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Making The Mall Even Less Appealing
from the brilliantly-pointless dept
We've written plenty of times in the past about the various trends for some people to shop offline and buy online, while others shop online, but buy offline. However, a new concept mall is trying to merge the two by letting people shop in the mall, but order online from the mall -- perhaps making the whole process even less appealing. The idea is that as you enter the mall you get a little handheld device, programmed with your credit card number and address. As you see items in the mall that you want, you can scan them for more info, and then click to order them. The order gets sent to a warehouse, and the product gets sent to your home, just like ordering online. It seems like this gives you the worst of everything. One of the main reasons people buy in the mall is the instant gratification. You get to take the product home now. Among the main reasons that people buy online is to avoid the crowds and to be able to comparison shop to get the best deal. It appears that this mall takes away all of those benefits in one pointless move. You don't get any instant gratification. You don't get to comparison shop and you still have to deal with the crowds. Apparently, though, this is "the future of retailing."
Reader Comments
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What about bridal registries?
Now you have an excuse not to attend stupid weddings.
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Advantage
Sounds like the advantage goes to the retailers, who can reduce their square footage because they only have to keep one of each item on hand.
How long until Apple sues them for calling the device a "Buypod"?
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Confused Retailers?
They forgot to add the first step of: shop online for buypod. Then your wait for it to show up, then you head out to the mall, order stuff, then wait for stuff to show up. Then you get the complete online-offline-online experience that they were hoping for. Maybe they could also make you drive to the wherehouse to pick up the item instead of shipping it. To further improve the shopping experience.
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The otherside
If you use this system, you don't have to worry about carrying around all your purchases AND on the side of the retailer, you will catch those people that over spend.
Since you have no bags to carry, you could quickly loose track to how much you've spent until you get that bill.
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Trying living in a smaller town
We already have a worse system than this where I live, population a bit less than 50,000. We have the same chain stores that larger cities will have, but they are 'lite' versions that lack inventory and sometimes even displays of several kinds of merchandise: for example a sporting goods store that doesn't stock shoes, a Target that doesn't sell several types of electronics at all.
The response is always 'we can get that for u', 'we can ship it to you', or 'drive 35 miles to the next store where they stock that'. A local merchant group recently did a survey to see why local buying has fallen off so sharply. Shocker: People are going to the nearby town with the larger stores and buying online! A key reason: Local stores don't have what I'm looking for.
So yes the inventory-free mall seems like a stupid idea for all but people who are too lazy to carry their bags but otherwise enjoy the browsing experience. It certainly isn't working well where area businesses sort of implemented the idea by accident.
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No Subject Given
For me, I think this ONLY way this COULD work is if the following conditions apply:
1) The price is very competitive with other stores.
2) The S&H is either very very cheap or non-existant and
3) The delivery is same day or at most within 48 hours
I mean, why would I want to go to a Mall to get an item I am ready to purchase, pay the SAME price I would down the street (where I can take it and go home with it) AND pay S&H on top of that AND have to wait a week for this "privilege"?
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hmmm...
I could see some value in having a "try it out" storefront, so that I could see how things worked or fit or whatnot.... For example, I don't like the idea of buying shoes online cuz I want to see stuff like that actually looks in "real life".
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