The ultimate example of storefront-meets-pick-and-pack is B&H Photo Video in midtown NYC. I’ve always been excited to see other specialist stores — albeit a li

The ultimate example of storefront-meets-pick-and-pack is B&H Photo Video in midtown NYC. I’ve always been excited to see other specialist stores — albeit a little more modestly — follow their model. In the UK, Axminster Tools is one of the best examples that springs to mind. With the collapse of Amazon’s quality for anything except boxed brands, these kinds of storefronts that do pick-and-pack make for an exciting future that will fill the void. I live in a city with a thriving independent sewing supply shop, art supply shop, and hardware store. All have an online presence of the highest quality. It is subtle, but you can see how they have slowly morphed over the years from bricks and mortar stores into online warehouses which happen to take walk-ins. The other big change, aside from the Amazon screwup, seems to be that I buy all my supplies on my phone now. The infra ecosystem that includes Stripe and Shopify makes it so unbelievably easy to checkout from diverse online stores. The phone OSs with Apple Pay / Wallet and automated form filling are great. The one thing that still sticks out like a sore thumbs is iOS seems to have a split brain about which parts of the OS know about which credit cards. Apple Pay knows one thing and Safari Autofill knows another — hopefully the two will converge in future iOS releases.