Not your mother's mall (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Not your mother's mall (2003)

sfgate.com

Note this is from 2003...

Internet is no longer just 5% of retail.

That $100m rebuild of the Tanforan mall is already being exited and will be converted to a biotech and life sciences hub.

The rest of the general impact to retail, I'm sure everyone is aware of.

I’m amazed that in 2022 internet retail was only about 15% of the total [1]. The Dept. of Commerce stats show that Q4 2023 was at 15.6% [2].

I expected it to be higher.

[1] https://www.zippia.com/advice/what-percentage-of-retail-sale...

[2] https://www.census.gov/retail/ecommerce.html

Groceries. Most people still like visiting those in-person. Especially for things like picking out fruits/veggies/meats/etc.

Groceries, a lot of clothes, bulky/heavy items, impulse purchases when you're shopping anyway... I probably shop online more than the average person but I still do a lot in-person.

I purchase a fair amount of stuff online, but there's still a lot of things I buy in person.

Stuff that's regular and I want specific brands of I get online I go to pick Fruits, Vegetables and that kind of stuff the experience shopping is a lot more pleasant since it's a lot less

Why? In the age of ubiquitous scams online, including at "trusted" places like Amazon or Walmart or Target that all function as weird drop-shipping storefronts, the ability to walk in, see the item, see that it's not fraudulent, that it's real, and can be returned if it is incorrect or broken with minimal hassle, is real value.

I peaked in Internet shopping around 2010 when Prime was, you know, good. Since then I have vastly preferred going in person.

Clothes? You can try them on. Electronics? Won't set your house on fire. Food? It's fresh and I get it today.

If you told me in the aughts that Newegg would be a ghost town and that I'd prefer going to Best Buy, I'd've called you a troglodyte moron, but today that's exactly how it is.

These are all anecdotes but I can't possibly be alone in these feelings. 15% sounds about right to me. I order online when I must.. otherwise, I drive to the store.

I wish my Best Buys were like that. Anytime I go in most of the small and messy inventory is mis-marked, I can’t find a free representative, and the prices are often 20% if not 50% more for functionally equivalent products.

It’s a shame, in high school me and my nerdy friends would stop in often enough to check out new gear. Now we just swap Amazon links.

Yeah, it’s disappointing compared to how it was in the mid 90s/early 2000s. It was one of my favorite stores as a teen. Luckily for me I live close enough to a MicroCenter which still has the old school electronics store magic.

Microcenter is glorious. I love peaking my head in when I'm in the Philly or Cleveland area. I usually save my PC building trips just to go there.

I'd long ago noted that ecommerce sales growth strongly lagged predictions, and that seems to continue to be the case.

Segment detail on retail spending / sales is hard to come by, but it seems that overall spend is dominated by food & beverage (though that's less than half the total). Online sales are dominated by electronics and apparel. The latter somewhat surprises me as clothing is very much a feel-and-fit concern, difficult or impossible to assess online.

<https://www.retaildogma.com/number-of-retail-stores-in-the-u...>

<https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/top-ecommerce-categories-in-th...>

Key data for 2024 ecommerce categories:

  1. Computer and consumer electronics: $219.33 billion (21.2% of total sales in the US market)
  2. Apparel and accessories: $203.75 billion (19.7%)
  3. Furniture and home furnishings: $129.45 billion (12.5%)
  4. Health and personal care and beauty: $111.03 billion (10.7%)
  5. Auto and parts : $86.26 billion (8.3%)
  6. Food and beverage: $78.28 billion (7.6%)
  7. Toys and hobby: $74.03 billion (7.2%)
  8. Books/music/video: $54.02 billion (5.2%)
  9. Office equipment and supplies: $19.35 billion (1.9%)

Buying on the internet is such a gamble and it is hard to judge the quality of products. I don't think the share will rise much more.

At some point, even pre-pandemic, I came to the conclusion that getting something in 2 days via delivery was probably faster than I would get around to getting to the store. For some things, I still prefer to go in person especially if it's just down the street or I'm in the area. But increasingly little. (Except grocery.)

Yeah, when I read about adding glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, I thought "but... hasn't that golf place has been there forever?"

I kind of wonder if it's still there.

"Natural bamboo landscaping, living room comfort seating and a soothing paint palette mirroring the calendar seasons"...

I wonder how long that lasted.

Starbucks doesn't even have chairs in many of their locations now. The prices didn't drop when they took them out, either.

Amazingly, Hillsdale Mall is still operating.[1] It probably survived because it was owned by a local family from 1954 to 2021.

[1] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3s292u

This is a really good example of how focusing on a single metric can eventually lead to the death of your company. The reason people started using online shopping was to save time, which is completely at odds with the metric malls were using for success, which was the amount of time you spend in the mall and the number of visits you made. Had they recognized that their key metric was at odds with the desires of their patrons, they might have made some significant changes at a time when they still had a strong beachhead in the space.

> at odds with the desires of their patrons

I doubt that at any point if they asked their patrons and got honest answers, saving time would stand out as a large desire.

What is another problem with metrics, they measure an specific thing that is often very different from the one you think you are measuring.

Yep. If you ask people at a mall, they're already there, and probably aren't as interested in saving time. The people interested in saving time also wouldn't stop to answer your "mall survey person" trying to stop them in the mall, even if they were there. ;)

There is more than one reason people go to malls, and "save time" is probably not even on the list.

> The reason people started using online shopping was to save time

I doubt that. Many people can save a __lot__ of time by stopping their online shopping habit.

I think that convenience is a big factor in online shopping, but I agree with the parent that it's a bit of an overstep to say that saving time is "the" reason to shop online.

Personally, I tried to put it off because I like the idea of shopping local and supporting local businesses. Plus, shopping in person was familiar and a skill I already had.

In retrospect I think the thing that really pried me away from in-person shopping and into online shopping was that online shopping (Amazon, in particular) serves as a "universal backstop" for whatever I'm looking for. Like, if I try and find an item in a store and I can't find it (or it's too expensive) then I can always find it online. So I throw a request at my local store(s), they miss, and an online retailer catches the request behind them. Once my now-ex got us a Prime membership this got even easier, and now I start most of my orders online (except food, obviously).

I have no idea how typical my story is but the point is that there's more than one road that leads to online shopping, for sure :)

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