I know, it’s weird. There are vacant storefronts everywhere, yet they are still building new strip malls. I get it that sometimes it’s easier to build something new to order than it it is to go in and redo an existing structure, but the current glut of retail buildings seems ridiculous.
Strangely, around where I’m at now, building owners have been replacing the high turnover retail stores with office space leases. So you’ll have a strip mall with an insurance firm, a tax firm, a tiny sandwich shop, and a nail parlor. And every two years, the sandwich shop will become some other food establishment.
I don’t know if this will solve their co-mingle problem. Amazon is still going to need to store these shoes in their warehouse in order to make the kind of quick deliveries everyone sees. So how am I, the consumer, supposed to know which products are direct and won’t be co-mingle vs. those which are?
I think Amazon will simply kill a lot of brick and mortar stores and then put in their own brick and mortar superstores. I could even see them taking over an entire mall and putting in their own specialty stores.
I usually have good luck buying clothes at Amazon, because my sizes are usually easy to fit.
But strangely, I recently bought 5 pairs of Timberland shoes, 3 fit great and 2 not so much.
Okay, I just have to ask:
Outside of a catastrophic event in one’s life, why would you buy 5 pairs of shoes at one time?
Ya, I’ve done the same thing. Hell, you didn’t even have to lie… Amazon basically had a reason for return which was “Changed my mind!”
It’s one of the things about amazon prime which is so great… you can return anything for free with no hassle at all. Print up return label, slap it on the box, drop at UPS store… get your refund literally as soon as they scan the box at UPS.
I did it for Jeans too… Cause Amazon carries essentially every single kind of Levis made, way more than any normal retailer, so you can just try all of them and send back what you don’t want.
I mentioned this to people at work and they were all like “oh xyz already does this” so they were decidedly not impressed. I do think that Amazon doing it will be a game-changer though.
In that vein, I was talking to a co-worker about the whole “buy a bunch of stuff and return what doesn’t fit” idea. She’s a 6’ tall woman who complains about never finding stuff in her size. Plus, she said she has size… 12(?) feet. Really big. So finding shoes is a problem. Her strategy is to get around 10 pair of shoes from Zappos, try them all, and send back the ones that don’t fit. She was saying it’s great because they give you a year to return them, so there’s no time pressure - and in fact she’s bought shoes, had them a month or two, and then decide “y’know, I’m never going to wear these” - and sends them back. So if Amazon moves that behavior to mainstream, I do think it’ll be problems for the clothing industry. (and yeah, I didn’t realize Amazon bought Zappos a while ago, so maybe they’ve been perfecting their technique there).
The big difference here is that you aren’t being charged for the items, then returning them. With this program you’re having stuff sent to you, then picking what to keep and being charged after you make that decision. In practical terms, the end result is the same, but you aren’t getting a ding for too many returns (which Amazon, like all retailers does keep track of) and you’re not dealing with the hassle of the charge processing back and forth.
I’ve not done it. However, my SO has. I can summarize it as:
I need these for work, with options.
So she will pick a style of shoe that wears well for work, then have color combinations for said shoe to match multiple outfits.
I was explaining this to my wife the other day and she seemed offended by the whole concept. Her objections were:
1 Amazon doesn’t off a lot of the brands she really wants (e.g. Ann Taylor)
2 You can’t tell what the quality is without feeling the stitching
3 The sizes are too easy to get wrong on-line
4 She doesn’t want to wait two days to get clothes
Try as I might, I couldn’t convince her that the whole purpose of the service was to mitigate #2 and #3. I guess she felt it wouldn’t make that big a difference.
The first one… I dunno, I just checked and Ann Taylor is available through Amazon, but that doesn’t mean other brands won’t be. But I see this as a logistics thing, not a systemic issue.
The last one… well yeah, I guess. Amazon’s never going to give you that degree of immediacy through the mail.
As for me, I’m really excited for the service. I actively loathe in-person shopping and being abnormally-tall I almost never find anything in my size in-person anyway. This service will make what I do today about 50% easier, what with the re-sealable boxes and pre-printed labels. Bring it on!
Huh, I didn’t even know that Amazon cared about “too many returns”. I haven’t returned tons of stuff (at least not as a percentage of the mountains of junk I buy from them), so maybe I just never hit the limit.
This is big one for some people. The immediate gratification of shopping in a brick & mortar store isn’t something Amazon can really fight with this system. Some people just want the experience of perusing a selection and walking out with that special something right now.
Me? I’m good. I think I can count on one hand the amount of times in my life that I absolutely had to have a certain item of clothing that same day.
I get the browsing thing, but I don’t get the “walking out with that special something right now”, for clothes anyway. How often do you buy something to wear the next day? Maybe when you’re going on holiday, or you realise you didn’t bring something on your business trip.
I don’t, but I get it. Clothes shopping for some people isn’t about fulfilling a practical need. It’s a ritual that tickles their pleasure center. The act of shopping itself is the draw, and that includes being there in-person, making a choice, and walking out with the item that very same day.
It’s similar to buying games on Steam during a sale to dump into a backlog. There’s no logical reason for it. We tell ourselves that we’re taking advantage of the sale price for when we do want to play that game, but in reality it’s the shopping and buying that’s important.
Yeah, but how often does THAT happen?
Oh. yeah.
Because the two pairs I had were worn out, and the color options for the boatshoes I like, in my size, have been extremely limited the past few years, so I took advantage of the options they surprising had…
I wear this type of shoes seven days a week, at some time in the day too.
I want shoes for an event this weekend. I don’t have time to order one pair, risk them not fitting and sending them back. It won’t make the time frame… so you order 2-3. VIP Zappos lets you do this. Some stores though charge you return shipping or they give you a hassle about the return or my least favorite, charge to ship me to my home but not the store, that last one seems to be the favorite of the retailers that are not doing well actually, JCP, Macy’s, Ascena.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest, so I could easily imagine myself buying the following around the same time:
- Running shoes
- Waterproof work shoes
- Normal work shoes
- Hiking shoes/boots
- Casual wear
- Waterproof casual wear
Waterproof shoes since I tend to walk at least 30 minutes a day going to/from bus stops or walking around downtown, and hate doing so in the rain, which we get a lot of.
Sure I might not desperately need all of them suddenly at the exact same time, but I don’t buy shoes very often, so if a store is giving me an incentive to replace many or all of them for a discount I’d definitely consider it.
Well, with the exceptions of Nesrie and Skipper’s SO, you all are a bunch of shoe fetishists! ;-P