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Comment by Shog9 | Hacker News Reader

Even before "online" was an option, folks were fleeing high prices in high rent districts for cheaper goods on the outskirts. Heck, I remember folks banding together to get in on bulk buys decades ago, when that was neither convenient nor quick. High rent will kill retail in an area no matter what; if online also gets you faster and easier, then who would choose anything else?

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There was a local camera shop in my town, this was back in the 1980s. I went in to look at some cameras and the salesman mentioned how they were having problems because people would come in and look at the cameras and get advice and then go order them from 47th Street Photo or Adorama or one of the other big mail-order places that advertised in photography magazines.

Not a new phenomenon.

I purchased my telescope and mount from a "local" store. It was >30 miles away in the metroplex, but it was a physical store with human employees. I went in with an idea of what I wanted to buy, but the person there asked me a whole slew of questions to ensure I was going to be happy with the purchase. They then also knew that my selected scope and selected mount would need an additional adapter plate that I would not have known about if I bought the items online. When I went to pick it up, they opened the boxes with me and helped me assemble the whole thing with a quick walk through on operating the mount. The only thing missing from this white glove service were the literal white gloves.

A year later, I wanted to buy a scope as a guide scope, and they had sadly closed. Telescopes are clearly a niche market, and even though it was a proper store the market just wasn't there to sustain the rent. There are plenty of places to go online to get similar advice, but nothing online can replace the experience of having someone right there showing something to you.

Sadly, the longer the internet exists, the less I'm liking it. It is soulless and just sucks the soul out of humanity more than it adds.

I remember that from the 1970s, too. I think photo gear might have been a unique case because the market was big enough to support those huge mailorder shops in NYC, and most items were expensive enough that the markup of buying at a local shop really hurt. As a young, cash-strapped, photography enthusiast, I felt guilty about buying all my major gear online, but I could bring myself to purchase only small accessories from the (really nice) people at the local camera shop.

What it suggest to me is that delivery fees are too cheap. Amazon subsidizing shipping to the point customers expect same-day as an option on something as insignificant than it was just a simple button click. No other thought given to the actual cost. Where going to the store probably means putting on clothes, driving somewhere, dealing with other humans, before driving back. The original online purchase meant possibly saving taxes, but now everyone collects taxes so no savings there. If there was a tipping point of being able to save brick&mortar, COVID pushed it over to the non-recoverable side.

> Amazon subsidizing shipping

Do they still do this?

Do, did, does it matter. The sheeple are now hooked on the free shipping, and are now too addicted for how it happened to matter.

It matters. If it's not subsidized, it's not actually free, it's just baked into the price, and a large player like Walmart might be able to compete.

Which is possibly the bigger deal. Every time I shop at a specialty provider I end up frustrated by their lack of clarity around shipping costs - many will actually force you to go through the entire order process before giving you a shipping estimate, complete with collecting contact information.

Makes it very tedious to price-shop.

I will actually go out of my way to search for some suppliers on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, even Tictok before dealing with buying directly, just so I can rule them out if they're gonna pull a "$10 + $60 s&h" trick.

And... Again, this isn't new; pretty sure Ronco was doing this on TV before the Web.

And the old 10 CDs for $0.01 requiring a minimum full price purchase of some sort of subscription that is difficult to cancel has been around long before modern SaaS platforms.

The old "which long distance carrier do you want?" with an "I don't care" response resulted in you receiving the most expensive long distance plan from a company called "I Don't Care".

Just because scams/shaddy practices existed in the days of yore does not make them any more acceptable today.

Which is why companies that tell you what you'll pay up-front (Amazon, eBay) have made life hard for "traditional" sellers. Your sheep are tired of being fleeced.

What I find wild is at least at my walmart they pay the employees to shop for customers for their delivery service. Like how can that be cost effective? Walmart used to be a leader in tech in the 90s now it's applying ancient techniques to modern problems.

On a per-customer basis the cost of last-mile shipping is just the cost of the truck driving from the prior delivery to your house. That's probably less than the cost of you driving to a store and back.

Conveniently ignoring the cost from the distro warehouse to the neighborhood and the return leg back to the warehouse. sure, it can be split amongst deliveries on the route, but it is not free

Retail is just a warehouse you walk into: they pay the same costs

Retail does not need to employ the fleet of drivers going door to door with those packages. The drivers need paid, they need fuel, the trucks need maintenance. Those externalities are made way more clear when someone has to get themselves to a store to pick up the item instead.

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