December 6, 2005

The End Of Shopping

by Guy Brighton

An article in last weekend’s New York Times magazine bemoans the possible death of shopping – or shopping around for a deal. Soon, the author, Walter Kim, predicts, we will all be running around Best Buys with our phones set to ‘scan’.  When we find the product we want, we simple scan the barcode or at least the details of the products and within moments a text message will come back to us with the prices of the same product at the nearby Circuit City or Cost Co. Kim wonders what will come from this. Where will all the fun of getting a deal come from?

New York Times Magazine

Article categories: Lifestyle, Retail, Telecom

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2 Responses to “The End Of Shopping”

  1. mizubitchy
    Posted from: 62.8.196.210

    December 6th, 2005 at 6:20 am

    Hm, I have to admit that the idea to swap all those findmesomethingcheaper.com pages to the cellmarket. Combined with LBS and Semacode Scanning Phones that’s just a logical step.

    For me two things apply:

    1. It’s really convenient. Of course I want the best buy, esp. when I can’t really afford buying in one shop more expensive while the other 2 blocks away is 20% cheaper. I mean those pages with price comparison in real life retail shops already exist. And people use them. So why not use them on the cellphone?

    Also, when there are big queues in the retailer’s I simply scan my desire products semacode and use the NoQueue Service and have my goodies sent home the same day.

    2. Esp. in germany there is this huge “Avarice is lewd”-campaign from electronic reatil chain saturn. And it turned the whole market into a total avarice (if that’s the right word) hype. Everyone wants a bargain, evertything has to be cheap, no one wants to spend money. I don’t like this movement and I know many people who don’t like it either.

    Therefore I think there is a big well-earning range of consumers who want to get out of this Avarice and Cheapo Trend. They are willing to get good quality for a reasonably high price. The big cheapo-movement will of course survive but I’m pretty sure campaigns will pop up that clearly differentiate their target audience from the cheapos.

    So I think the retailers have to make this shopping is fun thing more clearly to preserve at least some of their customers.

    Greez,

    matthias

  2. JT Barnhart
    Posted from: 71.97.158.124

    December 8th, 2005 at 7:45 pm

    Yeah, if I can get the best price by looking at my phone companies will be forced to price match even more than they do. Through price matching the most obvious likely outcome is comsumers make shopping decisions based on the experience… maybe customer service is about to be reborn.

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