And with people being able to purchase from the Internet 24/7, bricks and mortar retailers demand longer and longer trading hours to compete. But I don't understand how businesses can afford to pay staff to keep their doors open at times when customers are thin on the ground. I'm sure they'd be smarter to simply have an on-line alternative for those types of customers. I think we need to get back to more traditional opening hours so that families can all be together on weekends.
In general I'd say that the concept of "family life" is pushed to the back a bit due to employment in general anyway. To my understanding employers sometimes already rather hire people without kids, marriage plans and pregnancy plans.
In a way I do wonder though, how brick and mortar can sustain. The few stores I see doing it decently is because they offer cheap prices, excellent service OR because they're part of a storechain that's being backed up by an online store even.
What I also think is silly, at least in The netherlands, is how we by law have opening and closing times of stores. That model in general made a few people I know who owned a store, run out of business because their product wasn't a really viable one to sell from 9 tot 5, but rather one you could cater to (alongside facilities to sell/show/demonstrate) if you would be allowed to run your store from say... 5 pm till midnight. This is especially true for hobby, gaming and comicbookstores. It's hobby products which people can only afford by holding jobs, which most of the time are at the same time stores are opened. And since it's no big corporation like a supermarket storechain, they can't really run long shifts in that way. I wouldn't say you have a busy day often, but let's face it... sitting on your butt waiting for someone to come in and have a chat every hour or so, for 16+ hours still is 16 hours of "waiting".
Short story of a store in my area;
We used to have a store that sold different cardgames, tabletop games, some practical magic tricks, anime related stuff... pretty much a collection of geeky stuff I guess. Besides that, it had the facilities for the games they sold. Big room in the back, tables set up for the games they stocked. It opened at noon, closed at 6pm. It was run by a man and his wife. Within 2 years the store got closed down over financial issues. Their location was ace (middle of the center of the city where all the other stores were; easy accesible by public transport).
However, they used to stay open longer on thursday and/or friday. Sometimes pulling an all nighter. Just lock the front door, keep the people playing the games in. I've ended up there going there in the late afternoon and going home the next day after 12+ hours of gaming with a few people. And that was common. Though, this is where the store pretty much got their sales going on. Not from that part the regularly opened. That's when people came in and browsed and had no clue what a game lik Magic: the gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh was all about. In the evening the hobbyist came in, they bought new cards, new models, and eventually ended up emptying the soda machine overnight.
The owner thought those nights were the best reason to own a store. It's fun, you're in touch with the customers (the community) and he gets sales going on. But suffice to say, these few nights a week where he can pull this off, because both he can't pull all-nighters each week, as well as customers, being college kids for a big part don't have money (as in lots of disposable income) nor time to hang out till late in the morning for gaming, made the store not really viable in the long run.
To me this store is a prime example of facilities that made up a good store, yet it was it's downfall since it catered to only a select group (in a relatively small area populationwise).
On the downside however, the store had to deal with stuff people bought, not at the store, but online. Since... online prices most of the time beat brick and mortar prices by a stretch. Let's face it... I'm all for supporting a local store, but if product X is about half the price online, I know where I"m buying. The entire concept of people having to pay rent for a brick and mortar store shouldn't be a problem to me as a customer. It's a simple fact I once learned when I was employed somewhere. That company gave us a course which revolved around MUDA (which basically is the cost any factor a product makes which doesn't contribute to me as a customer). So in that way; I can't be bothered to be held responsible for the stores rent.
And with online sales that's an even bigger problem. Because people will get the cheapest way to obtain product X. And worse; they will buy it AFTER stores are closed. The comfort of online shopping is way bigger than any reason you might have to go somewhere physical. And more and more people are finally jumping onto that.
The only reason I see this fixed is if the government would tax online sales more, which will result in a decline in online sales, which will make them run out of money, which will get people unemployed again... conclusion; we're screwed. To be honest I feel that online stores are the worst competition of brick and mortar stores in the sense that some stores, no matter what additional services they offer, they can never compete with online stores... ever. (that is; unless they're going to give out their inventory for free and give you money with it... which eventually is a bad business plan by itself).
fftopic: (very interesting, however)
