Bought my first VCR at CC in the early 90’s.
Remember Radio Shack’s Free Battery cards for crappy non-alkaline batteries?
Amazon is never out of stock of anything.
Here is my latest retail story: I wanted to buy a new 8 TB backup drive last week. I normally buy everything on Amazon, but went to Best Buy thinking I’d go ahead and pay the 10% California tax just to get it a day early. Paying California 10% on my purchases really grates me the wrong way and I want to deprive those assholes in Sacramento every penny I can.
I picked up the drive on the store shelf (at least this time I didn’t have a salesman hovering over me watching me like a hawk like last time), then went to checkout. The checkout experience at B.B. is the worst in the world. Their POS terminal first tries to trick you into making a donation to some non-profit. You have to click “no” to get past it. Then the clerk said I could save some money if I used my B.B. credit card. The clerk couldn’t say how much I would save until she looked at my account. I don’t carry the B.B. credit card with me so the clerk said “No problem. I can look it up.” I provided my name, address and phone number (by now I’m getting steamed at how long all this is taking).
Then they needed my social security number! That really hacks me off because it is not supposed to be used for identification. I type it into the terminal and, of course, it isn’t the right SS number. Seems my wife opened our B.B. account and used her SS which I couldn’t remember. We were dead in the water. The clerk couldn’t tell me how much I would save if I used a card I didn’t have on me and she couldn’t look up. I wasn’t about to bother my wife at work to get her SS to find out if B.B. could cut my price a small amount.
At that point I screamed “Forget it! I’m using Amazon! This is ridiculous!”
I jumped onto Amazon while in the store and bought the product with one click. No fuss, no muss, no idiot store clerks. It probably took 45 seconds. It was on my doorstep less than 24 hours later, no sales tax and shipping paid with my annual Prime fee. I wasted an hour of my time driving to B.B., $2 of gasoline, and the agro dealing with them.
Good luck CC topping the Amazon experience. Why would ANY investors or exec team think they could possibly launch a new retail operation and succeed?
More than 1/2 the times I’ve gone to Best Buy they don’t have what I need in stock. Standard reply from the sales clerk is “oh, you can order that off the internet.”