I was in the market for a new pair of shoes last May. I work on my feet a lot, so support and breathability are important, but I also like wearing shoes that if the opportunity presented itself that I could wander off on a five-mile hike at the drop of a hat. In an average year, I spend about $250 on two good pairs of shoes.
Two hours of store visits later, the best deal I found in town was that Dick’s Sporting Goods could have something kind of like what I wanted shipped to the store in three days. Fifteen minutes later, I was at home; and two days later, the mail carrier handed me a box from Amazon, which contained exactly what I wanted.
I keep a running tally of things that I’ve given up trying to get from local brick-and-mortar retailers in town and saved time (and in some cases a little money) buying it online. The list is wide ranging: books, fertilizer, pens, foods, tools, electronics, clothing, bicycle parts, kitchen supplies.
By now, I think most of us who live in a town like Mount Pleasant has a similar story. Given the hand wringing over the death of major retailer chains — Toys ‘R Us earlier this year, and now talk has turned to Barnes & Noble — this is an underappreciated point. Traditional brick-and-mortar chain retail was not very good to communities like this one.
We forget as a people that the point of capitalism is a means of getting goods and services to the marketplace where people who need and want them can access them. It doesn’t exist purely to make people wealthy.
In its time, brick-and-mortar retail chains were the best option. They carried a wide selection, so that even if it wasn’t exactly what you wanted it might approach close. But, if they didn’t have exactly what you wanted, your choice was to keep looking or make a compromise.
But, of course, you had to travel to the store. For places like MC Sports and Kmart, when they were open, the trip was short. Barnes & Noble and Toys ‘R Us never made it to Isabella County. With selection limited by storage space and location limited by geography, their value to this community as a means to deliver goods is pretty narrow.
Online retail, led by Amazon, broke through those barriers, providing a breadth of variety and efficiency in delivery that local brick-and-mortar can’t. A two-day wait? Sure, but the real comparison is in how much time and hassle is spent driving to four local stores versus spending time on four different retail websites on your phone or laptop.
What Amazon doesn’t offer is the social experience, of course. Like a lot of people, I have fond memories of looking over a possible book purchase over a cup of coffee, and have stores locally where I enjoy chatting with the owner and/or staff, especially if they can help inform a purchase decision. I share concerns that doing away with common shopping spaces turns us from a community of people into a group of consumers isolated from each other.
The issue isn’t whether there is no value, but whether the value justifies what is really subsidizing an outdated, inefficient means to deliver consumer goods. That’s banking on sentimentality as a business plan, which doesn’t seem like a sound approach. It also doesn’t do a good job in rebutting the realization that killing traditional brick-and-mortar has, for smaller, more rural communities like Mount Pleasant, been a pretty big net positive. Keep that in mind when you hear the president trash it, or people bemoan that it’s killing suburban chain store.
Eric Baerren is a Morning Sun columnist. He can be reached at ebaerren@gmail.com or on Twitter at @ebaerren.