THERE IS A HELL! - - - IT IS CALLED RETAIL THERE IS A HELL AND IT IS CALLED RETAIL! | Page 14
14
This particular business marks a very specific shift in the marketplace. If you were to look at
book sales you would have seen it for the last decade as Borders and Barnes & Nobles went
down like dominoes. What was happening was customers were coming into Best Buy, testing
the products, gathering knowledge about them and going back home and purchasing them
online at some 30% cheaper.
Heresy! So, you’re saying they’d prefer to buy from a website than a person?
Yes.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves. You can’t indoctrinate someone for National Minimum Wage and
expect them to give a genuine piece of themselves to a job that requires connection. And
customers know this. In fact, many times it’s even uncomfortable to watch someone degrade
themselves to this, and by now we’ve gotten REAL comfortable with the internet.
We trust Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia and Apple more than we probably trust our local grocery
store. The structure that uses in-store people for sales is no longer valued. That isn’t to say
that we won’t have customer service—but these people will be highly skilled, well-paid and
use their own creative personality across tools to reach larger audiences. A great example of
one of these positions is a community manager. I know when I tweet a complaint to some
Urban Outfitters or Supermarket, I’ll get a carefully crafted response from someone that
matters. Not a replaceable face at a storefront who is working for National Minimum Wage
an hour.
Through the internet, connectivity and widely available information has allowed thousands of
jobs to be reduced to hundreds. For some people the question is daunting: Does this mean
there will be layoffs? Yes, but I prefer the word liberations, because less people indoctrinated
means more people creatively thinking, and more people creatively thinking means more
industry leaders, increased market competition and better careers that don’t suck.
dodie ste®eo p®odu©tion ™
Page 14 of 36