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Comment by iso1210 | Hacker News Reader

In the UK we had shops that sold everything -- Argos has done catalogue shopping for decades. Sainsburys, a major supermarket, owns them, and does delivery.

Amazon makes it trivial to buy pretty much anything I want and get it the next day. Sainsburys sells the same stuff between themselves and argos, yet they failed miserably at competing. They could have worked with companies like royal mail and leverage their logistics expertise to compete, but they failed miserably to even realise why I shop at amazon.

I'm not some 1970s afficiando going out to a high street to buy something in person, it's very unlikely I need something right then and can't wait for 24 hours for someone to bring it to me. I have better things to do with my time.

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I was at Argos between 2012 and 2013. Fresh out of university. At one point during my time there, for around five or six weeks, me and another graduate were the only front end developers on the entire Argos website. At that stage I don't think I knew the difference between margin and padding in CSS just to give you an idea of our level.

It was truly chaotic. The amount of money they wasted on Accenture consultants should be criminal. I know it's a cliche to say money is wasted on consultants, but really, no work happened. A lot of energy was expended but nothing was built or created.

I was in a newly formed "innovation hub" which had a lot of very talented people but we were blocked from doing anything by internal and external staff at every turn.

One time we tried to have a QA environment set up so that we could demo and test our work. We were told it would take _9 months_ to provision a server for us. We were a team of about 20 in expensive central London office space and we didn't have an environment to test our work. It took about 8 hours to do a deploy to production, so if something was broken the BEST CASE scenario was it would take 8 hours to fix. I never saw the best case scenario.

The most talented and motivated staff in the innovation hub slowly left after we were told that the pace of change had to be "glacial".

Argos never stood a chance of competing against Amazon.

It's not the mega conglomerates they are putting out of business. It's the bike stores, the hobby shops, the clothing boutiques. In the US with the purchase of Whole Foods, they are also moving more into groceries and everything else. After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is, and decided if I had to choose between the two I would choose the physical experience.

Once you do that you start to realize just how much of the consumer goods world Amazon has already put out of business. I live in silicon valley and there is no where I can go for electronics any more. My last amazon purchase was getting some 2.5A fuses because every store that would sell them locally has closed ( either before the pandemic, or because of it ). I tried to buy a video card, and the local computer equipment retailer literally couldn't get allocated any stock from the manufacturers, somehow Amazon managed to get first dibs on supply. I don't like that world, and I don't want to live in it.

An auto parts store or Ace Hardware should stock fuses.

They should, but they weren't auto fuses, and Ace Hardware didn't sell them either. They were really small and specific to small electronics ( in this case a Honeywell desk fan that had a fuse in the plug ) Fry's would have had them, but Fry's is no more, and there isn't any other store like that anymore.

There's always DigiKey if you need something like that, which also happens to have a parametric search that's actually useful.

For your example, from the fuses search page (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/fuses/139) you can apply the 2.5A, fuse type "Cartridge, Glass", mounting type "Holder" and still have a wide variety of options starting at $0.25 per fuse. No free shipping though.

But fast delivery on par with or better than Amazon in most cases.

This is really a bad example. What value do electronics shops add to a neighborhood? Maybe if you need something asap. Remember Radio Shack selling you phone chargers for $40? Do you miss them too?

I love local businesses in my neighborhood but only if they add value. Theaters, cafes, grocery shops, restaurants, book stores with cafe/events, places for kids, etc. Not an expensive electronics shop that I might visit once a year.

What there should be is a local store that stocks everything (rather than having to choose between one of 50 different specialised stores), and rather than self service from walking around the store, you simply ask the shopkeep to bring you what you want.

And then instead of having to go to that store, the shopkeep could even send someone to bring you the goods. It would be like the olden days.

> After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is

I have rarely been to a high street to buy stuff (rather than say a cafe or haircut) for 10 years. Imagine having to traipse somewhere, then actually walk around looking at random things on shelves hoping to find what you want?

I have been to large out of town shops like B&Q on occasion, the experience is better than a local hardware store, but still massively inferior to shopping online.

I've installed the apps for Argos, Curry's, Cex, John Lewis, and a few others on my phone including food, clothing and toiletries suppliers. If they don't have what I'm after then I may revert to Amazon if necessary. I'm also trying to ditch the "must buy now" impulse that Amazon has thrived on, and going to local physical shops instead.

Amazon's supply and logistics are way superior to their competitors, and their app usually is too. This does introduce a bit of friction when making the switch, including a slightly higher price sometimes. However, all in all, it's still worth doing.

It took them a while to wake up, but I think Argos is better now. You can collect from stores, get it delivered, sometimes even same-day delivery. I value having a store nearby. I trust them far more for commodity products (chargers, accessories, etc) than venturing into the Wild West of Amazon sellers and reviews. I also feel I have more recourse if something goes wrong.

(And no I don’t work for Argos!)

> it's very unlikely I need something right then and can't wait for 24 hours for someone to bring it to me.

Interesting how quickly things we did fine without become needs.

This is classic Prisoner's Dilemma. No one wants to defect (boycott). In the end we all lose.

20 years ago I used to spend 2 hours a week walking round a supermarket. I haven't done that for 15 years. That's 100 hours a year and 1000 miles of driving that I don't need to do.

If a lightbulb blows, I could get in the car, drive to the local shop, find one which will do (but probably not the right one), and drive home, or I could just go click-clikc and get on with the gardening safe in the knowlege that someone else will bring a replacement to me tomorrow.

These are good things. I would like an alternative to amazon (like argos or whatever), but they just don't get it. Royal mail has had an amazing delivery network throughout the UK for decades, delivering mail and parcels next day from Lerwick to Hugh Town, from a random shack on a road 30 miles from Inverness to a central London office. It's such a shame that this wasn't utilised to provide competition to amazon, because old people like the idea of a "high street" and living like the 1950s.

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