Take Back the Showroom

Not long ago I was browsing my way through a nearby Meijer hypermarket when I came upon a display of pod-based coffee machines and suddenly realized that this was the perfect item to wrap up my holiday gift list. Unfortunately, there were a bewildering array of sizes, styles, colors and features to choose from, and I didn’t know the first thing about coffee or coffee makers, pod-based or otherwise. Over the years I’ve tried to cultivate a taste for the stuff, but so far I can only drink coffee if you mix a large amount of milk, sweetener, chocolate, and preferably ice into it – at which point even I have to admit that it’s more of a coffee slushy than actual coffee. Finding someone to help me in the middle of a Meijer in the run-up to Christmas week would have been even more impossible than trying to find a sales clerk in any other big box store under the same conditions. But expecting any retailer to tell you that any of their merchandise is anything less than “really super extra superior,” let alone post shelf tags critical of any of their goods, would be even sillier. Clearly, I needed to look somewhere else…

We’ve talked about the concept of “Showrooming” in this space before, but if you’re not familiar with the term it refers to the increasingly common practice of going to a traditional retailer to examine different products and then going home and making one’s actual purchase online. It has had a horrible effect on small businesses, most of which couldn’t possibly compete with an online retailer given the overhead and volume advantages that such operations can realize, but Showrooming had also be problematic for big-box stores and national retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. What I hadn’t considered until that moment was that, in addition to the ability to comparison shop and find the best sale price (and the best deal on shipping, one assumes), shopping from home would also give me access to hundreds, if not millions, of consumer reviews of each one of these products. If only I had some small, portable device on my person that could access those same websites…

Of course, I did have such a device in my pocket. Taking out my smartphone, I quickly surfed over to a couple of product review sites, and then checked the online comments on Amazon, just for good measure. Much of the blame for Showrooming is pinned on Amazon, since they have listings for almost anything imaginable, so it seemed fitting to use them to reverse the process. The price differential between the different models wasn’t much, and none of them were noticeably cheaper online, even before I took into account the cost of shipping. But there were some models that definitely worked better than others, and even a couple that were reputed to leak after a few months in service. In a few moments I had made my selection and started schlepping the machine up to the registers…

Now, I’m not going to claim that this story, or even thousands of others just like it, are going to do anything about the Showrooming problem. Sometimes there are going to be better deals available online, and if you can find free shipping – or get it as part of your Amazon Prime membership – it may even be possible to cover those costs. But I think we should all consider the advantages to actually going to the store and physically selecting and purchasing a product, not least of which is that you don’t have to worry about your merchandise being delayed by weather, train derailments, longshoreman’s strikes, or airport closures since it’s already in your hands. There’s also the fact that you don’t have to worry about the delivery service stealing it, running it over, throwing it into a pond of stagnant water, or leaving it at a vacant house somewhere else along their route – all of which have happened to members of my household before now…