Email this

Print this

Send comment

Strange Behavior

The way we consumers spend our time, money, and mental energy to acquire goods and services is crazy. Here's the situation:

You walk into a grocery store. Or it could be a department store, a clothing store, a discount store, whatever. You are hit with sights and smells that are designed to make you buy things, whether you want them or not. Here's just one example: The stuff on the "endcaps" (end-of-aisle displays) is always on sale, right? That's why it's on the endcaps, right? Wrong. The stores know you think that, so the stuff on endcaps is often at full price. But how would you know that without spending some time to check it out?

Anyway, you grab a shopping cart. You wheel this cart up and down aisles crowded with shopping carts, people, kids, and basket displays (by the way, those basket displays are a recent innovation that are put there to slow you down).

Now, here is where it really gets insane: You start to pick items off of shelves and put them in your cart. Say you need aspirin. Hopefully you remembered that you need it, or you check your shopping list if you're really organized. You compare the different products based on ... Price? Unit price? Past experience? Brand name? Tablet color? Label color? You pick one off the shelf and put it in your cart. You do this over and over again, product after product. Even if you're buying the product for the 100th time, you still do it. Hey, it has to be done, right?

You make this journey over and over again, product after product, week after week, year after year. It's pretty much the same thing. Sure you're making some decisions, maybe shaving a dollar or two, but do you really need to "micro-manage" this process? We believe you're wasting your time. Could you see any business doing this? Could you see Toyota or Wal-Mart saying, "We need some more parts (or merchandise). Let's go down to our suppliers and pick the stuff out. What do we need? Don't worry. We'll make up our minds when we get there and see what they have." Are Toyota and Wal-Mart losing time or money because they have taken the insanity out of the process?

We consumers just accept this. We're so used to it, it doesn't even occur to us that there's a better way. It's hard to see how crazy it is. We've been shopping this way for decades. Personal computers and the internet didn't exist until recently. If you don't see the insanity of it now, sooner or later, it will hit you.

We're living in the dark age of shopping!

"As a society, we need a new vision of consumerism. The primitive way that most people now go about making their basic lifestyle decisions leads to needless waste and suffering." - James H. Snider, The Futurist, December 1992

Partial Solutions

Does online shopping solve this problem? Only partly. Online shopping removes some of the old problems (legwork, limited store hours, etc.) but creates some new ones (finding what you're looking for, inability to comparison shop, inability to handle the merchandise, etc.). A recent statistic says that it takes 26 clicks to buy something on the web. If you need to buy just twenty items, do you really want to click 520 times? Is it really less time consuming, expensive, or stressful for consumers to shop on the web? Maybe for some products, in some situations. But online shopping is often more trouble that it's worth. Basic online stores are only the beginning. Much more can be done.

Do price comparison web sites solve this problem? Actually, they don't do very well in the area of low-cost repeat-purchase products. Also, they are limited: they only survey items offered on the web, they do an incomplete job of that, and even then, merchants often block them from surveying their online stores. Also, they often list featured merchants first -- whether they have the lowest price or not.

In short, online shopping and price comparison sites use technology to some advantage. But shopping is still a burden.

The MakeLifeEasy Solution

Email this

Print this

Send comment