How to hack a gift store: why brick-and-mortar retailers are f'd
December 16th, 2009
Elizabeth and I went to see Handel's Messiah at Disney Hall in Los Angeles last night. Great show! But beforehand we were, like hundreds of others throughout the night, browsing in the gift shop.
The fun started when we found a book we wanted to buy someone as a gift: Tenor: A History of Voice by John Potter. The gift shop had it marked as $40. That made me suspicious, so I whipped out my iPhone, did a search on the Goodreads mobile site, and found the book is available on Alibris for $15 and Amazon for $22. What a mark-up!
Then I remembered that Amazon had finally just integrated Snaptell into their iPhone app, which is an amazing image recognition app that they bought this summer. I spent the rest of my stay photographing various items and finding that the gift store marks everything up by 40-100%.
I left by buying 3 items. On Amazon. And since I qualified for free shipping, my savings were about $35. Why would anyone who knows this ever pay more than they have to in a brick-and-mortar store again?
The fun started when we found a book we wanted to buy someone as a gift: Tenor: A History of Voice by John Potter. The gift shop had it marked as $40. That made me suspicious, so I whipped out my iPhone, did a search on the Goodreads mobile site, and found the book is available on Alibris for $15 and Amazon for $22. What a mark-up!
Then I remembered that Amazon had finally just integrated Snaptell into their iPhone app, which is an amazing image recognition app that they bought this summer. I spent the rest of my stay photographing various items and finding that the gift store marks everything up by 40-100%.
I left by buying 3 items. On Amazon. And since I qualified for free shipping, my savings were about $35. Why would anyone who knows this ever pay more than they have to in a brick-and-mortar store again?
1 Response to “How to hack a gift store: why brick-and-mortar retailers are f'd”
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.
December 16th, 2009 at 11:32 PM One small note: it's not that the bookstore marked it up obscenely (looks like the listed retail price is $35, though university press books are notoriously discounted very poorly, so many stores do sell them for a bit more), it's that Amazon sells things just barely above cost. Which works for them because they don't have pesky overheads like whoever was manning the till and looking out for shoplifters, and keeping the lights on and paying the rent so people can come in and browse the tables. And maybe you're right, maybe that's a horribly inefficient way to do business. As for why people pay more at a bricks & mortar, I think it's different for everyone. I think many people are willing to pay for the ability to browse, to find books they couldn't find otherwise, to look at a curated group of books out of the millions out there in the world, to get help from people who know more than they do about books or shoes or what have you. Some people do that on Goodreads, some people do it in bookstores! In the interests of full disclosure: I run a small bookstore that charges full price for books. And I promise you, at least 95% of my customers know they can get the books I sell for cheaper online. But they also know that in order for a bookstore to stay open, people must buy books there. And it seems like they like us (or the ability to browse, or the ability to meet authors in a store down the street for them, or our book selection, or some service we provide) enough to pay the extra couple of bucks; YMMV.