The Ohanaware Weblog
How supermarkets prepared us for online consumption
Several years ago, I was on a radio talk show. My main topic of concern was internet shopping and the high-street. While I’m a geek, and the internet is my domain, I still love to go window shopping. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen high streets dwindle until they become they wild west scenes, complete with tumble weeds, charity stores and coffee shops.
In the town I grew up in (a small rural town in the south of England), there used to be 3 magazine stores, a music store, several electronics stores. Then came the supermarket, this particular supermarket was perceived locally as a menace and generally not a very good supermarket. Still people flocked to it en masse.
Over time it would kill the specialty stores by selling the mainstream products at a much lower price, forcing the stores out of business. Next thing you know, if you want a CD that isn’t a boy band or pop, it’s an hour’s journey to the next ‘bigger’ town. Same happened with magazines. Boom! Gone. Mac Magazines, nope, not enough demand for them, sorry.
Last time I was in England, the Supermarket was stocking Amateur Photographer, which is an interesting weekly read. So I was buying it once a week, from this supermarket. I felt dirty, supporting the very thing that I was so against.
Onto last weekend, I discovered that Amateur Photographer is available in Zinio (Zinio is a convenient way to get magazines delivered digitally to your computer, iPhone or iPad http://www.zinio.com/index.jsp) for as little as £25 a year, where as in the UK, it’s £2.99 a week, £155.48 a year! That’s a huge saving, but then there is no longer the cost of printing, shipping, brokering, and the supermarket! That’s right the supermarket is no longer getting it’s cut and I get what I want cheaper than ever.
So in summary, the internet is now beating the supermarket at it’s own game, and I don’t feel bad about it because it’s about time that the supermarkets went down and little specialist stores returned.
Tags: Amateur, Computer, Digital, geek, internet, mac, Macintosh, magazine, photo, Photographer, supermarket, Zinio
July 30th, 2010 at 1:02 am
Hey, Sam!
Nice piece and I agree with your sentiments. But the final 5 words seem to me to be a non-sequitur!
I can’t see how my being able to get stuff even less expensively than at the Supermarket, whose pricing differential already destroyed the ‘little man’ (Alan Jackson), will allow specialist stores to re-appear.
August 1st, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Hey JB, great to hear from you. It’s more sort of wishful thinking
I personally prefer to buy things from people, especially electronics, being able to test it out first and talk to someone who knows about the product, is comforting.
Maybe the new conservative/lib dem government will help kick start something to encouraging small businesses (and helping them of course). Then also maybe Unicorns will fly with pigs?