Opinion: Retail Therapy

Posted on 16 Feb 2010 at 17:34

 

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Even before the Great Recession, shopping on the high street was (and is) a thoroughly depressing experience. Lengthy queues at the tills, haggard and unfriendly staff, happy slapping chavs and screaming children is enough to drive all but the most committed technophobe into the warm, soothing embrace of online shopping.

The situation is even worse for high street shops now that smartphones, like the iPhone, can be used to compare prices and make purchases leaving it difficult for the spotty, inarticulate, extended warranty-pushing sales assistants behind the counter to compete on price. Both Amazon and eBay have dedicated iPhone apps that work smoothly even over a poky EDGE connection, while Google Product Search has a layout optimized for small smartphone screens. It's surely a sign of our times when, while browsing the dilapidated shelves of the Charing Cross Road branch of Borders in London during its closing down sale, it's cheaper to buy a Jamie Oliver cookbook using the iPhone Amazon app than it is to buy it from a bankrupt book store desperately slashing 60 per cent off its prices.

I don't have any magic answers for high street shops facing the competitive might of online shopping. If I did, I certainly wouldn't be sharing it with you plebs for free. But one of the most obvious things shops can do is to improve customer advice. Not all stores can benefit from this – I don't need help or advice when buying toilet roll or giant catering packs of sausage rolls. But I do need expert advice when deciding what cut of suit would flatter me most, which particular types of cheeses and wines go well together, or the name of that book by that annoying author whose name I can't quite remember. Good luck getting any of this from the shelf stacking drones at Tesco. Unfortunately, such expert help would doubtless be time consuming and expensive to implement on many shop floors which is why it's usually only found nowadays at specialist and luxury shops which are often out of reach for many people.

The convenience of a shop you can actually visit is hard to beat, but this isn't enough for a sustainable business. I can only hope the high street gets its act together soon. With more and more websites like Expert Reviews offering buying advice and price comparisons all in one place, they may not have long.

Author: Alan Lu