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“Going shopping” is dead: How stores sucked the fun out of an American pastime
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- Title
- "Going shopping" is dead
- Authors
- Whizy Kim
- Published
- Aug 22 2023
- Word count
- 2793 words
The only in-person shopping I do nowadays is grocery shopping, because I don't trust the person picking my produce to avoid giving me some gross rotten one, or making a ridiculous substitution. Overall, shopping in a store just plain sucks.
Can confirm produce is still a problem with grocery delivery and pick-up. If you want only overripe bananas because you're making banana bread, you gotta do it yourself. If you want some firmer avocados because you don't plan to use them for a few days, still gotta do it yourself.
One supermarket chain is really heavily pushing people towards click and collect which seems the worst of all worlds to me. The supermarket still gets to pick which items you get, so you get all the close to expiry goods, you're still paying a premium over shopping in store (if not so much as delivery), and you still have to be present at a particular time to collect it yourselves.
Two things that make me not want to shop at a store.
Shelves/displays that are disorganized or outright trashed. The items are mixed up, knocked over and on the floor throughout the store.
Constantly having to work my way around employees stocking the shelves. Boxes and carts in the aisles sometimes with someone actively stocking, sometimes not.
You would think these things would be mutually exclusive but they are not. My decision to not shop at my local Target came when I could not find the item I wanted because the shelf was a complete mess and an employee was stocking items right next to it and they walked away leaving it a mess.
If they don't care about their store why should I?
A Pop Shelf opened next door and they are eating Target's lunch with friendly staff, organized product and pleasant atmosphere.
I mean... I rarely enjoyed "shopping" as a pastime. It was always an impediment that stood between me and what I wanted/needed. The less I was doing it the better. People like me begrudgingly accepted retail as a neccessity and not a desire. We're the reason Amazon became the juggurnaut that it is...because if I can type "AA battieries" and click 4 times to have it arrive at my doorstep instead of browsing a store that's a huge win.
The one exception has been trash picking, yard and estate sales. I'm not exactly sure why...perhaps because of the more organic nature of second-hand goods.
For me its because of the possibility of discovery. A store is curated. I'll see what they curated for me. But the examples you gave are all situations where there could be anything. That potential novelty is fun in its own right.
There's a certain thrill of the hunt involved in thrifting, where you can still occasionally find an absolute deal on something you wanted, but weren't really looking for. You used to be able to get something similar at general retail, but these days logistics are down to such a science that you no longer find those crazy unexpected clearance deals at regular retail.
I would add to that, the fact that increasingly I find items are not priced. I am not putting anything in my cart if I don't know the price, and if I have to flag down employees for multiple items' prices, I just won't.
Stocking during business hours... Is this a trend started by Trader Joe's and everyone else is trying to copy it? Or is it just a side-effect of trying to reduce labor costs?
As someone who worked at TJ's years ago: they did it because of the exceptionally small store footprint of the older stores and slim selection for a given product. If you wanted salted creamy peanut butter there was exactly one product, and only enough shelf space for 48-72 jars. This necessitated restocking during business hours, and had the side-benefit of a bunch of people wandering around restocking who knew exactly where everything was, since they needed to know where everything in the store was located. I have no idea why stores bigger than multiple football fields do it.
Walmart, at least, since covid has not started back overnight hours, closes at 11 where I live—no 3rd shift differential necessary if they can just have people stocking all day.
Side effect of reducing labour costs in my experience. Sales drop for various reasons. Instead of reassessing product mix they do the easy thing, which is reduce labour. Retail goes from full time employees that love their job and want to sell to part timers making minimum wage and not giving a shit, because now the job sucks. So people buy less, and labour gets reduced more. Vicious cycle leading to people stocking on the floor during open hours and most retail slowly chasing bankruptcy.
We were kind of over Target once they started playing music in the store. It was so nice having a quiet place to just do some shopping without being inundated with noise. Now that they’re like everyone else with the loud music, why not shop somewhere that’s a little cheaper?
Wait, is that new? I thought my recent autism dx just made me more aware of my issues with sound and overstimulation.... Huh. Either way, Loops in place every moment I'm in target these days, sometimes with the added muter bits. Fucking love them, highly recommend (even if you're not ND).
The music started happening with the last 2-3 years. Recent enough. :)
As someone who worked at a Target during the Christmas season circa 2004-2005, I can assure you that my store definitely had music playing back then. This may be a regional thing, or you just got lucky and had a quiet store.
I think both of those issues are driven by online shopping. Add in employees with massive carts that block the whole isle as they pick for orders.
Additionally, I've found the placement of items to be completely non nonsensical these days. It feels like a recent development, but things that you would expect to be grouped never are, instead they are randomly placed in different isles or only exist on some random end cap. My only guess is that this is also an optimization for pickers.
Oh, it's bad. I used to be able to easily navigate any Target in the area. Now it feels soooo random. I think that's deliberate to make the shoppers hunt so they do impulse purchasing. Instead I get impatient and jist pick up that stuff elsewhere now.
Yeah, just last week I was looking for a brand of hand soap at Target, and two fragrances were in the section you’d expect, with the toothpaste, deodorant, and so on, but the kind I actually wanted was in the kitchen section. The only reason I even knew they carried it was because I found it on the app.
It seems like a combination of things. The article describes "shopping" as an activity as
In the intervening years, many things have happened with the internet. Beyond Amazon bringing you items with the click of a button, there's also, y'know, funner things to do. Browsing target is not in most people's lists of top 5 funnest things to do. It was symptomatic of living in a suburb or in a rural area where there was nothing to do. Now, not only are there more fun things to do in more areas, but there's also the internet.
There's still places where "shopping" is normal. Barnes and Nobles is an easy example - they've done what the article prescribes as well, adding a cafe and seating. Books are a natural thing to "shop" and browse for.
Groceries? Not so much. Trash bags? Toilet paper? The other stuff in Walmart and Target? Yeah, those are things you buy by necessity. I don't think adding a cafe to Walmart is going to make people like hanging out there.
It is what it is. The "browsing" kind of shopping is still there, just at specific shops where it makes sense.
That's OK.
As a teenager in a semi-rural area, can attest that the main reason to hang out at Kmart was to cause mischief without risking getting banned from somewhere you cared about, like the arcade.
Honestly, going to a store is something I only do for groceries or something I need that day. I'd rather order something and have it in a day or two if I can avoid going to the store.
I've noticed that as well. There are a lot more items that are "online only" or it will have a basic version in store and say "more styles/models available online".
Going to the store is awful. There's shitty music blaring over the speakers, interrupted by ads. You can't just shop in peace. More recently, stores have gotten a lot better about price matching online stores, but they're still more expensive in general.
Anyway, I'll stop yelling at the clouds now.
I've been using curbside online grocery pickup since before the pandemic and, produce selection issues aside, I love it. But I've seen instances where the "online only" tag was misapplied in the interface by accident and had to call the company to get it categorized correctly because I saw with my own eyes that the product was right there on the shelf. So sometimes that restriction is not there intentionally.
I've noticed it more with non-grocery items. Groceries are the one thing I still do in store because I just prefer to pick out my meat and produce myself, rather than a store employee just grabbing one randomly.
makes sense. this was with a gallon of milk, so...
Oh man, I just went through this at a local Target in Portland, OR. I stopped in to pick up a few groceries and household items, and I can't quite explain it, but walking in there was just this vibe of heightened anxiety and standoffishness that permeated the whole place.
And then, when I got into the actual merchandise, I found that half the stuff I needed was under lock and key, behind glass. I'm not talking big-ticket items. I'm talking mid-tier laundry detergent and single sticks of deodorant. So you want to get some deodorant, you've got to ring for service and wait for non-existent employees to come open the case for you, while they stand there waiting for you to make a decision so they can re-lock it.
And this is one of the (up until recently) "good" Targets. The "bad" Targets are even worse. I understand that they're in a rough position, but needless to say, I won't be going back.
Good lord, you gotta wonder about the safety of the neighborhood when they start locking up deodorant? Is deodorant theft even a thing?
Everyone needs it, so it resells well and it's easily hidden in a pocket or bag. A stick can be $6 or more, which is the cost of a meal. If you can sweep a dozen+ of them into a bag and walk out, even if you resell them at $1 or $2, you've fed yourself for a day or your family for a meal. It doesn't mean the neighborhood is unsafe, there's just minimal opportunity for paying work and an active grey market.
I mean they don't lock up detergent and deoderant near where I live, even at the walmarts, so I definitely think it has something to do with the community.
What do you think are the characteristics of the community that lead to local stores locking up soap and toiletries?
High poverty and a high crime (specifically theft-related) rate.
My area is by no means rich, but the crime in the area is mainly drug and drunk/disorderly conduct related.
When lower-valued items start getting locked up, clearly theft is getting bad, since it annoys their normal customers as well as decreases their sales by making them have to go out of their way to buy something.
I like the answer before mine though lol
Yeah, and I think probably population density also helps? Organized retail theft isn't just snatching one stick of deodorant for personal use, it's functionally a wholesale diversion of consumer goods from legal sales channels into criminal sales channels. And that requires both a population large enough to buy said goods as well as a large enough total pool of goods that things can be sold on the grey market without a lot of questions. If 100 pairs of jeans are stolen from the single clothing store in town and then all of a sudden a bunch of people have new jeans that's kind of obvious. In a bigger area the stolen goods can be diluted significantly more by the diversity of legitimate goods and number of potential sales channels.
It's possible their community just has a greater emphasis on hygiene, at least more than MaoZedonger's community does.
First post on Tildes ever (been here two months) to make me lol. Thank you for that.
IIRC toiletries and food are the most common things shoplifted, and with a little thought it should be pretty obvious why.
A lot of stores have started selling higher quality (read: more expensive) beauty products, which includes things like soaps and deoderants, so it's not entirely surprising that they would lock at least some of them up. If I were shoplifting necessities, I think I'd probably select the nicer versions of what I needed. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Wellllll, there's more to the dynamic than public safety.
Ever since the public demanded greater accountability from our police force as part of the 2020 BLM protests, they've essentially quiet quit. The most recent numbers for theft in Portland show that the police are referring less than 2% of reported cases to the DA's office. And since we all realize that reporting cases to the police is useless, fewer people and companies are reporting them. Thieves know this and have been cleaning out stores with impunity due to the lack of consequences.
This Target abuts the 205 multi-use path, which typically has a lot of homeless camps along it, so it's a pretty short walk for folks to come in and grab some stuff.
In addition to that, you've got organized theft on the rise.
Targets (at least by us) have a hands-off policy for shoplifters, so nobody is going to stop you from walking out with stuff.
It's a reflection of the safety of the merchandise, not the neighborhood.
We have the added disincentive of living 20 km from town in a fairly remote area of northern Canada, so even going to get a single item means that its going to take an hour and cost extra for fuel and wear and tear.
Lately Amazon has started delivering out here in the boonies straight to our door, and as much as I hate to make Bezos any richer and I'd prefer to support local business, when I can get an item delivered to my door, the next day, for LESS money than I'd pay to take an hour to drive into town and get it locally, it's pretty hard to decide to drive in. Thus I'm stuck in my love/hate relationship with Amazon and why Bezos can buy another yacht next year.
This has been repeated in multiple articles that I've seen (see also: punishing price increases are the result of rapacious price gouging and profiteering by companies who collude or otherwise have near-monopoly power and have nothing to do with labor costs), but as far as I can tell nobody here is even acknowledging that, much less discussing it.
The labor market is tight. Even if wages increased, unemployment in many countries is at all-time lows. Unless legal immigration is increased, some jobs will simply go unfilled, and that has cascading effects for everyone.
No, that's not it. When minimum wage in my area is $14.30, and retail places advertise as "up to $15 an hour!" on their signage, you're not gonna be selecting from your best and brightest. Or even remotely motivated.
Pair that with little to no job security and insane job requirements like 'No sitting for 8 hours except your legally required 10 minute break and 30 minute lunch.'
Add in:
"We'll only give you maybe 24-26 hours per week but never on a set schedule!"
They literally won't let you work enough hours to live yet also seemingly go out of their way to ensure you have a difficult time getting another job to be able to live
This seems like, in US "unskilled" work culture, the first thing that needs to go. I wouldn't mind working more than one low-pay job if there weren't so much uncertainty in the hours, whether the scheduler refusing to respect availability, or unpredictable calls from coworkers or managers to cover shifts that come with social and if you can't make it (or just don't want to), not to mention the basic stress from not knowing when you'll be working Monday until Saturday evening. It hamstrings your ability to make even casual plans.
I can say "so true", but that's about all I can really add.
I think the comment by u/stu2b50 is pretty on point with noting that experiences are relative. The more entertainment options that come around, the less entertaining some things can seem by comparison even if they once felt entertaining in the past.
Similarly, one of the problems described in the article could be that same 'experience is relative' concept from the retailers perspective:
When things are bustling, shrinkage can be a cost of doing business. When things slow down, then the shrinkage looks more impactful to your bottom line. There's another reference in that article about a mall closing down and retailers leaving and citing crime, but malls were already losing lots of traffic. The above figures quoted if applied to that mall could fit the explanation I'm providing, that their shrinkage may have been dropping even, but when your sales are down, that crime is no longer just a cost of doing business but rather just a hurdle to overcome while having less revenue to do that.
Then there is the pricing problem. If the stores focused more on experience, we'd likely not be reading an article about the in-store experience, we'd be reading an article about retailers are languishing and how you can get the same items online for significantly less and the stores didn't focus enough on giving customers the best prices.
I do think post-pandemic there are inventory problems that didn't exist before, but not all of this is applicable to what is described in the article. Global connectivity has been increasing, which means that we're exposed to more advertising and more mentions of a wider variety of products, and this has near limitless scale compared to what a physical store can accommodate. Of course that means going into a store and not always finding products you want. We did see stores got bigger in the past to accommodate more products over time as factories and television marketing etc. broadened our horizons and made more products available and affordable, but it's now at another level as internet usage has grown and online shopping better deals with this scale.
You may not have looked at walking around in the store as an unwanted chore in the past because there was literally no other way in some cases (yes I know there was catalogue shopping and ordering things over the phone at some points in time). So even when not comparing "retail therapy" as a form of entertainment to say, playing video games or whatever the hell else people do these days to entertain themselves, sometimes being given the ability to take the chore out of something that you just accepted because there wasn't another way can change your experience.
Depending on the item, I can often find a better deal online and also greater quantity. Lots of things like soap or just non food consumables can be cheaper buying in bulk. The only hangup of course is storage space.
I noticed the opposite. Many items (especially things like cleaning supplies) can cost multiple times more on Amazon than in local store. I think Amazon relies that their customers rarely shop and have no idea of the real prices.
It really depends on the weight of the item. Cleaning supplies are a pretty good example because most of them are made up of water weight so they are expensive to ship, and the price reflects that.
One of the few things I like about Target and Walmart is that they're one of the only retail operations where you can find the actual price of things online and choose to go and pick it up yourself if you want. Others use services like instacart where the online prices are inflated.
In my experience, Amazon is much more expensive almost ONLY for consumable household goods like groceries and cleaning supplies. That bit's a little bizarre to me but I assume it's got something to do with the cost of stocking them. When it comes to other purchases it tends to be the same or cheaper ime.
Really depends on the item. I'm not denying that Amazon can be pricier (especially for small perishable goods), but they definitely have economies of scale on their side.
Over in Japan and Taiwan, and I’d imagine in South Korea, China, and other Asian countries as well shopping is absolutely awesome for all the reasons it used to be and probably some new ones too. Shopping in the U.S. seems to have succumbed to its own kind of enshittification. Too much greed.
I don't do much first hand shopping myself in general. Even then I have found most stores tend to be on the downhill side. I haven't been in a higher end store in a long time so I can't talk about that, but the lower end has been marking new lows. For example dollar tree, a place I used to frequent, has just been downhill. They don't give you much to expect, and even then you walk out disappointed. From the general state of the store to lack of employees. In my option first hand retail has been on the downhill.
Now looking at second hand, it has been too. Used to you could find amazing used items at a good low price. Now the same item is way higher. I used to find my nugget electronics at flea markets, thrift stores, and other second hand places. Now I find myself not getting as many due to the price/ worth price. (the price may be okay, but it is not worth that price to me) Compared to first hand, you don't expect much in general from the store, and they deliver. The employees don't need to know as much, and that is find. While even on the downhill slope, second hand does stand up better for me then first hand.
As a long time thrifter, thrift stores (charity stores for those across the pond) tend to go up and down in quality and selection along with the economy. When things are going good, people buy new stuff and donate the old stuff. When things are going bad, people try to save money however they can. There can be cultural surges in people checking out the used market, such as Macklemore's Thrift Shop song and reality shows like Pawn Stars and other ones about finding "vintage gems" in the used market that popped up in the 2010s. The used market will improve over the next handful of years.
Personally, the things I wanted the most were video games, and the collector's market on that has completely eaten away the selection; they're all only available in collector's markets and specialty stores these days.
It is funny that you would mention second hand or thrift stores. I was just having a conversation with a coworker about a time we went to Maryland and it unexpectedly snowed. We went to a nationwide chain thriftstore and their not-very-gently used winter coats were more than brand new ones at Kohl's.
Locally I'm seeing tons of cheap pressed wood bookshelves that are like $89 at Walmart with triple digit price tags in thrift stores. I used to enjoy going to find who knows what at a cheap price but those days are long passed..
You're better off going to the locally-owned ones rather than the big chain ones. They've generally got more overhead and are looking to make more money, so the prices there will often be higher. Some of them seem to want to turn into "vintage" shops. "Oh, this top that someone didn't want and gave to us for free? Yeah, it looks like someone online is willing to pay more than the $5 we normally charge for this kind of item so we've priced it accordingly."
A lot of the local ones tend to be run by or for charitable organizations, so shopping there will not only save you money, but will go towards a potentially good cause. Win-win!
A lot of interesting perspectives in this thread. Highly divergent from my experience. We are fortunate to live in a well-off, low crime town. Of course there are some sketchy (pretty tame compared to other places I've lived) walmarts, targets, safeway, and kroger affiliates. But every major chain has at least one nice example. We like the local Super Target, it is clean, well stocked, people seem generally happy, and it is pretty low stress. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's on the other hand are always busy.
I cant' say we really "go shopping" for the fun of it. I am resistant to buying off Amazon. I would much prefer to drive to a store or two and make my choice. I don't like reading reviews, figuring out if what I'm buying is from a reputable seller, or if I'm purchasing the correct item.
The article doesnt mention it but for me the surveillance makes shopping much less enjoyable. I cant shake the feeling Im assumed to be a criminal: cameras everywhere including at the auto tills with one showing my face to me. Locking barriers preventing me from leaving unless I scan a receipt, pressured to part with personal info at the till (email / home address) etc