With the ongoing success of online outlets like Amazon.com and Walmart.com the actual physical shopping experience may soon be a thing of the past. Of course some retailers are here for the long haul and will have sales to carry them into the future but many of the retail malls as we know it are not set to last much longer.
Just as physical book stores went down pretty fast as Amazon began ramping up, so will other retail stores that carry items that can be easily purchased online.
International online retailer Amazon.com not only carries books but everything from socks to business goods. With free shipping right to your door, sometimes even as fast as overnight or two day shipping, unless you need something absolutely immediately you can save money by ordering online. By centralizing the distribution of many goods Amazon is able to cut the costs out of many of these products we would buy anyway at local markets that do not have the scales of economies a firm like Amazon can have servicing millions at a time.
It is truly amazing to see how digital our economy has turned over the past few years with more and more goods being bought online. There are many new items being added every day to online stores that you would only think possible to get in retail and it is only going to increase with the proliferation of mobile devices coming to market.
The ability to quickly pay with paypal or login to websites with Facebook and geo-locate yourself for the best available vendor to ship your item makes the online world just make sense for consumers. True it will put many brick and mortar locations out of business but the general public will benefit from lower costs and the ability to not have to drive to pick up a lot of products.
