kottke.org posts about shopping
One problem with having a toddler is that there’s so much you can buy them, and it’s so easy to be tempted by all of it. Or to resist 98% of the time, but then cave and still end up having spent hundreds of dollars on sweaters and toothbrushes and sunglasses and shoes. And trampolines and socks and stuffed dragons. It’s just that my daughter likes everything right now, and it makes me feel good to give her something that she likes. Really it’s just the clothes that torment me. She loves new clothes and will put on anything that’s new to her, including all the fabulous hand-me-downs we get. But Mother magazine sometimes hits that 2% sweet (rotten) spot. A couple weeks ago, it got me to buy a little apple sweater, which I love, but which I regret buying in her size (2T) and not in a size that she’d grow into (3T), because it’s basically already too small, which is absurd because it cost $50 (on sale plus shipping and tax). I also put like $200 worth of clothing (on sale!) from Petit Pilou into a digital shopping cart before abruptly closing the tab and shutting off my phone. But I bet if I open it up again it will still be there. The pineapple dresses were really what got me.
Maybe I just want to dress all in fruit myself, and it pleases me to live through my daughter, since she seems to enjoy it as well. Hanna Andersson has some wonderful fruit clothing, since I’m on the topic. We have their strawberry socks, swimsuit, and hat.
If anyone knows of any running clothes with cool fruit patterns, please let me know. I’ve been hoping Janji will bust out with something good (their other patterns are often excellent), and although it would be cool if Tracksmith did something fruity, it would probably be tasteful and realistic, when I’m looking for something neon and extreme. Something cheerful. I hope Santa is listening.
Lili Loofbourow on that great symbol of capitalism, now hollowed out by (mostly) private equity and (partly) changing consumer habits:
They aren’t easy to physically dispense with, malls.
It’s no surprise, then, that people are desperately trying to find new uses for them. The afterlife of a dead mall is interesting. Schools are moving into malls; some students are completing high school in a converted Macy’s in Vermont. A Dillard’s in Texas is now a radio station. Malls are becoming home to community colleges and libraries and offices. The Eastmont Town Center in Oakland, California, is home to a Center for Elders’ Independence, Social Security offices, and a lab.
These efforts are noble and good. They are also—and can’t help but be—anti-makeovers. Malls were made to be malls. This means every effort to repurpose a mall becomes a fascinating performance of architectural insufficiency, of a bespoke thing being wrenched into a different, and more practical, and less entertaining, function. It’s not that you can’t have schools in malls—or libraries, or social services. It’s that malls, being temples to consumerism, were tailor-made to be exactly what they were. Trying to square-peg another operation amid the former makeup counters beside onetime dressing rooms makes the result seem impoverished, weird, jangled. The erosion of detail is essential, but it makes the space grim.
Americans get nervous when symbols change. If the American grocery store was, among other things, deployed as an active rebuke of Soviet scarcity in the Cold War, the American department store was a serene display of endless availability. There were more kinds of makeup than anyone could possibly want, and they all had loyalists. Can we adapt to a new idea of the mall, the way old maritime warehouses turned into loft-living for gentrifiers? Should we? A stroll through these deserts finds dots of life poking through: mom and pop stores offering to repair watches or do your dry cleaning or your hair. I visited the Eastmont Town Center recently to see what it looked like in its new incarnation as a hub for seniors and Social Security and a “self-sufficiency center” where an anchor store used to be. A security guard stopped me at the entrance: Without an appointment and a specific destination in hand, she would not let me in. It puzzles me that the building is less accessible as the site of a library than it was as a mall, but I love the idea of a mall serving people in need. Still, the new configuration isn’t scratching the itch a mall did—at least according to other nostalgic mallgoers who have tried to haunt its halls. As one Yelp review reads: “Not enough stores, too many social services.”
“Americans get nervous when symbols change” — I’m going to be thinking about that for a while.
Something I think about a lot is if they remade Back to the Future today. Marty would travel back in time to 1992, and probably accidentally invent dubstep or something. But if he and Doc still met in the parking lot at the shopping mall, it would be a very different, much more haunted place. And the time machine wouldn’t suddenly crash into pine trees, but would appear near the mall’s peak in popularity. The scene from 1955 where Marty marvels at the officious gas station attendants would be replaced by one of Marty at the mall, amazed at the sheer number of people shopping, walking, letting themselves see and be seen at the outlet that in his time is now home to a plasma bank.
I recently had to put my Amazon newsletter, The Amazon Chronicles, on a two-month hiatus because I’m going to have surgery to replace my shoulder. So what should happen the day after I make my announcement? One of the very best Amazon reporters, Recode’s Jason Del Rey, comes out with an oral history of Amazon Prime, the membership program that covers free fast shipping, digital media, and more — and arguably, the innovation that pushed Amazon past eBay and Walmart to become the retailer of first resort.
Charlie Ward (former Amazon principal engineer; current Amazon VP, technology)
I’m a one-click addict. I hate having to go through the order pipeline and choose everything again and again and again. And … I couldn’t use one click with Super Saver Free Shipping.
I kind of have a perfectionist type of mentality. Things kind of irritate me and get more and more irritating over time and it was just really confirmed to me that I couldn’t make it better. So I threw out this problem to the group: “Wouldn’t it be great if customers just gave us a chunk of change at the beginning of the year and we calculated zero for their shipping charges the rest of that year?”
And we kind of had a small pause, a moment where we all looked at it as like, “Is Charlie crazy?”
See also this digital media pullquote which Peter Kafka pointed out on Twitter.
Bill Carr (former Amazon VP of digital music and video)
Netflix had a budget which — and you’re going to laugh when I tell you the scary number — was $35 million dollars a year on video content. These were fixed costs. This meant they’d go and buy the rights to movies and TV shows from the studios for $35 million a year and it didn’t matter whether they had one viewer or 100 million viewers, that’s what they’re going to pay. Well, that’s not the business Amazon was in.
We were giving much more than $35 million a year to the motion-picture studios at the time. But it was a daunting thing to commit to it on a fixed-fee basis with no knowledge of how we’re going to actually get any subscribers. In the 2008, ‘09, ‘10 era, that was a scary amount of money.
And I remember then Jeff finally goes, “I’ve got an idea.” And in typical Jeff fashion he picked something that was not on the list at all and he said, “Let’s make it part of Amazon Prime.” And we looked at him like there are arms and legs growing out of his head. Like, “What are you talking about? Amazon Prime? That’s the free shipping program.”
And the principle that Jeff realized was that we need to do actually exactly what Netflix did when they first launched their digital service. Everyone scoffed at that, too. Like, “you’re offering digital plus DVDs and you’re not charging more?”
Netflix was able to get away with the fact that the content was not great at the beginning because it was free. It was like, “Oh, by the way, here you go, here’s some movies along with it.” And we were going to take a page out of their book.
I remember Jeff used those exact words — It’s an, “Oh, by the way.” “Yeah, Prime is $79 a year. Oh, by the way, there’s free movies and TV shows with it.” And how much could consumers complain about the quality of movies and TV shows if it’s free?
Buying vintage and collectible sneakers online has become so complicated that a secondary industry has sprung up. Programmers create bots to outbid humans at auction. Initially, these were used just to snap up shoes to be sold at a markup on secondary markets. Eventually, though, enterprising botmakers realized they could avoid having to deal with shoes altogether by selling their bots to thirsty sneakerheads directly. At Complex, Tommie Battle breaks it down:
It’s now seen as a must that you need a bot. Copping “manually” is a risky endeavor—a misstep in entering credit card info or your address could mean that the item that was once on its way to being delivered to your door is now swept from under your virtual feet. That very sequence has happened to so many customers at this point that it’s now a part of the release date experience, and there is seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel.
The exclusivity will always be there in the world of streetwear, and it’s quite possible that the exclusivity is what drives brands to stay the course in regards to how they handle not only the availability, but the probability of purchasing their product. After all, the hype doesn’t follow every sneaker. The issue remains that the playing field must be even, especially in the digital realm. The old phrase is that the customer is always right, but what happens if the customer is a mindless bot?
The main question I have is this: what other economies have been disrupted by bots? Presumably, the rest of the collectors’ markets haven’t been untouched by this. The fundamental technologies and principles are basically the same. Entertainment, too, in the form of tickets to events, anything else sold by auction or to the first bidder. But how deep does it go? How far has the rot spread?
Men hate shopping so they buy their favorite shoes/coats/pants/shirts in bulk. Here are interviews with some of those men. Guess who this might be:
I hate to shop. For the last 20 years I only shopped once every two or three years. I would go to the big and tall store and buy only what I could find in 20 minutes, tops - usually a few dozen briefs, T-shirts and sweaters. If there was time left, I would try on a jacket. Nothing needed to be perfect: just fit and be black.
Now I am buying African block-print shirts and pants in a riot of colors and patterns from an African street merchant. I visit him every few weeks to see what’s new. I buy 10 or 15 at a time.
Whole Foods’ stock is going down, but maybe it shouldn’t be. “The whole idea of good food and gourmet eating has begun to transcend the PBS-store bag toter.”
More and more, shoppers are judging books by their covers. “Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye.”
Spike Jonze. Gap commercial. Go watch.
Stupid phrase that I’m sure will catch on because the TV and print media that propagates such things is brainless: Cyber Monday. “The Monday after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, when online retailers reportedly experience a surge in purchases” because everyone is back at their speedy internet connections (sans family) at work.
Update: “Cyber Monday” was created by shop.org, an organization of online retailers, as a marketing promotion. It’s only the 12th biggest online shopping day of the year. (thx randy and minuk)
Wanted to share a few last things from Bangkok while they’re still (relatively) fresh in my head.
1. Green tuk tuks. I read somewhere that a) the locals don’t much care for the tuk tuks (photo) because they’re noisy & polluting and that they’re only still around because tourists use them, and b) supposedly no new tuk tuks are allowed on the street, but that’s more of a guideline than a fast rule. How about this…start regulating tuk tuks like taxis, put a meter in them, stop the unannounced commission-subsidization detours, and require them to be electric (they’re glorified golf carts after all). The crammed streets of Bangkok need more smaller vehicles like tuk tuks, not less, but without the pollution, noise, and the unreliability.
2. Both the Grand Palace and the Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho are worth a look. We happened to go to the Grand Palace on the day they were changing the Emerald Buddha’s clothes (done to celebrate the changing of the seasons), so we didn’t get to see him. But the Reclining Buddha made up for it…I was not prepared for how large he was. Quite impressive.
3. We were lucky to be in Bangkok for the Loy Krathong festival, which is a celebration at the end of the rainy season where you float your worries out onto the water in the form of a floating flower arrangement with candles and incense. But it was largely a bust for us…it rained/torrential downpoured most of the evening, and we didn’t really know where to go in Bangkok to participate/experience the event. I think Loy Krathong might be better experienced on a smaller scale (i.e. not in the big city).
4. On Saturday (which seems like forever-ago from my Wednesday vantage point in another country), we went to check out Chatuchak Weekend Market, which IMO is overrated. It’s a completely overwhelming experience, it’s difficult to find anything (they labelled each section with what could be found there, but they rarely matched reality), and is recommended only for really hardcore shoppers. Check out some of the smaller markets instead; the Suan Lum Night Market near Lumpini Park was a good one that we ran across. For food, check out the Aw Kaw Taw market.
Perhaps a bit more if I remember. (Oh, and I’ve got lots of photos from Hong Kong and Bangkok, but posting them will probably happen when I get home…need a proper monitor for editing and whatnot.)
When you read up on Hong Kong prior to visiting, most guides make mention of the different levels of the city. Physical levels, that is.[1] The city proper is built on a hill and there are so many tall buildings that you quickly lose interest in counting all of them; imagine Nob Hill in San Francisco, except with skyscrapers. The famous escalator cuts through the city up the hill; the change in elevation over its short span is impressive, especially when you get to the top and realize you’re actually only a few horizontal blocks from where you started.
Much of the HK’s retail and dining is vertically oriented; there’s just not enough storefront real estate to contain it all. You’ll typically find restaurants on the 3rd or 4th floor of buildings and 3- to 6-level malls jammed with retail stores are everywhere; the Muji we went to was on level 7 of Langham Place. Skyways connect buildings together — as do subways — so much of the foot traffic in some areas isn’t even on the street level. Cars and buses (with two levels) zoom on highways passing over city streets and other highways, past the midlevels of buildings just a block or two away and down the hill. As a pedestrian, you can find yourself staring up at a 50-story building in front of you and then turning slightly to peer into the 15th floor of a building 2-3 blocks away. It’s a disorienting sensation, being on the ground level and the 15th floor at the same time, as if the fabric of space had folded back onto itself. Many people aren’t used to negotiating cities so intensively 3-D, particularly when all the maps reinforce the Flatlandness of the city grid.
[1] Well, not entirely physical. There are economic levels for one; the woman selling eggs on the street for a couple of HK$ each while tourists shop for Prada and Burberry only blocks away. You’ve got British culture over Chinese culture…and then Chinese culture layering back over that since the handover in 1997. You’ve got different levels of authenticity, from the fake electronics & handbags to the real Chanel cosmetics & Swarovski crystal, from the more touristy, mediated experiences to the hidden corners of real Hong Kong.
Shopping is huge here in Hong Kong, second only to dining as a pastime for travelers to the city (and I’m not even sure that’s true). Yesterday we checked out Shanghai Tang (various locations around the city, including Central, in the Peninsula Hotel, and the InterContinential Hotel). Many of the clothes are a little too Asian-styled for me (I’d feel a bit conspicuous wearing them in NYC, a concern obviously not shared by the American woman who was trying on some black pants with a white sequined dragon emblazoned down one pant leg), but aside from that, the designs were very simple and stylish, with clean lines and good use of bold color.
Speaking of simple and clean, that reminds me that we’ve yet to track down a Muji store here…today perhaps.
Great ongoing collection of old mall photography. Includes shots of Southdale in Edina, MN, the very first mall ever built.
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