Offline Shopping is Alive and Trampling [Comment]

Sixteen years since Amazon launched. Well into an era once we should purchase anything with a click. Why are there still Black Friday headlines about shoppers trampled in a mad effort to get their mitts on the most recent offline deal?

Take it from a guy named Keith who nearly bought it at the entrance to a Target in Buffalo.

A decade ago i’d have predicted that by now Keith would spend his Black Fridays tucked behind a laptop within the safety of his own home. I underestimated the resilience of terrestrial stores. Sure, a mix of e-commerce and a troublesome economy have left many storefronts vacant, and sure verticals like record stores and local bookstores had been hit hard. But many people who could find better deals faster online are still moving into their cars and heading to the mall.

One irony of this era is the explosive success of the Apple retail stores. People line up outside the stores that sell the very devices that were supposedly going to doom terrestrial shopping. On Black Friday, local Apple outlets were selling a mean of 8.8 iPads an hour . Wouldn’t it’s easier to buy an iPad on a computer? Will we at the very least predict that folks that bought these iPads will buy their next one using their iPad?

Probably not.

Apple launched its first retail store almost ten years ago, in the intervening time e-commerce was set to essentially take hold. Today they operate more than 300 stores that did a groovy $3.5 billion in revenue last year.

Stores like Apple and Best Buy sell the products you’d think we’d be almost certainly to buy online, yet we’re still heading to stores – even when it means braving essentially the mostsome of the most aggressive holiday crowds.

Groupon has been described as the fastest growing company ever . In place of taking business far from offline stores, its entire business model is geared toward providing discounts that send you in your local stores. In its first national deal, Groupon got more than 440,000 internet users to buy a discount for use at Gap stores – not at gap.com. Not many web experts predicted that among the hottest companies on the web can be providing a new option to distribute coupons for use at local retailers.

On one hand, the pace at which online brands have entered the mainstream has been astonishing. This year’s Cyber Monday chalked up more than a billion in sales. Nevertheless, does it surprise you that Amazon is barely the 26th largest retailer inside the US? Sears is number 9.

I’m equally addicted to convenience and the web, and yet I just got back from a two-hour stroll through a huge Target store. Could I actually have purchased a similar items faster, easier, and probably cheaper without leaving my desk? Maybe. But there remains something about being in a store, seeing and holding the products and loading a real shopping cart, not just a virtual one. And the net has always been better for searching than browsing.

There’s also the community element. I’d never trade the experience of continually taking my son to our local market for the supposed convenience of a web based grocer. I know almost everyone within the store several blocks from my house. The blokes inside the butcher shop know I’m a Jewish vegetarian, in order that they give me a fist bump once I buy the remaining of my family a couple pounds of center-cut bacon.

I’m sure Norm Peterson would continue to move right down to the Cheers bar even after he realized he will have beer delivered by Safeway.com. Sometimes you should be where everyone knows your name, not just your username.

Dave Pell is an online addict, early adopter and insider. He blogs regularly at Tweetage Wasteland .

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This post is tagged: apple retail stores, black fridays, business model, explosive success, holiday crowds, offline stores