't have to provide the same level of personalized service), he eventually went out of business because people would come into his store and have him help them find the right shoe, then go home and order it for 20% cheaper or whatever.
If you are a consumer, it seems rational to go somewhere and try something on, get expert advice about it, etc, then go purchase it wherever it is least expensive. Why pay 20 or 30% more or whatever for the same thing? Some sort of unwritten social contract (this is usually the reason I don't use local stores as showrooms)? Time sensitivity? As a retailer who goes this route, you kind of have to pin your hopes on those things.
Showrooming is a real problem, and retailers are faced with the decision of trying to add value and hope people end up buying there even though it costs more money, or trying to cut costs in every possible way to compete on price, and I don't know that it's an easy choice all of the time.
Why would this lead to less suburban sprawl? Unleashed from any interest in physical commerce, wouldn't suburban sprawl perhaps be even more attractive? There's a lot of assumptions here that these changes will have us reverting to older forms, but I don't see any reason why.
Instead, we'll have giant eyesore big-box empty buildings on oversized empty parking lots littering the land that nobody wants, and few who can afford to tear down and replace.
And what will they replace them with? New houses or apartments or condos few can afford? Maybe office space?
And then get shipped a knock-off product that doesn't do what the customer needs.
Or spending hours sorting through endlessly scrolling pages of choices, taking hours longer than just walking down store aisle.
Online shopping has some benefits, and also some serious drawbacks.
I'm reminded of an article I read last year about parents buying presents for kids at Christmas. In the 90s it was easy. The kid wanted a thing. A gaming device, a dress, or a car... there was an object that the kid wanted to own. That object was sold at a store. But today's kids don't want things. They have the iPhone. What they want is 50,000 likes on facebook. Their happiness is tied less directly to things than social acceptance. Often having the thing leads to that social acceptance, but increasingly not. Your seeing the junk as superfluous, and mentioning it here on HN, fits with that shift away from retail goods and towards social acceptance via online communities.
For example here in buffalo we have small stores for spiritual goods that also serve as community centers for such spiritual practices.
Historically, public markets have also provided a platform for important non-commercial informal civic interactions. The review section of e.g. Amazon doesn't seem to cut it.
True, but neither does the strip mall surrounding a Best Buy parking lot.
The confluence of events that the article alludes to are that many retail stores went through a period of consolidation and buyout through leveraged debt. As anyone with big credit card bills understands, it sucks when you're spending a huge chunk of your income just to pay interest on your credit cards. (or in these stores cases their junk bonds).
This massive debt load is forcing changes faster than what one might see organically and as a result there is a lot of turmoil in the retail business.
Or you can be sentimental for practical reasons:
"Eliminating the middleman is never as simple as it sounds. ‘Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated."
-Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly)
But we don't program in a void, right? Somebody has to create work for us and those would be the ones doing "superfluous" things. In other words, nobody would need our programming if all they did was supporting our programming.