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Microsoft’s “new approach” to retail stores: Closing them forever:
Microsoft's retail stores, like many retailers throughout the nation, have been closed for months due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. If you were hoping to visit one again as restrictions in your state ease up, however, you're out of luck: the Microsoft Store is done for good.
The company announced the closure today, amusingly, as the Microsoft Store taking "a new approach to retail," by which it means "not actually operating retail stores." Although four locations—in London, New York City, Sydney, and Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus—will remain open, they will become "experience centers," where one can see, touch, and play with Microsoft products but not actually purchase any.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 30 2020, @07:20PM (9 children)
Back in 2008 we finally decided to join the flat-panel generation. Just had dinner at a restaurant in the Best Buy parking lot and thought: "Sure, I know it's going to cost an extra $50-200 - particularly if I buy the cables I need in-store, but, you know, what the hell: we're gonna go in there and take home a 42" flat panel TV tonight!" Or, so I thought. They had the model I wanted on display, but the only things they had in stock were a generation or two behind in specs like refresh rate and resolution - all for higher prices than you could get online for the latest and greatest. They did offer to place an order for me, but I'd have to come back in a week or so when it delivers to the store. Gee, let me think... pay more, wait longer, and not have it delivered to my door? They acted genuinely shocked when I told them no thanks.
I can see this model working for Microsoft: show the products in a good light in the retail outlets and then people can either order them for home delivery right there in store on a tablet, or just go home and order. Saves the whole logistics nightmare of stock on hand, etc. and is actually more convenient for the customers too. If you want "next level" service you can have a Geek Squad dispatched to your house to arrive with your purchases.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday June 30 2020, @10:31PM (7 children)
Sort of. Everyone is slowly transitioning towards it. Part of the great die off of the malls. Children, teenagers, and adults no longer use the mall to truly socialize like we did in the past, and online retailers with 2-day shipping combined to take away a huge amount of traffic.
Other businesses have already demonstrated the efficiency of shipping and logistics to provide items to customers fast. It used to be if you wanted it in less than a week, you bought retail. Way back before the Internet, I was buying stuff across state lines to save on taxes and often dealing direct with vendors in different states. I knew that I could possibly get it local, and today, or wait at least a week. The expense of overnight shipping was only when you needed a production part fast, not because you wanted it personally. Heck, I can remember when local meant driving a couple hundred miles to a Fry's Electronics which used to huge and have everything.
Today? They're saying it is just around the corner for fast drone deliveries of normal products. Maybe even faster than you could drive to the store, purchase it, and drive back.
Retail is a dinosaur. Experience centers only require a few shipments, all for display models. Requires a lot less space, and deliveries can be arranged with the customer in the store. If the product is small and popular enough, the Experience Center could sell it directly, but it's purpose would not be to provide enough revenue to maintain the Experience Center. Just to make the Experience Center better for the customer. Fulfillment would still primarily be done by those heavily optimized shipping channels, likely with drones. As for employee costs, just some pretty sales people. No more need for the trolls in the back to handle the inventory. Experience Centers represent the rapid and dramatic change in how consumerism works with our newly acquired tech to quickly and efficiently deliver information and materials. It just doesn't take that many people anymore.
I predict it could be so damn crazy, that you could order something in a park from your smartphone, and a drone might deliver it within 3 minutes. Walk over and pick up your 44oz ice tea fresh from the restaurant at the corner.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @11:16PM (6 children)
And good riddance to bad garbage.
I never went to a mall to socialize. Hell, I don't even remember going to malls *at all* until I was in my twenties. And thank goodness for that. It sounds like a truly soul-sucking experience.
Where I come from we went to coffee shops, bars, the streets and places like this [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @11:44PM (2 children)
Thanks for letting us know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @01:24AM
Wasn't it Ballard who wrote that "Let's go shopping" is a statement only uttered by a madman?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:46AM
You are welcome. I'm happy to help.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @01:44AM (2 children)
Originally, malls weren't supposed to be primarily commercial. They were "malls", not "shopping malls". But the commercialism made the money, and very soon that dominated so completely it became the only reason to visit.
When I was a kid, I was dazzled by all the shiny mirrored surfaces and pretty lights inside the malls, as well as the impressive hugeness. There was nothing else quite like the inside of a large indoor shopping mall. My favorite places were the bookstores, the video game arcade, and the computer store where I looked and looked at that Commodore Amiga, but never could figure any justifications that persuaded me let alone my parents that it was worth buying. Now though, malls are meh. Even then, there were hints, like that 90% of the stores in the mall were of zero interest to me. Women's clothing was at least comprehensible, but stores that sold useless decorative knick-knacks I found difficult t0 believe that they had enough customers to keep them in business.
At a few major indoor malls, I've tried expressing this to mall management, but it's hopeless. The people staffing the mall offices are dullards. I suggested they list the surrounding stores on their mall directories, and they nearly had seizures. Might hurt the business of their rent paying shops! As if shoppers don't know about all the nearby stores. I also suggested that they put price tags on the furniture in the food court, and they acted as if putting such items up for sale was incomprehensible. Sure, the industrial strength chairs and tables are hella expensive, but some people might want to buy them anyway. And those were just the really mild suggestions. Ideas such as adding apartments to the mall were evidently so radical and raised so many questions that they were absolutely impossible. Kinda makes you wonder how a skating rink became a traditional feature. Shopping malls have hammered out and tuned a formula that worked, and they don't want to change a thing. They are stuck in very deep ruts, and it seems only being whopped with the clue bat of commercial failure and bankruptcy can bring changes and improvements.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:31AM (1 child)
Well, they have changed a thing, but that was toward the worse, about 30 years ago.
Back then there was Sears, two upscale department stores, Woolworths with two restaurants as anchors. There were pet stores, music stores, snack bars, duck ponds, bird cages, a video arcade, water fountains, a post office and a shoe repair place, a pharmacy, a computer store, a tobacco store and restaurants in the local mall. All those have disappeared from the main mall, the food places have been forced to move to a food court or surrounding properties. The main mail has lost most its color and is a black / grey / white agglomeration of (women's) clothing stores. There is a bit of color left in form of the big four phone networks' stores and a children's clothing store.
Back in the 1990s, they requested the local bus company to not serve the mall. They didn't want the wrong class to show up. They also harassed young people walking around while accommodating older "mall-walkers". They alienated their future customers.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:55AM
> Back in the 1990s, they requested the local bus company to not serve the mall. They didn't want the wrong class to show up.
Yeah, I too eventually learned of that attitude of theirs. Active hostility towards pedestrians, kids, and anyone else who didn't look like a big shopper. They actually liked the oceans of parking space surrounding the malls acting as a barrier to such "undesirables", and wouldn't hear of such ideas as building connecting corridors to make it easier to walk to and from the mall. Bigotry against the poor.
The strip malls that put up "no loitering" signs lost my business. Such signs give the place an air of menacing enforcement of petty rules. Teens may have to put up with that crap at school, but they sure as heck don't have to patronize stores with those attitudes.
One other thing I found very weird was the slowness of the average computer store in getting connected to the Internet. What do you mean Best Buy and CompUSA don't have free WiFI? Don't have their floor computers connected? WTF?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday July 01 2020, @07:33AM
Pretty much still the model of UK electronics stores (Currys, Dixons, PC World) plus all the appliance stores (white goods, Comet, etc.) - - but one of those is dead now precisely because of that
I stopped going to stores for those things about 10-15 years ago, maybe more. The final straw was similar to yours. Needed a fridge. Had moved house, had no fridge, needed fridge to put food in. Ok, we can survive a few days, but we need one pronto. A store will have one, right? We'll be able to just take it away, surely, but first we could measure it up for the gap it needs to go in, and see if it suits us, etc.
Went to the store. Everything was overpriced. Simple search on my phone (I think we're talking 2G-era?), found same things for cheaper, delivered, tomorrow. That's when they started changing the model numbers to have a "Dixons" model of a fridge which was basically identical to one online, but it would stop you comparing purely by model number. I wasn't that fussed about the exact model, but it was clear from the photos and specs that it was identical in size, shape, etc.
Got hassled by multiple sales assistants (which, presumably, the cost of was added to the price of the products). Measured up the one we liked. Grabbed a guy and asked. Not in stock. Delivery "up to" 28 days "if you'd just like to pay now, sir, to hold the stock". I asked "What do you have in stock, now, today, that we can take away or have delivered today/tomorrow?". Ten minutes of sales-talk and the answer was literally nothing. The hugest store on the biggest retail park in the area, and I can't buy a product in any reasonable timescale. Found the same online, ordered it on the drive home (which I remember being a novelty at that time). It arrived (I think it was 2 days later, but it said that, and we saved even more money on that one than the same thing available tomorrow).
It was at that point that you realise they aren't really interested in fulfilling your need (to buy a product and have it delivered/fitted, especially when you *don't have one* and desperately need one). They cared only about money which - ironically - ends up costing them custom and customers.
Did the same several times since, the only exception was a Euronics centre when we needed a particular type of washing machine. We had a very narrow-in-depth gap for it because of pipework and needed to see it up close to make sure it would fit where we needed it, and around the pipework. We visited the store and got some old guy running an entire shop on his own and we soon figured out why - he knew every available model, their specs and prices, off the top of his head. He was a walking catalogue and would open a brochure to the exact page without looking. We described the gap. He knew exactly what ones would fit. But he also knew that he could get a better one, cheaper, that would also fit, if he spoke to his friend at another store. We trusted him, because he was trying to help us, clearly.
And we did buy it. Because it was available the next day. And the guy was spot-on. Cheaper, better, and fit exactly round the pipework it needed to.
I haven't seen service like that since, and have moved far away from that store or I'd go back there (but only if he was still there).
If your shop isn't about fulfilling your customers needs, they won't come back. And you *need* to sell them a fridge, the same way that they *need* to be able to buy one. It's quite a simple equation. And in the Internet era, and especially now, I hope we see all those "no stock, no service, ten sales assistants, up-sell" type shops die.