Canto XVIII - The Black Showroom

The Internet has had a vast impact upon the way that we do business. With Amazon encroaching from all sides, it seems that for the majority of us nowadays, our first impulse when it comes to shopping, is not to head down to the local mercantile district, but to let our fingers do the walking by way of Google or similar. On the one hand, there is convenience in so doing: with a few minute’s quiet clicking, the onerous task of buying gifts for Christmas – for example – can be over in an afternoon. On the other hand, there is an enormous unspoken effect upon our social activities and, indeed, our social contracts.

One way that these egregious effects have started to manifest is in the heinous activity of “showrooming”. This is where a punter goes into a retail establishment and proceeds to identify products that they would like to purchase. They then use their telephone to find out where the same item can be purchased at possibly a cheaper price, then they order it online. Once they’ve finished, with a cheery wave to the shop proprietor, they exit the establishment filled with retail satisfaction. And how much money has the shop made in this transaction? Absolutely zero (or, negatively, less than that, when you factor in the potential shop-soiling of the product which may have just taken place). Some people think that rorting the system like this is just smart shopping; arseholes always like to smugly congratulate their own perceived ingenuity.

In our case, since we sell secondhand, out-of-print books, it doesn’t have quite the same impact but, with venues like ABEBooks and EBay, increasingly it is going to start to hurt. People have been talking for awhile now about the death of books as a viable commodity; I think people should worry more about their book shops.

When you look at a prospective purchase online, you’re not really seeing what it is that you’re about to by. It’s a reference; a guide. In a very real sense, when people buy things like this, it’s not like finding the object in a shop, picking it up, looking it over and then haggling over the price: there’s no physical, sensory connexion to it. You might as well be snaffling some bit of treasure in a video game for all that it has any impact upon your life. Consequently, anything you purchase online is also emotionally de-valued; it means less to you because you haven’t worked for it. It’s like picking up Pokémon creatures, for all the effect it has upon your reality. Here’s an instance to support what I’m saying:

This last week we encountered a further refinement of the showrooming technique which has left us goggling. We had for sale a few weeks ago, a signed, first edition of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a little edgeworn but in very good nick. A customer from overseas ordered it from us through ABEBooks and we duly sent it off. Imagine our chagrin when later, we received a request (through ABE) from the customer for it to be returned and refunded. The reason stated was that the book was “not as described”.

Now, we are particularly diligent in describing our books: if we say that it’s a little bit worn, then that’s exactly how you’ll discover it to be. Any marks inside the book, old price tags, bookplates, marginalia, tears, stains, whatever – if you find it in one of our books, you’ll also find it in our description of same. So we contacted the punter and asked him what the problem was. He replied by email to the effect that he had bought several copies of the same first edition, signed book online, had had them delivered, then sent back all the ones which he considered “inferior”. We were gobsmacked. And I’ll tell you why:

All of us who sell books online through either ABE or Amazon (it’s all basically just Amazon but ABEBooks at least tries to pretend that it’s run by human beings), have a rating that we accrue through the work we do finding, selling and shipping books to customers across the planet. If our rating drops below a certain limit, we can be punished for it, or even barred from the system entirely. When someone returns a book that we’ve sent them, it drops our rating. And it’s worse than that:

When a punter rejects a book, they are asked to supply a reason why. They are given four options from which to choose, including “book not as described”. There is no option five: “I bought a bunch of these books and kept the best one – the others can go back at the seller’s expense”. ABEBooks (and its parent company Amazon) almost always decides in favour of the customer on most issues; when we complained to ABE about this person, we were pretty much expecting that we would be the ones out of pocket after their arbitration. Fortunately, we had the customer’s email to back us up and, although we lost the cost of the book, the punter is now obliged to send the book back at their own expense (whether or not they do this is something which we’re still waiting to discover. He might just decide to have a Kite Runner bonfire and be done with it). For him these unwanted books have ceased to be funny icons on his computer screen and are now quite heavy, quite individual real-world items with which he has saddled himself.

Bricks and mortar stores are not online merchants (although there is some overlap). You can’t just assume that it’s all just one big homogeneous cloud of consumerism and treat us as if we’re robots. We need to eat too. The way things are going, there will most likely come a day when you can’t pop down to your bookstore to browse; buy fresh flowers from the local florist; get a cup of coffee and a roll from the local baker; or even prop up the bar at the local pub: we will all be expected to purchase stuff using our ‘phones with only staged photos of what we’re trying to buy as a reference and then sit in our rooms until the drone zings by to drop it off. If it comes late, or is not as described, we will squeal like babies denied the teat until the provider rules that we should be compensated in some fashion at the expense and detriment of those facilitating the delivery (until, of course, those people are replaced with robots). That may seem like some peoples’ idea of convenience; for me it’s just Hell.

Make use of your local shops. The longer you do so, the longer they will be there. Because we all know that, once they’re gone, you will be the first to complain about their absence.

*****
Post Script: I just watched a report on the television news - apparently the flood of online purchasing that took place over this last Christmas has had such a debilitating effect upon the local economy that it was worthy of being reported. Our intrepid journalist asked a representative of the Retail Trades Association what the effect of this trend would have upon bricks-and-mortar businesses? His response was that we would need to stock fewer commodities and "do something different". I'm sorry? What does that involve exactly? Hiring jugglers? Sheesh!