Why Bother With Stores?

This article about more people spending free time online is a great way to point out something I recently realized. Let me set the story up.

My wife would like to get me two books for my birthday, two books that I very much would like to read about WWII. She checks on Amazon for pricing and finds that she could order both for $30 plus shipping (unless it's eligible for free shipping which most things at Amazon now are.) Ok, fair enough. But we're going to be out that evening anyway so we decided to look at the stores around the area. The cheapest we could find the books were $25 a piece at the store. Borders and Barnes & Noble both charged full retail price for the books. We didn't bother looking elsewhere since those two are usually in line with the pricing of other book stores in the area. So we can order the books for $30 and never have to leave the house, or we can spend the gas money and go out and get them both for $50, plus tax. Now the price difference is bad enough.

But have you been to the Borders web site lately? Try typing in www.borders.com Go ahead...Hey! This looks like Amazon! Well, wait a minute...It is Amazon! So then...Hold on, I'm trying to get my mind around this. I can go out and spend extra money to buy the book from the store or I can order it online, from the same store working with Amazon, and get it for almost half price.

So then, this leads to the moment when Agent Smith is holding Neo down on the tracks and smugly says, "Do you hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability." But this time, Neo doesn't toss Agent Smith off and avoid the train. It is, indeed, inevitable that stores will soon be utterly useless. And they have brought it on themselves with such ridiculous business practices. Sure, there will always be stores. But they'll be quaint little relics, and people will wander through to reminisce about the "old days" before the internet took care of all of our needs. And little Billy will look up and say, "Grandpa, what is this place?" Grandpa will say, "Well Billy, when I was a child this was how we did ALL of our shopping. And then the internet came along and you could get everything cheaper online so no one EVER bothered to go out anymore. Now, Billy, put your air filtering mask back on or else you'll catch some air-born disease because your young lungs have never breathed natural non-filtered air before and all these naturally occurring bacteria floating around could kill you."