I recently took my son on a "GameStop run" to sell our super old PS4. He's 7 and never been to a store with video games before. So we jumped in the car and arrived at the store about 30 min north of Seattle just as the sun was setting. In the window were two kids in Taekwondo uniforms. Both were super nice to a younger kid and immediately let him play and gave him pro tips on how to do slide turns. We then sold the console for $50 and he immediately wanted to use the money to buy a giant Eevee squishmallow that was next to the checkout line. What can you do? :) Now he tells me the story as "remember that time we bought my Eevee and those karate kids gave me a quarter".
Having real places is still awesome. I know the finances don't really scale, but shoutout to Lynnwood GameStop for keeping it real out there.
And RIP RadioShack. You always had a hard drive when we needed one to reinstall windows during a lan party. holds up a glass
Had a similar experience going to a GameStop with my son to fix a gift card that wasn't working online.
Store was great and the young men who worked there were
- polite
- helpful
- persistent in calling HQ store help line to get the card working
I even asked them if there was a way I could give feedback on the store and mention them specifically. They said "Given how the company is doing, that would be great but it won't matter but thank you."
Which prompted another thought:
Retail was a great first job for kids in high school. It taught you customer service, sales, responsibility etc. Barrier to entry was also low in case you came from a lower socioeconomic tier and were looking to gain experience for your resume etc.
Feels like we lost a lot by killing off physical locations on multiple fronts.
There are many retail places that I know that are just unable to keep up with ever increasing rent. There is only so much a retailer can do with the prices of their products before they lose customers. Losing customers only worsens the pressure on paying rent.
Consumers say they lament the loss of brick and mortar stores, yet their actions of only buying online shows that isn't really that big of a loss to them. It's such a weird situation for a retailer. I don't envy their situation.
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?
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.
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.
But as already pointed out, one driver in a truck can cover multiple houses and so is a lot more efficient for the world than everybody driving their car to the store. (maybe, but you have not tried to counter this argument)
> 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.
If retail is dying, how can rents keep going up?
Tax crap. An empty rental lot can be used to offset taxes from a more profitable location of the same owner - you just use virtual or real expenses such as mortgage payments.
The ultra rich are, once again, externalizing costs to society (because a run-down mall is a blight that takes down the value of everything around it) while taking and gobbling their profits.
The other alternative is that instead of niche specialty dealerships, you got national or even international chains moving in, that sell cheap-ass clothes from Bangladesh or other sweatshops in masses.
Retail is not dieing. Spetiality retail is dieing though.
The landlords do not care what type of tenants are renting (for the most part). They just rent to a new retail customer that thinks they can survive. I'm sure there's a 6 degrees to Spirit Halloween to compete with Bacon.
I have the fondest teenage memories waiting for Halo midnight releases.
For Halo 3 we had LAN parties in the back of pick-up trucks after rushing down to GameCrazy (Hollywood Video's game store chain which was attached on the side) after middle school in Canyon Park.
Halo Reach was the Lynnwood GameStop after a friend begged his parents to let him stay out late that night.
So many friends and memories. I miss those energetic meet-ups!