13 ms·

This is a really good idea! I love my small businesses but being coddled by the internet is so real, you get used to immediately finding exactly what you want.

This is a really good idea! I love my small businesses but being coddled by the internet is so real, you get used to immediately finding exactly what you want. With local stores, you have to put in some work sometimes, and ghasp talk to real people, potentially a few, at different stores, to get what you need. It sounds like a lot written out like that, but the important bits are that the people you talk to, you learn things from, and that makes you better at finding things. This tool is kind of like that effect, or an easing into it from someone who may have just bought the first-worst thing on Amazon.

Kalium 5y ago
Last weekend, I went looking for a particular kind of garment. I wasn't hopeful, but I thought I would give local shops a chance. I did it by going around, looking in various local stores, and talking to people. I did this in four or so different spots. I spent probably three to four hours at it. After that process, I was no closer to the garment I sought than I had been when I woke up. What I had learned from my efforts to shop local and talk to people was that the things I sought weren't carried by anyone nearby. I went online, and found exactly what I wanted in under ten minutes. It arrived two days later and fit perfectly. Speaking only and solely for myself, and narrowly about that experience last weekend, I fail to see what I gained. I already knew how to search for what I want. I talked to a few people and mostly learned that none of them could help me. This raises the question of why I bothered with attempting to buy local when I correctly guessed that it would be fruitless. I understand that for some people this experience of traipsing from store to store searching for what is not to be found is the most enjoyable part of the whole experience. Sometimes I'm not that person.
- awillen 5y ago
  Man, I read the first paragraph and was 100% sure this was going to be a tale of how some garnet salesperson educated you on the intricacies of the market and your life was better for it. Turned out just how I feel instead... the idea that talking to people at local stores helps you find stuff is fine, except that I don't need help because Google is much, much better at finding stuff. Even if you don't know exactly what you want, searching online gets you in front of a range of perspectives that you can compare, as opposed to going to the store, where you get the perspective of the person who happens to be working. Now to be clear, I definitely like to support my local small businesses, but that's mostly because I also own a small business and feel kinship/connection/whatever with them. There are also a few that are better than the internet (e.g. I'd always rather get plants from my local nursery). It's pretty much never because they're better at helping me find something, though.
- Swizec 5y ago
  On the other end of the spectrum you have items where expert help is necessary. When I bought my first motorcycle gear, I had little idea what to look for, what I need, or how to verify it does the job. Going to a store that specializes in motorcycles and gear was fantastic. They showed me how to fit a helmet, what to look for in a jacket, gloves, etc. I could try multiple items to find which brands fit my body, what looks good, and how the whole ensemble is gonna work together. You can’t replace that online. Now that I know more about gear, shopping online is faster and easier. But I still wouldn’t buy a helmet online, for example. You gotta test that stuff. My friend is getting into video. He’s spent 3 weeks looking for the right lens and camera, bought a bunch, still not happy. Hours wasted, edge cases uncovered, room specifics discovered. 1 trip to a specialist camera store wouldve solved his problem. My butt has also learned the rather uncomfortable lesson that you never buy a couch online. Your butt needs to try it.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Unfortunately, things can get quite messy when expert advice gets conflated with inventory management. And most shops struggling to survive against online doesn't make that better at at all. We really need to find some middle ground where foot-on-the-ground shop continue to exist, but not as an antithesis to online but as an extension. For bikes (of the pedal-pushing variety), there's now a market for what is effectively billed by the hour costumer-consulting regarding size fitting. I could easily imagine that getting transformed into foot-on-the-ground presence of online distributors, with neither income stream able to pay three full bill alone but working out in combination.
    - Swizec 5y ago
      You're right, the inventory management part gets tricky. On the other hand they claim to only have inventory they trust and promote. So it becomes a question of "Do I trust this influencer's opinion?" I've seen modern direct-to-consumer brands use the approach you mention. Their revenue stream is instagram ads and online retail, but they also have physical shops in bougie locations where you can go browse and talk to their [sales] staff. They only rep 1 brand which can be an issue. Personally I've had good luck with specialist stores. You have to go in with a satisficing instead of maximizing mentality and it works great. The average on offer is about 10x better than the average you find online. (because inventory & space are expensive)
- fbelzile 5y ago
  I guess it really depends on what you're looking for. If you're buying a book online, it might be worth going to a local bookstore and checking out the other books on the same shelf. You might find a better book (by being able to skim it quickly), or you might come across another book about a hobby you've been wanting to learn more about along the way. Visiting physical stores allows for "happy accidents" that wouldn't have occurred while shopping online. Targeted ads (or "customers who bought A also bought B") can help, but they seem tuned to maximize profits, not for inspiring new ideas.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I've sometimes wished that I could buy ebooks at book stores. I too like the serendipity of wandering aisles and picking up random things. I wish I could take a book to the counter and ask for the ebook version that they could email to me. Instead, I wander the aisles, then pick up my phone and buy the ebook on Amazon.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Could your need have been satisfied with another product available locally? Was your need for that exact product really only created by browsing online? For instance I could spend hours reading reviews about power washers and finding the perfect model and then lamenting it not being available at my local hardware store. Or I could just buy whatever corresponding product they have and be just as happy.
  - lazide 5y ago
    In my experience - half the time you’re right. Half the time the local shop product literally will not work, or if it works is incredibly outdated (so very expensive for performance) or so crappy it will be overtaxed during use and break in weeks or days. And I’m in a major metro area. When I lived in the sticks? It was more 25% solid, 75% crap.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    > Could your need have been satisfied with another product available locally? Was your need for that exact product really only created by browsing online? You raise wise and excellent questions! In short, no. My desires were not readily met with things available locally. My need was not for a particular product or model, but for a product from a reasonably general category of things with a couple of attributes. There are a variety of products available in the broader market that would have done it for me, only some of which I was aware of. Talking to an array of local small business owners got me a circular set of pointers to other shops to try. In your example, imagine going to local hardware stores and finding that none had anything that would meet your needs. They'll happily sell you a selection of hoses and send you to another hardware store that has a fine selection of wrenches, but nothing helpful in meeting your needs.
- asiachick 5y ago
  I can imagine some future world where ordering garments online works for me. Maybe I could scan my body and see an AR version of the clothing using real physics simulation or something, though I'm also picky about how a fabric feels. So, for me, I can't tell if a garment is going to look good or bad on me unless I try it on. Further, I just don't seem to find what I'm looking for online. I also find looking online slower. Looking at racks of clothing I can see 100s of items at once, looking online I see 9 to 12 per screen and while sure, there's more places to look for some reason it feels like way more work, maybe because it takes more time to pass all the stuff I'm un-interested in. Still, at least in the USA, I don't find it offline either. The USA or at least SF/LA has almost no variety in clothing. All there are are chain stores. The limited small stores I know of just don't carry enough. Conversely in Tokyo I can find 10x? 20x the variety? At least that's my experience.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    In my particular case, I was dealing with fabrics I'm familiar with, size charts I can trust, and a tape measure I am comfortable applying to my own body. Combined, these factors cut down greatly on the uncertainty. I realize that I don't represent the typical shopper. I can tell you from experience that SF specifically, and the Bay generally, has a pretty wide variety of clothing available from a series of retailers. I've seen everything from one-person brands to chains and lots of things in between. You sometimes have to go looking for smaller retailers or more unusual styles. The retailers aren't always clustered together like the big chains are around Union Square. It can most definitely be challenging to know where to get started to look, and it took me a while to figure out which ones tend to stock things I like. LA even has a whole garment production industry. There's a lot of small brands based there for exactly this reason!
- tristan957 5y ago
  You could have easily called ahead to check stock of the item you were in search for.
usrusr 5y ago
> and ghasp talk to real people, potentially a few, at different stores, to get what you need. That's really an issue: if you aren't the hard-boiled, super unemphatic negotiator type you'll likely buy the very first thing a salesperson has invested face-minutes in, if it just gets the easy 80% of requirements/desires right. "Thanks for your time, but I'll go see if there's another offer that is maybe 3% better or 2% cheaper" isn't something that feels good to all people. The asynchronous experience of online shopping (and before that: mailorder) is a huge enabler to people who aren't the haggler type. And because the haggling mindset is a learned skill, I'm afraid that it will only get worse the less people grow up shopping face to face. To future generations, every shopping experience that isn't online or at least highly formulaic self-service like in a supermarket will feel like the haggle scene from Life Of Brian (and just as alien as the one after that). But obviously a total amazonisation of all buying would be terrible nonetheless. What I'd love to see: a site like those price comparison directories but not so much focused on cheapest but on local availability. Current stock, proximity, opening hours and price, they are all important. Actually I should have gotten my ass up and looked for funding years ago, or at least part-timing it on the side (I'm not the haggle type, right?). It would all hinge of course on integration interfaces with whatever systems local dealers already use for managing stock, because those claims world need to be reliable or else it would all be futile.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  People in the US were not haggling for anything less than a car in the decades before the internet.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Exactly! And the same fate is waiting for "thanks for the time you just wasted, but I'd rather check out the competition next door some more". For most people, this has already happened. It's just not as visible as haggle/no haggle (even to the people doing/not doing themselves)
    - pythonaut_16 5y ago
benrbray 5y ago
I think cars are largely to blame for the sorry state of small businesses. Before moving from America to Tokyo, I had never lived in a place with anything even remotely resembling a walkable city center where you can easily browse and pick up what you need from local businesses. Everything is separated by a 15min+ drive, and I likely need to get on the highway to get there. Atlanta was the worst for this. In Tokyo I have at least 3 daily grocery stores within a 10 minute walk, plus dozens of other small shops selling all kinds of things I might need. For specialty ingredients I've made an effort to hunt for specialty shops importing Indian, Thai, and Chinese ingredients. My favorite place to go is probably Kappabashi, a street lined with dozens of restaurant supply stores. I've learned which places I should go for which items, and I love the variety it adds to my routine.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
  You are in tokyo. Come on. Tokyo is not Niigata, or Sendai, or Saitama. The tokyo bubble is not the same as the rest of japan
  - benrbray 5y ago
    I didn't say I was in Sendai. Human societies were designed to a human scale for thousands of years before cars started dividing us all up. American suburbia is one extreme, and Tokyo is another. Somewhere in between, I'd like to think we can find a balance in city design that allows us all to choose the mode of transportation that is most suitable for the journey.
    - criddell 5y ago
      I think the variety of city types is good too. I live in the suburbs of Austin and it suits me perfectly. I wouldn't be happy in a city like Tokyo (although I haven't been there since 1997).
- prima_cookie 5y ago
  I agree, haven't lived in tokyo but I've had similar thoughts and experience going from Chicago/NYC to cities like Austin
defaultname 5y ago
"and ghasp talk to real people" Why add the "gasp" bit? A lot of people don't want to have to talk to people unnecessarily and they certainly don't need to justify themselves. And let's be real: When you talk to someone at a local store you're usually talking to some completely unmotivated teenager who knows positively nothing about the domain and makes everything take much, much longer. Buying local versus online is playing out identically to the buy downtown rather than at the mall transition: Instead of offering concrete benefits, there is an attempt to control behavior by shaming. It is completely ineffective. "Why efficiently find exactly what you're looking for at a competitive price when you can instead waste your time talking to a lot of different people, doing what you very much don't want to do, to eventually buy something not quite right for more?"
- YeBanKo 5y ago
  > completely unmotivated As one meme put it: I am a part time seasonal employee half way through my 2-week notice. Do you think I care?
renewiltord 5y ago
> and ghasp talk to real people Actually this is a deal breaker. I'm a very personable person and people usually find me the life of the party. But when I'm looking for a specific thing, I'm optimizing for search latency. Spending hours performing the search is not enjoyable to me. When I'm just browsing, I can enjoy that, but most of my purchases are task-oriented. You can bemoan how "people these days" do things if you want, but it won't get you any closer to understanding why they behave that way.

Kalium 5y ago

Last weekend, I went looking for a particular kind of garment. I wasn't hopeful, but I thought I would give local shops a chance. I did it by going around, looking in various local stores, and talking to people. I did this in four or so different spots. I spent probably three to four hours at it. After that process, I was no closer to the garment I sought than I had been when I woke up. What I had learned from my efforts to shop local and talk to people was that the things I sought weren't carried by anyone nearby. I went online, and found exactly what I wanted in under ten minutes. It arrived two days later and fit perfectly. Speaking only and solely for myself, and narrowly about that experience last weekend, I fail to see what I gained. I already knew how to search for what I want. I talked to a few people and mostly learned that none of them could help me. This raises the question of why I bothered with attempting to buy local when I correctly guessed that it would be fruitless. I understand that for some people this experience of traipsing from store to store searching for what is not to be found is the most enjoyable part of the whole experience. Sometimes I'm not that person.

awillen 5y ago
Man, I read the first paragraph and was 100% sure this was going to be a tale of how some garnet salesperson educated you on the intricacies of the market and your life was better for it. Turned out just how I feel instead... the idea that talking to people at local stores helps you find stuff is fine, except that I don't need help because Google is much, much better at finding stuff. Even if you don't know exactly what you want, searching online gets you in front of a range of perspectives that you can compare, as opposed to going to the store, where you get the perspective of the person who happens to be working. Now to be clear, I definitely like to support my local small businesses, but that's mostly because I also own a small business and feel kinship/connection/whatever with them. There are also a few that are better than the internet (e.g. I'd always rather get plants from my local nursery). It's pretty much never because they're better at helping me find something, though.
Swizec 5y ago
On the other end of the spectrum you have items where expert help is necessary. When I bought my first motorcycle gear, I had little idea what to look for, what I need, or how to verify it does the job. Going to a store that specializes in motorcycles and gear was fantastic. They showed me how to fit a helmet, what to look for in a jacket, gloves, etc. I could try multiple items to find which brands fit my body, what looks good, and how the whole ensemble is gonna work together. You can’t replace that online. Now that I know more about gear, shopping online is faster and easier. But I still wouldn’t buy a helmet online, for example. You gotta test that stuff. My friend is getting into video. He’s spent 3 weeks looking for the right lens and camera, bought a bunch, still not happy. Hours wasted, edge cases uncovered, room specifics discovered. 1 trip to a specialist camera store wouldve solved his problem. My butt has also learned the rather uncomfortable lesson that you never buy a couch online. Your butt needs to try it.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Unfortunately, things can get quite messy when expert advice gets conflated with inventory management. And most shops struggling to survive against online doesn't make that better at at all. We really need to find some middle ground where foot-on-the-ground shop continue to exist, but not as an antithesis to online but as an extension. For bikes (of the pedal-pushing variety), there's now a market for what is effectively billed by the hour costumer-consulting regarding size fitting. I could easily imagine that getting transformed into foot-on-the-ground presence of online distributors, with neither income stream able to pay three full bill alone but working out in combination.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    You're right, the inventory management part gets tricky. On the other hand they claim to only have inventory they trust and promote. So it becomes a question of "Do I trust this influencer's opinion?" I've seen modern direct-to-consumer brands use the approach you mention. Their revenue stream is instagram ads and online retail, but they also have physical shops in bougie locations where you can go browse and talk to their [sales] staff. They only rep 1 brand which can be an issue. Personally I've had good luck with specialist stores. You have to go in with a satisficing instead of maximizing mentality and it works great. The average on offer is about 10x better than the average you find online. (because inventory & space are expensive)
fbelzile 5y ago
I guess it really depends on what you're looking for. If you're buying a book online, it might be worth going to a local bookstore and checking out the other books on the same shelf. You might find a better book (by being able to skim it quickly), or you might come across another book about a hobby you've been wanting to learn more about along the way. Visiting physical stores allows for "happy accidents" that wouldn't have occurred while shopping online. Targeted ads (or "customers who bought A also bought B") can help, but they seem tuned to maximize profits, not for inspiring new ideas.
- criddell 5y ago
  I've sometimes wished that I could buy ebooks at book stores. I too like the serendipity of wandering aisles and picking up random things. I wish I could take a book to the counter and ask for the ebook version that they could email to me. Instead, I wander the aisles, then pick up my phone and buy the ebook on Amazon.
matsemann 5y ago
Could your need have been satisfied with another product available locally? Was your need for that exact product really only created by browsing online? For instance I could spend hours reading reviews about power washers and finding the perfect model and then lamenting it not being available at my local hardware store. Or I could just buy whatever corresponding product they have and be just as happy.
- lazide 5y ago
  In my experience - half the time you’re right. Half the time the local shop product literally will not work, or if it works is incredibly outdated (so very expensive for performance) or so crappy it will be overtaxed during use and break in weeks or days. And I’m in a major metro area. When I lived in the sticks? It was more 25% solid, 75% crap.
- Kalium 5y ago
  > Could your need have been satisfied with another product available locally? Was your need for that exact product really only created by browsing online? You raise wise and excellent questions! In short, no. My desires were not readily met with things available locally. My need was not for a particular product or model, but for a product from a reasonably general category of things with a couple of attributes. There are a variety of products available in the broader market that would have done it for me, only some of which I was aware of. Talking to an array of local small business owners got me a circular set of pointers to other shops to try. In your example, imagine going to local hardware stores and finding that none had anything that would meet your needs. They'll happily sell you a selection of hoses and send you to another hardware store that has a fine selection of wrenches, but nothing helpful in meeting your needs.
asiachick 5y ago
I can imagine some future world where ordering garments online works for me. Maybe I could scan my body and see an AR version of the clothing using real physics simulation or something, though I'm also picky about how a fabric feels. So, for me, I can't tell if a garment is going to look good or bad on me unless I try it on. Further, I just don't seem to find what I'm looking for online. I also find looking online slower. Looking at racks of clothing I can see 100s of items at once, looking online I see 9 to 12 per screen and while sure, there's more places to look for some reason it feels like way more work, maybe because it takes more time to pass all the stuff I'm un-interested in. Still, at least in the USA, I don't find it offline either. The USA or at least SF/LA has almost no variety in clothing. All there are are chain stores. The limited small stores I know of just don't carry enough. Conversely in Tokyo I can find 10x? 20x the variety? At least that's my experience.
- Kalium 5y ago
  In my particular case, I was dealing with fabrics I'm familiar with, size charts I can trust, and a tape measure I am comfortable applying to my own body. Combined, these factors cut down greatly on the uncertainty. I realize that I don't represent the typical shopper. I can tell you from experience that SF specifically, and the Bay generally, has a pretty wide variety of clothing available from a series of retailers. I've seen everything from one-person brands to chains and lots of things in between. You sometimes have to go looking for smaller retailers or more unusual styles. The retailers aren't always clustered together like the big chains are around Union Square. It can most definitely be challenging to know where to get started to look, and it took me a while to figure out which ones tend to stock things I like. LA even has a whole garment production industry. There's a lot of small brands based there for exactly this reason!
tristan957 5y ago
You could have easily called ahead to check stock of the item you were in search for.

usrusr 5y ago

> and ghasp talk to real people, potentially a few, at different stores, to get what you need. That's really an issue: if you aren't the hard-boiled, super unemphatic negotiator type you'll likely buy the very first thing a salesperson has invested face-minutes in, if it just gets the easy 80% of requirements/desires right. "Thanks for your time, but I'll go see if there's another offer that is maybe 3% better or 2% cheaper" isn't something that feels good to all people. The asynchronous experience of online shopping (and before that: mailorder) is a huge enabler to people who aren't the haggler type. And because the haggling mindset is a learned skill, I'm afraid that it will only get worse the less people grow up shopping face to face. To future generations, every shopping experience that isn't online or at least highly formulaic self-service like in a supermarket will feel like the haggle scene from Life Of Brian (and just as alien as the one after that). But obviously a total amazonisation of all buying would be terrible nonetheless. What I'd love to see: a site like those price comparison directories but not so much focused on cheapest but on local availability. Current stock, proximity, opening hours and price, they are all important. Actually I should have gotten my ass up and looked for funding years ago, or at least part-timing it on the side (I'm not the haggle type, right?). It would all hinge of course on integration interfaces with whatever systems local dealers already use for managing stock, because those claims world need to be reliable or else it would all be futile.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
People in the US were not haggling for anything less than a car in the decades before the internet.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Exactly! And the same fate is waiting for "thanks for the time you just wasted, but I'd rather check out the competition next door some more". For most people, this has already happened. It's just not as visible as haggle/no haggle (even to the people doing/not doing themselves)
  - pythonaut_16 5y ago

benrbray 5y ago

I think cars are largely to blame for the sorry state of small businesses. Before moving from America to Tokyo, I had never lived in a place with anything even remotely resembling a walkable city center where you can easily browse and pick up what you need from local businesses. Everything is separated by a 15min+ drive, and I likely need to get on the highway to get there. Atlanta was the worst for this. In Tokyo I have at least 3 daily grocery stores within a 10 minute walk, plus dozens of other small shops selling all kinds of things I might need. For specialty ingredients I've made an effort to hunt for specialty shops importing Indian, Thai, and Chinese ingredients. My favorite place to go is probably Kappabashi, a street lined with dozens of restaurant supply stores. I've learned which places I should go for which items, and I love the variety it adds to my routine.

IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
You are in tokyo. Come on. Tokyo is not Niigata, or Sendai, or Saitama. The tokyo bubble is not the same as the rest of japan
- benrbray 5y ago
  I didn't say I was in Sendai. Human societies were designed to a human scale for thousands of years before cars started dividing us all up. American suburbia is one extreme, and Tokyo is another. Somewhere in between, I'd like to think we can find a balance in city design that allows us all to choose the mode of transportation that is most suitable for the journey.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I think the variety of city types is good too. I live in the suburbs of Austin and it suits me perfectly. I wouldn't be happy in a city like Tokyo (although I haven't been there since 1997).
prima_cookie 5y ago
I agree, haven't lived in tokyo but I've had similar thoughts and experience going from Chicago/NYC to cities like Austin

defaultname 5y ago

"and ghasp talk to real people" Why add the "gasp" bit? A lot of people don't want to have to talk to people unnecessarily and they certainly don't need to justify themselves. And let's be real: When you talk to someone at a local store you're usually talking to some completely unmotivated teenager who knows positively nothing about the domain and makes everything take much, much longer. Buying local versus online is playing out identically to the buy downtown rather than at the mall transition: Instead of offering concrete benefits, there is an attempt to control behavior by shaming. It is completely ineffective. "Why efficiently find exactly what you're looking for at a competitive price when you can instead waste your time talking to a lot of different people, doing what you very much don't want to do, to eventually buy something not quite right for more?"

YeBanKo 5y ago
> completely unmotivated As one meme put it: I am a part time seasonal employee half way through my 2-week notice. Do you think I care?

renewiltord 5y ago

> and ghasp talk to real people Actually this is a deal breaker. I'm a very personable person and people usually find me the life of the party. But when I'm looking for a specific thing, I'm optimizing for search latency. Spending hours performing the search is not enjoyable to me. When I'm just browsing, I can enjoy that, but most of my purchases are task-oriented. You can bemoan how "people these days" do things if you want, but it won't get you any closer to understanding why they behave that way.