You know, we can have just about anything a store like Walmart sells delivered to our door within a couple of days generally. So if you're going to continue to pay for rent and inventory and employees to support a brick and mortar store, you're going to need to focus on the things that only a brick and mortar store can provide. I'm not going to try to enumerate these things for Walmart. I'm just going to give my experience from yesterday.
Two nights ago I decided I wanted to make Tempura. It had been so long since I made it, I no longer even had a deep fryer. But I wanted to make it the next day, not wait a few days, so I figured I'd just go to an actual STORE to buy a deep fryer. How hard could that be? I looked on the Walmart website to see what was generally available. I realized that not everything on the website would be available at the store. However, that really should be a usable feature of the website. Sure, I can order anything to be delivered in a few days, but I should be able filter the results to show what is available at a particular location so I can buy it now. Maybe that feature is there and I didn't see it. I just wanted a general idea of my choices, then I could go to the store and pick from what was there.
I suppose deep fryers are terribly passé. Slow cookers, rice cookers, air fryers, radiant light fryers... Ah, there are a couple of deep fryers on display. Then there's the usual problem of not being able to trust that the shelf tags are in front of the correct items and that they reflect current models and prices. But whatever. I'll take the round one. So where are the boxed ones? Multiples of the other types of cookers on the bottom shelf. But no deep fryers. Must be on the top shelf. I'm tall enough that I could've started pulling things off the top shelf, but the geniuses who stocked the top shelf cleverly stacked them so that only the bottom of the boxes were visible. I suppose to make it easier for employees to scan the bar tags which was all that was printed on the bottom. So I had no idea what was up there. Had to find an employee to come and look at just what I've already looked at, then scan a couple of bar tags on the top shelf to tell me they had none. None at all. And multiples of other types of similar small appliances.
Now why would that be? Are deep fryers so unpopular that they don't bother to order them even though they claim to sell them? Or perhaps normal people aren't very interested in 3 or 4 different air fryers and rice cookers and just snatch up all the deep fryers? Again, whatever. So fine, I'll just buy the little skimmer and thermometer and get the fryer at Target.
Admittedly, it was soon after opening on a weekday, but only one checkstand out of probably 8 was open with several people ahead of me. No problem, I'll do self checkout. But oh, that's right. This is California. Run by geniuses that refuse to prosecute criminals, so that retail theft is now so rampant that they've done away with self checkout.
I sort of wonder now if there's ANY store left at Hilltop Mall that's still open and that I would ever choose to patronize anymore. As for me, when you start locking stuff up and making it inconvenient for normal law abiding shoppers to use your store, you'd really be better off just closing. I'm not going to waste my time going there. As big anchor store businesses, you need to start making it clear to local and state government that they need to do their jobs and arrest and prosecute criminals so that normal people will come back, or else you'll just pack up and leave. Until you do that, I won't be. And if the state ever does return to sane law enforcement, it may be too late for me. I'll probably be gone by then. read more