Tuesday, June 23, 2009

"Back to the Future!"

I mean, the sub-title of this article could have been: "We're all Walmart now. Except with better brands!"

The reporter didn't ask any of the hard questions.

How are you going to make luxury goods cheaper?

Are kiosk machines an improvement? (Not to me, they aren't.)

How are you going to provide more service without more service people? Or better service people by paying them better?

How is providing less types of product, and less of each product, an improvement?

If confusion was a problem, why is it only be addressed now? Is that a real problem?

And so on.

There's a real "Back to the Future" vibe to the whole thing.

I can just imagine the brain-trust at Sears:

"Why are we carrying so much product, when we can keep them at a centralized location and let people order from afar?

"Hey, boss. I got an idea. We'll put out a paper thingie that shows all the possible product we might carry, and send it direct to the households. Then we don't have to pay all the overhead of having actual people selling actual product at actual locations...

"Great idea, Dunder! We'll call it....a Catalog. Yeah, that's it. The Sears Catalog. It'll be a hit!!"

1 comment:

Duncan McGeary said...

Only, in this case, they'll be sending you to a machine. Yuck.

Hey, My sunny cantankerous face is behind my counter every day, I know my product, and if I can get the product, I'll have it for you in a week, no charge, pay for the product when it comes in.

Oh....whatever. It's a lost cause.