Amazon.com Changes The Game

[buckeye]

So as you can imagine, me and my money walk out the door and plan a trip to Lowe's or Home Depot this weekend for a new water heater. :finger:

Do yourself a favor and get a Bradford White from Locke Supply. Home Depot and Lowe's will wreck you with high prices on substandard product.

Bringing me to a second point: most chain stores, just like most chain restaurants, all carry identical or equivalent crap to one another - and all that junk is online, too. Customer service at a big box is highly variable (i.e. worthless), so what incentive is there to avoid tax-less online purchases of junk (if that's your thing)? The Internet also affords highly specialized retailers tremendous accessibility. Where does that leave local retailers? They better start back up with customer service PDQ.

 

[Werewolf]

Many posts in this thread seem to focus on customer service.

I know I am in the minority on this but I've never really understood that. I want what I want, search for the best price and then buy it. I don't particularly care if the humans involved kiss my behind or not. All I want from a brick and mortar retailer is where's the product at so I can grab one and go pay for it. I'm not there to make friends with the staff; I'm there to buy what I want and get the hell out. If it turns out I made a bad decision and the product isn't faulty then bad on me.

Online - takes a lot of the human out of the equation. Research, due diligence and you can find just about anything that meets your personal requirements. Buy it and all without having to deal with some semi-literate snot nosed kid or overbearing a'hole, or even worse some sales type doin' his best to plant his lips on your behind trying to sell you something that you don't want and is probably junk anyway.

Add to that that in my experience most online retailers bend over backward to fix a problem if one truly exists. There are exceptions as always but way fewer than brick and mortar IMO.

Taking the human out of the buying process is not a bad thing.

 

[pak-40]

I have a tendency to go to brick and mortar to find what I want. I then buy online if it is substantially cheaper. Ill pay a LITTLE more to buy local!

However, I ALWAYS ask the Brick and Mortar if they will work with me on the price. I know what I can buy it for online. I'm not expecting them to match the online price, but Im not going to a lot more than I have to. Guns for example......the last 3 I bought were from online retailers. Difference in price between local was pretty substantial. The last one I bought was a Savage FVSR. Locally, the best price was 269 + tax. It was online for 199...shipped! I asked the local retailer if they would do 250 "out the door" and told them what I could get it for online. They told me, "I would buy it online if I were you!".

That is exactly what I did.