Stupid Retail Management: Why Amazon Is Taking Over the World

Yesterday I went into FIVE stores searching for a few small items. I found one, count it one, of the items I set out to buy. Scratch that: at one store I found exactly what I wanted, but I couldn’t get them to take my money. As I marched angrily out of the third store, I said to the clerk, “I’ll get it on Amazon.”

Not that I want to pay two bucks in shipping charges for a bundle of damn hairpins. But if I have to, I will.

At 20th Street and Camelback, the hub of Phoenix’s East Camelback commercial district, there’s a big old shopping center that has, to a degree, been gentrified. Several useful stores (one imagines…) are gathered there. So when you have a half-dozen stupid little errands, it’s convenient to brave the UNHOLY parking lot so as to hit three or for stores at once. Videlicet:

Petsmart: I wanted a bottle of puppy-repellent whose brand name is “Bitter YUCK!” You can get Bitter Apple just about anywhere, but in my experience, it doesn’t do much to deter dogs from chewing…in fact, the Late Great German Shepherd Anna actually developed a taste for the stuff. “YUCK” is what it says it is: truly yucky, to humans as well as dogs. Spray it on something, and the parfum de revolting will not go away soon. Get it on your hands, and good luck washing it off. It is, in a word, great.

Oh: the plan, by the way, was to spray the lamp cord that Ruby likes to choff on with YUCK, then take some clear Scotch-type packing tape and stick the cord to the baseboard, tape it up the wall to the outlet, and tape it up the inside support of the little table where her favorite edible lamp resides. I figured the combination of Gag-a-Dawg stink and sticky tape would bring an end to Ruby’s as-yet-unsuccessful efforts to electrocute herself.

So, to Petsmart.

No. They do not carry “YUCK” anymore. The only choices were some wimpy “natural” bullshit stuff and Bitter Apple bullshit stuff. Faced with no choice, I came away with a bottle of Bitter Apple, a product that I did not want. At this point, I had yet to realize that almost everything I needed was going to have to be ordered from Amazon — if I’d known I was going to be racking up charges at Amazon, I wouldn’t have bought the effing Bitter Apple. In fact, I may take it back the next time I’m in that vicinity.

Next destination: Ulta, the mega beauty-supply store, open to the public. My hair is now long enough that I can wrap it up in a fine elegant bun on top of my head. First time I surfaced at the church in this “do,” I got a slew of compliments on how grand it looked. And now that the weather is warming, I’d like to get the fur collar off my neck.

Pinning such a bun up can be done with regular bobby pins, which I happen to have. But bobby pins are fingernail-breakers and tooth-chippers. I would like to have the type of pin that’s kind of U-shaped. They look like this:

A humungous beauty supply store would seem to be the place to find such an object, wouldn’t you think?

Well. Yeah. But no. The only ones they have are black. My hair is bronzey-blondish-brown….about the color of those cheap brown pins you see above. Apparently Ulta thinks only Mexican and Black women grow their hair long enough to wear it up. Ay, caramba!

Moving on, at Michael’s I did find what I wanted, mostly: a small crochet hook, some pop-open knitting markers, and a (very good!) beginner’s how-to-knit book. They did not have a knitting needle gauge, which was annoying, but there’s no urgency to get that. So I load up on these and get in the line for the cash register.

This particular Michael’s is set up in the same annoying crowd-control way as a Fry’s Electronics, where they herd you into a long line and you wait for the next cashier who comes free. That, while the cattle-control mode is irritating, does speed things along. Or…it would, if they had more than one cashier.

The single woman they had at the cash register was one of those people who moves very, very, v-e-e-e-r-r-r-r-y-y-y-y-y slowly, as if she were swimming through molasses.

I mean, really. I know there are people who must have a physiological problem that prevents them from moving their arms and hands and legs at a normal rate of speed. And that’s OK. But why hire such a person as a check-out clerk??? Surely a big store like Michael’s must have some other job she could do well, be paid for, and not make the customers crazy. And is there some reason Michael’s can’t hire enough cashiers to put two on duty when things get busy?

A line of about ten people, four of whom were ahead of me, stretched back toward the store’s display shelves. More customers were joining the end of the line as the rest of us stood there. And stood. And stood. And stood. And stood….

It took this lady almost ten minutes to check out the woman at the head of the line. As one of the people in front of me stepped forward to take that customer’s place, I realized that even if Molasses-Woman could check out each person ahead of me at the rate of five minutes apiece, it would be close to twenty minutes before I would get to her register.

Screw it! I put the junk down on a display rack and walked out of the store, empty-handed and pissed as hell. And determined to order all those things on Amazon.

Next: Staples, thereinat to purchase a roll of clear packing tape, for the purpose of securing the lamp cord from roaming puppies. Miraculously, I find exactly what I want there and only have to waste about five minutes standing in line at that store’s cash register.

You’d think I’d be happy, no?

No.

Why? Because as I’m standing there waiting for the woman ahead of me to turn in about twenty empty ink cartridges to be refilled, I realize that if I’d known I was going to have to buy Bitter Apple instead of YUCK!, I could have gotten both items at a Target or at the huge Fry’s Supermarket that’s roughly on my route homeward from my Thursday morning business group meeting. If one of the stores did not carry the specialty item I wanted but instead offered me a product I could get almost anywhere, there really was no need for me to traipse to two places.

This insight makes me feel more bilious than I already feel, which is plenty dyspeptic.

Right across the way from the Staples in this mall is a small Pier One. I love Pier One — it’s always fun to go in there and look around.  Maybe a visit to this sweet little emporium would clear my head of ire. So I walked over there.

Holy shit.

They’ve rearranged the merchandise, so of course you can’t find anything that you might want. And somehow, though they seem to have gotten rid of anything you’d actually WANT to buy, they’ve jammed the store chuckablock full of junk. There is SO MUCH CRAP in there that you can hardly navigate the place. At one point I spot some wine glasses (I do need a couple of wine glasses), but one couple (one little couple!) is standing in front of some stoneware trying to decide whether to buy it, and just those two people block the aisle so I can NOT approach the glassware!

I notice they still have the placemats that match the chair cushions I made from some curtains I bought there. One of the cushions could stand to be refurbished; I wonder if they still carry the curtains.

Apparently, they don’t carry curtains at all.

I ask a clerk who’s trotting along an aisle if they’ve stopped carrying curtains. He ignores me! By now I’m really, REALLY pissed, so I say something sarcastic like “Well, thank you so much” and start to stalk out of the store. He notices, apologizes, and points out the new curtain display, directly all the way totally on the FAR side of the store from where they used to be. And no, they do not carry curtains in the desired fabric.

Also needed are a few seat cushions for my outdoor chairs.

Pier One has always been THE place to buy seat cushions and decorative pillows. So I make my way through the thirty-inch-wide aisles to the cushion display, which they’ve also moved. There I see that they’ve hugely cut their inventory. The vast array of colors and patterns: gone. They’ve only got two or three choices, nary a one of which is very attractive.

Figuring I’d better buy at least a couple before they’re all sold out, I try to pull one out to look at it. But the aisle is SO narrow I can’t even get the thing completely out of the cubby they’ve stuffed it into. But I do manage to pull it out far enough to realize it’s too large. I leave the store empty-handed and no less annoyed than I felt when I walked in there.

This means the only remaining place in town to buy the kind of chair cushions I favor is Cost Plus. I stopped shopping in Cost Plus/World Market when they started requiring customers to sign up for one of those DAMNED membership cards to get a fair price on the merchandise. At one point along the line, I decided that I am not going to be made to share private information and I am not going to be forced to lie, in writing, on application forms so that I can buy things at a fair price. If your store makes me do that, I do not shop at your store. Hence I do not shop at Cost Plus.

There’s one word for all this, and it’s Amazon. Unfortunately, Amazon is not a very adequate answer: it doesn’t carry neat things like Pier One did (but then, apparently Pier One won’t be carrying those things, either…). And it gouges you for shipping unless you pay some outrageous annual membership fee that includes services and products that you don’t especially want. However, despite those drawbacks, in balance Amazon comes out on top.

Amazon does carry most things anyone could possibly want, and even if you decline to purchase an Amazon Prime membership, the cost of shipping is less than the cost of time wasted traipsing from store to store, fighting for parking spaces, searching for the merchandise you want, and standing in check-out lines.

Amazon diminishes our lives in some ways — we can’t get everything we used to be able to find in brick-and-mortar stores, and it kills jobs  locally — but it does save time, hassle, and annoyance factor. And since most of us will take convenience over cost savings, stupid store management, and bad service, eventually Amazon will push all but the most distinctive and specialized of local merchants.