Is the web killing shops?
July 29, 2007
Fopp was once a High Street music store, sadly it went into administration resulting in stores closing. Was this due to increased competition from one-stop supermarkets, where the modern consumer can pick up the latest Kaiser Chiefs album along with their beans, DAB radio and flat panel TV? Perhaps, but more likely the growth of the web in the past few years alone is making it difficult for High Street stores to survive. Why should anyone venture out into their city centre when they can simply enter their credit card details and await their product delivered the next day with little to no delivery cost. It’d probably cost more to visit a shopping mall now than it would to have the product delivered to their doorstep anyway.
The real world shops do offer real people that aim to help their customers make the right decisions. Nevertheless, do we really need a sales assistant trying to persuade us to buy their lowest spec’d computer or the album that’s filling up their warehouses? No. Last.fm offers up recommendations based on the music that you already listen to in your own library, whilst user reviews from the likes of Amazon help us to make the right decision when purchasing almost anything else. User reviews especially give us an idea of how the product is actually like in the real world, helping consumers make the right decision.
So, how are bigger retailers standing up to the threat of the Internet’s strangle hold on society? HMV plan to begin selling a wider range of technology in their stores. But, how can this really help, it’s still going to be cheaper to get the same product online in the same way as it would to get music, video or books. Digital downloads are offered from High Street giant HMV, but it appears to be too little, too late.
The High Street is doomed. Looking back, similar stores like Our Price and Music Zone have each closed down. Our Price attempted to fight the online market by dropping their back catalogue of albums, favouring in-store ordering systems like those found in Argos. The plan was to then mail out the products to the customer. But surely this was the wrong move, why go to a shop to do what you can elsewhere via your computer at home? Music Zone competed for a long time with their low prices, but still couldn’t offer them as cheaply as they were available online.
Prices continue to fall, but online etailers will always be one step ahead. One warehouse, fewer employees, no stores, little maintenance, all mean that the online empires are able to keep driving down the cost. Is this really helping society though or are we simply going to vegetate from the comfort of our home offices, working, playing, shopping and ever increasingly socialising online. We never need to go out again.
[...] December 22, 2008 Last year, I blogged about how Fopp, a High Street music retailer, was going out of business. 18months later, two more victims have emerged, as Woolworths and MFI are going into administration [...]