Invariably many things, in our day to day lives, change in a way that we just do not seem to notice. It was not that long ago that, in many countries, the small corner shop ruled. It not only provided personal service, it was also the centre of local gossip and news. The compulsive attraction of the shopping experience seems to rob most customers of good sense and reason. Impulse buying, influenced by the way store displays are arranged, often mean we return home with things we never really intended to purchase.
An internationally famous cut-price store group regularly has offers on totally unexpected items. Customers are known for going in to buy vegetables and come out having bought, unexpectedly, a new microwave! So strong is our desire to shop that the Internet has become the driving force. Unlike the corner shop, with which we tend to have a personal relationship, the big stores never get to know us in the same personal way. The Internet moves us even further away from meaningful individualised customer service because online vendors can only provide impersonal web suggestions. As online buyers we usually try to do all the research ourselves. The helpful comments and advice we use to receive from our corner shop have effectively vanished from the process.
I recently found, online, a wonderful pair of sports shoes at what was a great bargain price. However when they were delivered, even though I had ordered my usual size, they did not fit. Perhaps this represents an online equivalent of impulse buying but, there again, how could I check out if that style of shoe fitted me?
Unfortunately I had not read the website’s small print and only when I tried to return them did I discover that I was liable for the postage charges etc. The hassle and cost, in time and money, of doing this meant I ended-up giving the shoes away to a friend. But my friend’s gain was the online stores loss, because I never shopped with them again. What I had thought was an e-bargain turned out not to be the case. I learnt to only use online retailers who have a favourable returns policy.
So can you imagine a supermarket with no customers, no aisles to walk along, no checkout tills and certainly no shop assistants? In doing this you have just created a “dark store”, the name for something which exists to cater for the needs of the public’s demand for online shopping. Technology is rapidly reshaping the way we shop and also changing the way our town’s and city’s high streets look. Stores accept that many of us now spend our time ‘showrooming’ instead of doing real shops. We stroll through the stores whilst at the same time using our mobiles to check whether what we want to buy is cheaper somewhere else, maybe online. Probably most worrying for the supermarkets and shopping centres is that some 40% of the under-40s “showroom” and this proportion is set to grown.
Just like other changes, it has been almost unnoticed, that consumerism has become a principal pastime for the greater majority of us. We have become a generation of shopaholics believing that the more we consume the better our lives and social status will be. Some may think that we are destined to be slaves of online buying, where we don’t have any tangible confirmation of what we are going to get.
However we still value the opportunity to inspect what we want to buy, so it maybe that “showrooming” and online buying might be able to combine to provide more openness in the online shopping experience. This has already started in some areas, with “buy online – collect and inspect in store” and “book your holiday – pay balance at travel agent”. So maybe I should look forward to buying shoes that fit but there again perhaps it won’t be long before we have 3D virtual shoe fittings online!