Holiday Season Online Shopping Hit a New High in the US This Year (inputmag.com) 30
U.S. consumers spent more online this holiday season than they ever have before, according to a new report from Mastercard. From a report: Digging into the report, Reuters found e-commerce sales contributed 14.6 percent of total retail and were up 18.8 percent from 2018. This is despite a later Thanksgiving, which cut six days from the festive shopping window. Physical retailers are under increasing pressure from Amazon, which continues to offer ever more attractive ways to shop from the sofa, including same-day delivery in some cities and free returns on an ever-widening catalog of goods. The online retailer is so aggressive in its efforts to speed up delivery, in fact, it's taking a worrying toll on those making the deliveries.
In other news (Score:1, Flamebait)
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resulting in carbon sequestration which is good for the environment.
To be fair, carbon sequestration is neutral for the environment, not good. Landfills are generally dry, but some of the cardboard will get wet and decay anaerobically into methane.
The plastic comes from things like clamshell packaging which is present no matter whether the items are purchased in brick-and-mortar stores or online.
Many products have reduced packaging for online sales, and more and more will do so in the future. Amazon Basics have minimal packaging, so I buy them when possible.
One could make the argument that buying online actually saves on plastic use, since you do not leave the store with your purchased items in plastic bags which are soon thrown out.
One-time-use plastic bags are banned where I live. But they don't contribute much to emissions. The gasoline you use to drive to the mall is way way more significa
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^this year^every year (Score:1)
Happy. (Score:2)
More interestingly (Score:2)
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Despite nearly 2 decades of online shopping and deep Internet use, nearly 85% of all retail shopping is STILL done by people walking into stores.
My mom has never bought anything online ever. Last week she spent an entire day trying to find a heater for the water trough in her pasture at local agricultural supply companies. She finally found one 120 miles away and drove there to get it.
She could have bought one online in ten minutes and had it delivered to her front porch.
She is in her late eighties and way too stubborn to change.
Progress happens one funeral at a time.
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Maybe. But what you call progress, I may call digress.
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But what you call progress, I may call digress.
If you think a six-hour round-trip drive on icy winter roads is better than ten minutes with a browser and a mug of cafe mocha, then I daresay that you are a moron.
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If you'll have livestock dying or troughs cracking because of it, the 6-hour trip becomes the better option.
Her cows can eat snow. It is not good for them, but for a week or so it is fine.
The troughs are built to withstand freezing. Ice will not crack them. The heater only keeps a small area ice-free, just big enough for a cow's nose.
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Because online shopping is good for purchasing stuff you KNOW you want or need. You hear of a new book, you want it, you search it and you buy it. Great.
But what if you don't know what someone wants? Gift ideas are harder to come by just surfing Amazon for example. Going into a store and looking at a curated subset all at once, you can kind of sort of tell if maybe
Ain't All Good (Score:2)
Notice the word "Mastercard" (Score:1)
This is most likely a result of people who have finally rebuilt their credit after the great recession, rather than people truly having more disposable income.
Heck, it's anecdotal, but this was the first holiday season where I've had a real credit card again, too.
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> Heck, it's anecdotal, but this was the first holiday season where I've had a real credit card again, too.
If, like me, you had trouble paying the bills last time you used credit cards, you might re-think whether you want to do that again.
My wife and I aren't going to fall into that particular hole again. I do have one card, set up to automatically pay the full balance each month, which I use for those purchases where the chargeback protection of a credit card might be useful. On larger purchases where
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It was more of that I knew my credit was going to be totally screwed (due to circumstances resulting from being laid off) and that'd have to let everything age off for 7 years, so I just said "fuck it".
I wouldn't recommend that to anyone who doesn't want to show up in court and fight credit card companies. Also, don't live paycheck-to-paycheck if you can help it, kids.
Tales from The Retail Front Lines (Score:3)
So this year I bought some things both online and in stores.
Stores work pretty well, but they have a large degree of absurdity about them. I go at the start of December and see interesting festive displays will of interesting stuff, but then right around Christmas I go back, and it almost looks like they are just really trying to push whatever didn't sell well, the interesting stuff scattered across the store, or just gone and never re-stocked. On-line stocking indicators can often be wrong, possibly from internal theft.
Then there's Amazon. Ordering stuff around the holidays means that sometimes you'll get stuff a day before you expect, sometimes you get stuff a day or so after (with of course weather always being a factor, but also overloaded delivery services). It also is a bigger gamble than ever before it seems in terms of what shape your item will be in.
I ordered a book and It arrived essentially loose in a box with just a few inflated padding units thrown in as an afterthought. As you would expect from a heavy hardback book shipped loose in a box, all of the edges and especially of the corners were bent - so badly the book is being returned. Amazon knows this is happening though, there's a specific category of returns for "item damaged, box not damaged". So they know if they should blame shipping or internal packing measures they have taken.
It's not even just Amazon, I ordered some action figures from a few different places as well, to be shipped. In one case they literally just stuffed an action figure into a box a few inches too small on one side, crumpling the card. In others they just kind of piled them in a box loose and hoped for the best. You can't really blame them, but it does show that if you order something you want to arrive in good condition, you probably are better served finding it in person or paying more to order from someplace that packs more carefully.
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It's not easy to run a store. Your mom and pop