06-18-2018, 12:52 PM
(06-18-2018, 10:46 AM)David Horn Wrote:(06-14-2018, 07:08 PM)sbarrera Wrote:(06-12-2018, 08:55 AM)David Horn Wrote: ... Millennials appear to be the first generation to reject the merchant-customer model. They may come to regret it, but deciding to reverse course is less than likely. They have no emotional tie to that model, so it would be a faux nostalgia for a time gone by...
I'm curious - how are Millennials rejecting the merchant-customer model? Jeff Bezos is the ultimate merchant and the richest guy ever! Is it that online marketplaces are the new model?
By that I meant the transactional relationship between a physical merchant and a customer. If there is no need or desire to have a physical relationship to a product prior to buying it, as seems to be the case today, then the acquisition process is no longer one where, for example, we try on clothes and pick the ones we like. Now, we just click and acquire. Will that kill branding or make it stronger? There doesn't seem to be much else tying us to our purchases.
The idea was that the retail clerk knew more about the product than did the customer, whether the object was clothing or a houseware item. So it was in family businesses. Corporate retailers did not have the employee turnover that they ended up with once retail became the work that people recognized as the employer of last resort. If you worked for a department store you used your store discount to get nice clothes for the job -- or for interviewing for work with real pay.
Now nobody really trusts a retail clerk to know anything. One of the most successful dry-goods retailers is Kohl's -- and it has taken away the chatty clerk and put a grocery-style checkout where one buys one's stuff.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.