Quote:
Originally Posted by GA Russell
I can foresee many b&m's closing because they offer what can easily be purchased by mail order at a lower price.
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Basically, the same thing that happened when big-box "destination" stores lured consumer money away from smaller, more local stores is now happening in turn to those big-box stores. If you go far enough back, operating a shop was a part-time occupation for a craftsman, and those tiny shops were gradually replaced by small shops, etc. What we think of as "normal" (as in "omg they're replacing what has Always Been That Way) depends on where and when we grew up and what we saw around us as children. A lot of people want to pick some date in the past and say it should be
that way because that's "normal" to them.
I remember when we didn't have ten kinds of ripe tomatoes in the grocery store when snow was on the ground. How many people want to give up their supermarket for a little store that could be mislaid somewhere in the produce section? Not many, I would suspect.
On the plus side, the barriers to entry are a lot lower for online businesses than they are for brick-and-mortar stores. So there's that.