> and ghasp talk to real people, potentially a few, at different stores, to get what you need.

That's really an issue: if you aren't the hard-boiled, super unemphatic negotiator type you'll likely buy the very first thing a salesperson has invested face-minutes in, if it just gets the easy 80% of requirements/desires right. "Thanks for your time, but I'll go see if there's another offer that is maybe 3% better or 2% cheaper" isn't something that feels good to all people. The asynchronous experience of online shopping (and before that: mailorder) is a huge enabler to people who aren't the haggler type. And because the haggling mindset is a learned skill, I'm afraid that it will only get worse the less people grow up shopping face to face. To future generations, every shopping experience that isn't online or at least highly formulaic self-service like in a supermarket will feel like the haggle scene from Life Of Brian (and just as alien as the one after that).

But obviously a total amazonisation of all buying would be terrible nonetheless. What I'd love to see: a site like those price comparison directories but not so much focused on cheapest but on local availability. Current stock, proximity, opening hours and price, they are all important.

Actually I should have gotten my ass up and looked for funding years ago, or at least part-timing it on the side (I'm not the haggle type, right?). It would all hinge of course on integration interfaces with whatever systems local dealers already use for managing stock, because those claims world need to be reliable or else it would all be futile.

> "Thanks for your time, but I'll go see if there's another offer that is maybe 3% better or 2% cheaper" isn't something that feels good to all people.

Not necessarily because they're meek. For me, going to a brick and mortar store, interacting briefly with a human, and taking the first thing that meets my basic needs is a life hack.

The paradox of choice is real. Seeing the bounty of options available on sites like Amazon does allow me to try to carefully optimize what I get for every desire I could have, but, ironically, the process of doing so makes me less happy with whatever I end up with. Because seeing so many options means I've now got all sorts of opportunities to second-guess my choice. And because reading reviews to try and narrow down my choices invariably injects the reviewer's tastes into my thinking, and potentially guides me away from my own. And because pretty soon just seeing how many bells and whistles are available gets me wanting things I don't need and didn't even know I could have when I first decided I wanted whatever I'm shopping for, and therefore creates all sorts of trade-offs to have to weigh.

It's not worth it. "3% better" is a will-o-the-wisp beckoning me off into a quagmire, and "2% cheaper" is invariably a 2% discount on something that turned out to be 30% more expensive than what I originally planned on buying.

Thanks for that perspective, I don't disagree at all. I think all depends on why you buy. If it's a necessity, particularly one that you'd rather not need at all, then it's a lifehack feature. But when you buy out of love/consumerism/geekery it's a bug. I find myself surprisingly often ordering tiny little things that, despite being industrially manufactured, exist only in one or two tiny shops/directories, on the entire searchable web. That's a long tail that simply does not exist in the analog world. But it's good to see value in the other end of that animal as well.

I agree, but as I wrote in another comment here I often fall victim to the same myself. I find it quite paradoxal however, how I spent weeks deciding which sports watch to buy, but how the real estate market here gave us a few hours in deciding which apartment to bid on..

Anyways, I find your point about 30% often apply more to local shops. Price is often a bit higher, but biggest problem is not having a comparable model at the price point I wanted. And with a seller in front of you doing their thing, it's easy to walk out with more than intended.

Haggling is tiring and mostly useless considering the time and energy expended. There's a reason most shopping has gone towards standardized list prices without negotiation, and this happened way before Amazon existed. Even the large purchases like cars and real estate are trending towards upfront pricing now.

Now recommendations by a store expert are a different thing, but local businesses are again limited by recommending only what they have in stock, not what's actually best for you. I've rarely found anyone who would actually tell me to go somewhere else to get what I need.

Is this really true for real estate? In the U.S., I regularly hear how people must offer tens of thousands of dollars over a house’s listed price to get any consideration (Seattle).

> But obviously a total amazonisation of all buying would be terrible nonetheless. What I'd love to see: a site like those price comparison directories but not so much focused on cheapest but on local availability. Current stock, proximity, opening hours and price, they are all important.

Geizhals already does all that and I love it for that, e.g.:

https://geizhals.eu/dell-p2719h-210-apxf-a1849338.html?t=a&h...

It's mainly useful AT/DE though...

People in the US were not haggling for anything less than a car in the decades before the internet.

Not true. As recently the 90s expensive niche gear like a pro audio or video stuff was almost always subject to price negotiation, especially if you were a repeat customer or indicated an interest in possibly purchasing other stuff. It still is to some extent.

In general the more knowledgeable the dealership/salespeople, the more likely negotiation is possible, especially if you present as a knowledgeable customer so that neither of you are wasting each others' time.

I guess I was a kid back then, but I don’t remember any of the adults I hung around haggling in stores like circuit city, and my family are immigrants from a country where you haggle over vegetables.

As far as I understood, it wasn’t in the interest of the big retailers to spend time haggling with individuals.

Exactly! And the same fate is waiting for "thanks for the time you just wasted, but I'd rather check out the competition next door some more".

For most people, this has already happened. It's just not as visible as haggle/no haggle (even to the people doing/not doing themselves)

Sales needs to adjust to the new reality. Recognize that people have options and other sources of information and focus on answering their actual questions instead of trying to sell them on something.

If I walk into a car dealership it's because I need specific information not available online, even if it's just to see the car in person.

What I don't need is a whole sales pitch. That's wasting my time and the salesman's.

> but I'll go see if there's another offer that is maybe 3% better or 2% cheaper

I'll go to 3 stores, and just ask for the price and say "Thank you! I'll come back when I'm decided."

That way, there is minimal haggling, and I know I'm not getting completely ripped off. Still, it's more work than just checking online. But depending on the price of the item, it may be worth it.

That's Google shopping, and the inventory integration is pretty hard. Lots of stores don't or didn't use reliabile inventory systems. I wonder if the pandemic and in person closures have pushed some shops into maintaining their inventory databases.

> you'll likely buy the very first thing a salesperson has invested face-minutes in, if it just gets the easy 80% of requirements/desires right. "Thanks for your time, but I'll go see if there's another offer that is maybe 3% better or 2% cheaper" isn't something that feels good to all people.

This seems like an extremely positive aspect of going to a local store, not a downside.

> 2% cheaper

Unless it's a really big ticket item, going to another store to get it 2% cheaper would almost certainly be a net loss (due to the time involved) vs. just buying the first thing you see at a slightly inflated price.

Even if you are a hard-boiled negotiator, the additional time it takes to visit different stores to make the comparison often isn’t worth it compared to buying the whatever the first floor associate recommends to you.

In that world, what is local availability except that someone happened to already ship some quantity to a location closer to you?

Pretty sure a lot of people just see "Amazon's Choice" and hit Buy Now

"and ghasp talk to real people"

Why add the "gasp" bit? A lot of people don't want to have to talk to people unnecessarily and they certainly don't need to justify themselves. And let's be real: When you talk to someone at a local store you're usually talking to some completely unmotivated teenager who knows positively nothing about the domain and makes everything take much, much longer.

Buying local versus online is playing out identically to the buy downtown rather than at the mall transition: Instead of offering concrete benefits, there is an attempt to control behavior by shaming. It is completely ineffective. "Why efficiently find exactly what you're looking for at a competitive price when you can instead waste your time talking to a lot of different people, doing what you very much don't want to do, to eventually buy something not quite right for more?"

> completely unmotivated

As one meme put it: I am a part time seasonal employee half way through my 2-week notice. Do you think I care?

Last weekend, I went looking for a particular kind of garment. I wasn't hopeful, but I thought I would give local shops a chance. I did it by going around, looking in various local stores, and talking to people. I did this in four or so different spots. I spent probably three to four hours at it.

After that process, I was no closer to the garment I sought than I had been when I woke up. What I had learned from my efforts to shop local and talk to people was that the things I sought weren't carried by anyone nearby.

I went online, and found exactly what I wanted in under ten minutes. It arrived two days later and fit perfectly.

Speaking only and solely for myself, and narrowly about that experience last weekend, I fail to see what I gained. I already knew how to search for what I want. I talked to a few people and mostly learned that none of them could help me.

This raises the question of why I bothered with attempting to buy local when I correctly guessed that it would be fruitless.

I understand that for some people this experience of traipsing from store to store searching for what is not to be found is the most enjoyable part of the whole experience. Sometimes I'm not that person.

On the other end of the spectrum you have items where expert help is necessary.

When I bought my first motorcycle gear, I had little idea what to look for, what I need, or how to verify it does the job. Going to a store that specializes in motorcycles and gear was fantastic.

They showed me how to fit a helmet, what to look for in a jacket, gloves, etc. I could try multiple items to find which brands fit my body, what looks good, and how the whole ensemble is gonna work together.

You can’t replace that online.

Now that I know more about gear, shopping online is faster and easier. But I still wouldn’t buy a helmet online, for example. You gotta test that stuff.

My friend is getting into video. He’s spent 3 weeks looking for the right lens and camera, bought a bunch, still not happy. Hours wasted, edge cases uncovered, room specifics discovered.

1 trip to a specialist camera store wouldve solved his problem.

My butt has also learned the rather uncomfortable lesson that you never buy a couch online. Your butt needs to try it.

Unfortunately, things can get quite messy when expert advice gets conflated with inventory management. And most shops struggling to survive against online doesn't make that better at at all. We really need to find some middle ground where foot-on-the-ground shop continue to exist, but not as an antithesis to online but as an extension. For bikes (of the pedal-pushing variety), there's now a market for what is effectively billed by the hour costumer-consulting regarding size fitting. I could easily imagine that getting transformed into foot-on-the-ground presence of online distributors, with neither income stream able to pay three full bill alone but working out in combination.

You're right, the inventory management part gets tricky. On the other hand they claim to only have inventory they trust and promote. So it becomes a question of "Do I trust this influencer's opinion?"

I've seen modern direct-to-consumer brands use the approach you mention. Their revenue stream is instagram ads and online retail, but they also have physical shops in bougie locations where you can go browse and talk to their [sales] staff. They only rep 1 brand which can be an issue.

Personally I've had good luck with specialist stores. You have to go in with a satisficing instead of maximizing mentality and it works great. The average on offer is about 10x better than the average you find online. (because inventory & space are expensive)

> On the other hand they claim to only have inventory they trust and promote.

Doesn't matter if it's about size and fit. But I guess that's a problem that is very specific to human powered bikes, where an inexperienced rider can make wildly wrong choices based on just trying a few options (some of the best fits could take a year of regular riding for getting used to). There are lots of online shops in that field that make Amazon pale in both price and inventory depth (e.g. literally hundreds of different bar tapes, probably thousands if you count colors separately), I wonder if there could be an upmark percentage that would be acceptable to both retailers/post-retailers and customers for substituting the package delivery hassle with store pickup. Conventional retail competing with that choice is hopeless in a market consisting of nerd hobbyists. The old guard always thinks that customers only buy online because it's so much cheaper, but choice makes at least as much difference.

I suspect that the seemingly obvious hybrid distribution simply hasn't been done yet at scale because the legalities of customer protection require one party to be on the hook when things don't go so well and the online side of the equally wants to get rid of that so desperately that they wouldn't be interested in any arrangement that wouldn't provide for that and the retailer side is fully aware that they would never get a slice of the pie big enough to make up for those risks.

> 1 trip to a specialist camera store wouldve solved his problem.

Why not both? There’s a lot of web-first brick & mortar companies coming up these days. Coolblue is a good example in NL. They offer expert advice at their stores, and an amazingly modern website experience at the same time. Inventory is all managed via warehouses, like Amazon.

I prefer to buy at brick and mortar but I question this reason for it. The guy in the plumbing section of the hardware store probably knows where things are on the shelf there, but probably has not done plumbing themselves and probably can't answer my DIY question about what product to use. For that, I end up needing YouTube.

That entirely depends on the store.

HomeDepot or Lowes? Often times if you are even aware the topic exists you’ll be a step ahead of 75-80% of the staff.

If you go to a proper plumbing or electrical supply place, they can often point out that the video you’re watching isn’t doing work compliant to the local electrical code and you need to do extra step Y or you’ll fail inspection, or that the whole operation is not going to work because the length of your run is too long for the size of pipe/gauge of wire you’re using (which the video never even talks about), and you need to upsize or use a different technique.

Local shops without expertise are definitely not going to do well. Someone with experience and expertise who sells what you need and actually has it in stock? Super Super valuable.

Last Saturday I decided to fix the leaky kitchen faucet installed in the 80's. YouTube had me replacing cartridges @ $22 for pair. They had a former plumber working who down sold me the real fix, a pair of rubber seals w/springs $3.25 This guy told me the cartridges rarely are the problem . . he was right! he also instructed me on how to make the repair.

Man, I read the first paragraph and was 100% sure this was going to be a tale of how some garnet salesperson educated you on the intricacies of the market and your life was better for it.

Turned out just how I feel instead... the idea that talking to people at local stores helps you find stuff is fine, except that I don't need help because Google is much, much better at finding stuff.

Even if you don't know exactly what you want, searching online gets you in front of a range of perspectives that you can compare, as opposed to going to the store, where you get the perspective of the person who happens to be working.

Now to be clear, I definitely like to support my local small businesses, but that's mostly because I also own a small business and feel kinship/connection/whatever with them. There are also a few that are better than the internet (e.g. I'd always rather get plants from my local nursery). It's pretty much never because they're better at helping me find something, though.

Could your need have been satisfied with another product available locally? Was your need for that exact product really only created by browsing online?

For instance I could spend hours reading reviews about power washers and finding the perfect model and then lamenting it not being available at my local hardware store. Or I could just buy whatever corresponding product they have and be just as happy.

> Could your need have been satisfied with another product available locally? Was your need for that exact product really only created by browsing online?

You raise wise and excellent questions!

In short, no. My desires were not readily met with things available locally. My need was not for a particular product or model, but for a product from a reasonably general category of things with a couple of attributes. There are a variety of products available in the broader market that would have done it for me, only some of which I was aware of. Talking to an array of local small business owners got me a circular set of pointers to other shops to try.

In your example, imagine going to local hardware stores and finding that none had anything that would meet your needs. They'll happily sell you a selection of hoses and send you to another hardware store that has a fine selection of wrenches, but nothing helpful in meeting your needs.

In my experience - half the time you’re right. Half the time the local shop product literally will not work, or if it works is incredibly outdated (so very expensive for performance) or so crappy it will be overtaxed during use and break in weeks or days.

And I’m in a major metro area.

When I lived in the sticks? It was more 25% solid, 75% crap.

I can imagine some future world where ordering garments online works for me. Maybe I could scan my body and see an AR version of the clothing using real physics simulation or something, though I'm also picky about how a fabric feels. So, for me, I can't tell if a garment is going to look good or bad on me unless I try it on. Further, I just don't seem to find what I'm looking for online. I also find looking online slower. Looking at racks of clothing I can see 100s of items at once, looking online I see 9 to 12 per screen and while sure, there's more places to look for some reason it feels like way more work, maybe because it takes more time to pass all the stuff I'm un-interested in.

Still, at least in the USA, I don't find it offline either. The USA or at least SF/LA has almost no variety in clothing. All there are are chain stores. The limited small stores I know of just don't carry enough. Conversely in Tokyo I can find 10x? 20x the variety? At least that's my experience.

In my particular case, I was dealing with fabrics I'm familiar with, size charts I can trust, and a tape measure I am comfortable applying to my own body. Combined, these factors cut down greatly on the uncertainty. I realize that I don't represent the typical shopper.

I can tell you from experience that SF specifically, and the Bay generally, has a pretty wide variety of clothing available from a series of retailers. I've seen everything from one-person brands to chains and lots of things in between. You sometimes have to go looking for smaller retailers or more unusual styles. The retailers aren't always clustered together like the big chains are around Union Square. It can most definitely be challenging to know where to get started to look, and it took me a while to figure out which ones tend to stock things I like.

LA even has a whole garment production industry. There's a lot of small brands based there for exactly this reason!

I guess it really depends on what you're looking for. If you're buying a book online, it might be worth going to a local bookstore and checking out the other books on the same shelf. You might find a better book (by being able to skim it quickly), or you might come across another book about a hobby you've been wanting to learn more about along the way.

Visiting physical stores allows for "happy accidents" that wouldn't have occurred while shopping online. Targeted ads (or "customers who bought A also bought B") can help, but they seem tuned to maximize profits, not for inspiring new ideas.

I've sometimes wished that I could buy ebooks at book stores. I too like the serendipity of wandering aisles and picking up random things. I wish I could take a book to the counter and ask for the ebook version that they could email to me.

Instead, I wander the aisles, then pick up my phone and buy the ebook on Amazon.

You could have easily called ahead to check stock of the item you were in search for.

I think cars are largely to blame for the sorry state of small businesses. Before moving from America to Tokyo, I had never lived in a place with anything even remotely resembling a walkable city center where you can easily browse and pick up what you need from local businesses. Everything is separated by a 15min+ drive, and I likely need to get on the highway to get there. Atlanta was the worst for this.

In Tokyo I have at least 3 daily grocery stores within a 10 minute walk, plus dozens of other small shops selling all kinds of things I might need. For specialty ingredients I've made an effort to hunt for specialty shops importing Indian, Thai, and Chinese ingredients. My favorite place to go is probably Kappabashi, a street lined with dozens of restaurant supply stores.

I've learned which places I should go for which items, and I love the variety it adds to my routine.

And whenever a city in the US proposes some improvements to the ped/bike experience in a shopping area, the local small business owners will cry bloody murder. As someone who also prefers to walk to nearby stores, I feel no guilt whatsoever about buying stuff online instead of a local merchant. Amazon, for all its faults, has never showed up to a local planning meeting in my town to lobby against a sidewalk or bike lane improvement.

Why do you think that is? I'm not too familiar with local politics. Generally, I believe studies have shown that banning cars from main street in small/medium cities generally increases business, but I've heard of a phenomenon where all the non-main-street businesses make an uproar about how "unfair" it is that main street will be getting more business, and so the whole idea is scrapped.

I agree, haven't lived in tokyo but I've had similar thoughts and experience going from Chicago/NYC to cities like Austin

You are in tokyo. Come on.

Tokyo is not Niigata, or Sendai, or Saitama.

The tokyo bubble is not the same as the rest of japan

I didn't say I was in Sendai. Human societies were designed to a human scale for thousands of years before cars started dividing us all up. American suburbia is one extreme, and Tokyo is another. Somewhere in between, I'd like to think we can find a balance in city design that allows us all to choose the mode of transportation that is most suitable for the journey.

I think the variety of city types is good too. I live in the suburbs of Austin and it suits me perfectly. I wouldn't be happy in a city like Tokyo (although I haven't been there since 1997).

> and ghasp talk to real people

Actually this is a deal breaker. I'm a very personable person and people usually find me the life of the party. But when I'm looking for a specific thing, I'm optimizing for search latency. Spending hours performing the search is not enjoyable to me. When I'm just browsing, I can enjoy that, but most of my purchases are task-oriented.

You can bemoan how "people these days" do things if you want, but it won't get you any closer to understanding why they behave that way.