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.