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Comment by kawsper | Hacker News Reader

> ... because it had effectively become a “showroom” for Internet retailers—people would see books in the store and then buy them online.

Which is what all the real-life stores are facing right now. I don't claim to have the solution, but I tend to buy in stores because I enjoy to have my product today, with better service in terms of refund policies, and that I can talk with a human being face-to-face if the thing is faulty.

I live in Denmark where we have pretty good consumer protection, I suspect the difference between Amazon and a store in the US might be a lot different.

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There was a story a year or two or so ago about a bookstore in Boston (I believe, although it might have been some other major East Coast city) that managed to turn things around on Amazon.

They bought a high quality book-on-demand printer that can print and then very nicely bind a book in a few minutes, and that is backed by a very large catalog of books.

They put in convenient computers so that customers could use Amazon from right in the store to search for books and read reviews. The customers could go home and order from Amazon, of course, or they could buy from the bookstore, and then go have a drink or snack in the in-store coffee shop while their book was printed.

> because it had effectively become a “showroom” for Internet retailers—people would see books in the store and then buy them online.

I think there might be room for some retail outlets to embrace this. You could imagine a bookshop that was an amazon affiliate, stuck QR codes with their affiliate link to the book over all of the barcodes, had a nice cafe and environment for browsing the large numbers of books they have in stock, but don't actually sell any themselves. They could even arrange to be close to an amazon drop/warehouse so you could get things delivered super fast to the store itself for a small convenience fee.

Hmm, seems like this could be useful for more than just books. I bought some camping gear from amazon, and I recall that my biggest hesitation was not being able to evaluate the physical product, and therefore unsure of the construction quality. The Amazon reviews help a lot, but I was still left with some uncertainty.

Realistically, the amazon income is much too small for a business to be viable. I think the commissions are around 5-10%, whereas the traditional retail markup is around 50%. Seems like there is too big of a gap there to make things work, even if using this business model resulted in lower storage and stocking costs for the retail outfit.

Amazon is partially targeting this using its Amazon Source program: https://source.amazon.com/#/welcome . At this point it's only for kindle books (not physically shipping), but booksellers get paid for ebooks that customers buy.

Another factor in Denmark is that Amazon's convenience and prices are not as good as in the US. There's no amazon.dk, so you have to order from .co.uk or .de, which makes the order take 3-4 days. And it costs ~$10 to ship one book! (No free shipping on international orders.) The only case in which I consider it worth it is when I can find a book used on Amazon Marketplace for >$20 below list price. But since the Amazon UK/DE marketplaces have worse used selection than Amazon US Marketplace, that's also not that frequent.

IME, Amazon US's customer service has never been an issue.

Ditto for New Zealand.

> I can talk with a human being face-to-face if the thing is faulty

In the US, most "customer service" people are actually just human-looking facades for a computer system. Of course there are shining exceptions who apply their brain and even have domain knowledge. But most of the time dealing with a "person" actually takes more work than directly with the computer as you've got to prepare your request carefully. Companies wanted workers to be interchangeable cogs, and they got what they wished for.

Oddly: I reverse-showroom often. I'll research purchases online, make them in stores. Possibly old school. There's a greater convenience and generally far better returns policy. And there's now a #surveillancestate argument. I don't know if it was Jacob Applebaum's recent C3SO talk or elsewhere, but the story was of a security-conscious hacker who's taken to walking into an arbitrary storefront for his electronic purchases to avoid having it intercepted and backdoors installed by the spooks.

Amazon's return policy is amazing. They give actual refunds instead of store credit, cover return shipping, and there's never any open box/restocking fee. Stores frequently require arguments, pleading, or the threat of a credit card chargeback to properly accept returns. I buy from Amazon specifically because I know what I'm getting.

I've never been chatted up by a pretty girl whilst browsing the electronic shelves at Amazon.

Plus, you can choose to support local vendors run by community members, or who have less oppressive employment practices.

Staples -- one of the largest surviving brick-and-mortar chains -- announced recently that they were going to reduce the size of their stores, reduce the number of types of products carried on shelves, and (unspoken) focus on their web business.

If you're buying a known product, there's no reason to go to a store except immediate availability.

The solution is that they should (at least in part) become showrooms for Internet Retailers and manufacturers pay them to show off their merchandise.

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