I disagree. Amazon is an utter failure when I don’t know the exact product I want to buy: reviews are faked and many of the products are of low quality, with no

I disagree. Amazon is an utter failure when I don’t know the exact product I want to buy: reviews are faked and many of the products are of low quality, with no way to test them except for a terribly inconvenient return process. I’d rather just try on clothes in a store and not buy ones that I don’t like instead of having to sigh and package them up and wait for a refund. You may see retail employees as unnecessary middlemen, but they provide a value a machine cannot. I can talk to GameStop employees about which new games they played to see if they’ll be fun; I can talk to petsmart employees about proper pet care; I can go over installation prodcedures with the Geek Squad folks at BestBuy; I can get recommendations on outfits at the upscale men’s clothing store I frequent...and so on. There is no superior specialization in this regard. Many of these examples are because of the relationships I have cultivated with long-term retail employees, who know me and my preferences far better than any machine learning algorithm has attempted to match.