Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason14h
In the past someone had to put up capital for a storefront, hire a staff, then order the goods from china (or insert whatever country good came from, certainly/usually not local) and start selling in the storefront. They also had to pay insurance, utility bills, etc. The barrier to entry was massive.
Now the same person can setup a website and do that exact same thing almost overnight.
Sure retail selling jobs are in decline as a result. But these are not the jobs we want our world to be developing. Having someone standing around in best buy chatting all day and occasionally talking to someone about the "best TV" isn't productive for society or a good use of their time. They produce nothing in this scenario.
It also isn't a good use of time getting in your car, driving 20 minutes across town each way, to buy a cable for $10. Now sitting on a message board also is a big waste of time, and judging by how much people are on here maybe they have nothing to do but waste time and it explains the desire to drive around buying nic nacks and widgets!
It's also not a good use of land/real restate to build storefront to sell these things. Nor the parking lots. Nor the pollution driving around all day to malls/stores. (Yes Amazon , etc shipping packaging has to get a lot better then tricking people into thinking its fine because "Cardboard is Recyclable")
This doesn't even include the ability for people to get their goods to market quickly and effectively. In the past you want to sell your niche good you are begging a big box store to give you product shelving or setting up your own store. (And why are we more accepting of land based big box stores then amazon? Were we happier when the Waltons got all the profit vs Bezos?)
Now you can sell from your garage in minutes setting up a website and accepting online payments.
You don't have to use Amazon to buy your goods. Everything they sell is available on another site and the majority locally/within Canada businesses . Don't buy the knockoffs, support local (websites) and you can be part of the solution. Don't put your retirement savings with funds that buy Amazon.
Except you don't want to pay more or wait longer for delivery and Amazon is great at doing those things so you vote with your wallet and continue to use them.
Amazon and Walmart didn't kill the small, local seller. Consumers did by voting with their wallet. They wanted cheaper, faster goods.
|
So your position is that there shouldn’t be any storefront, restaurants, offices, warehouses, or any other use of real estate where the majority of the work could be either done in or delivered to someone’s home?
You suggested people go to these places because they like wasting time, but being so passionately against any in-person social interaction makes it seem like this is less a justification on environmental or economic grounds and more about justifying a preference based entirely on catering toward a crippling social anxiety.
You talk like drop shipping is some worthy contribution to society compared to working retail. It’s really not. If anything, it’s leeching. And you’re making the same type of argument about the prevalence of digital storefronts as people do with AI art, but in both cases, an incredibly low barrier to entry doesn’t lead to better, it just leads to more crap.
There’s no shortage of literature on the damage big players like Amazon and Walmart do, whether from environmental grounds, how they treat employees, or the distraction of small towns and mom and pop shops. If you want to say that’s all good because you don’t have to talk to someone when you order a 10-pack of HDMI cables… that’s cool, but I don’t think most people think social interaction is the scariest thing they do in a day.