After my previous post lamenting the social costs of online shopping, here’s one exploring some of the social benefits. I guess the take-home message is: think about these issues and make a call on a case by base basis!
My case here in favour of online shopping is for specialist retailers (or service providers) where a physical shopfront could not be sustained in your city due to the small size of the local market. Here the online shop is not displacing a local sale, but rather making available goods and services that would not otherwise be available.
And this is a good thing! For making people happy, and also potentially for getting us access to stuff that allows us to enjoy a better quality of life, more and better services etc, locally.
An example close to my heart: there used to be photographic shops in every shopping centre. Now there are very few. This is partly due to online sales, partly due to the March of technology (people take photos on the their phones now, making the market for ‘proper’ photographic equipment relatively small), and partly due to competition from brick and mortar shops like Game, Makro etc which sell the more ‘common denominator’ products and take this bread and butter share away from the specialist retailers of the past.
The existence of specialist online retailers of photographic equipment means that a local photographer can purchase equipment and photograph your wedding or kids birthday party, and this is good, right?
The principle arising from this is: take care with your purchasing decisions.
Ginger and Cocoa 