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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: 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?