The Future of Shopping

When I was a child back in the ‘50s most shopping was done in small stand-alone stores. Every block in my hometown had a small grocery store (and a bar!). There were a couple of “department stores” where we bought major products and, of course, there was the Sears catalog. This buying model changed when we got our first strip malls and big supermarkets. All of those small shops were forced out of business (but the bars remained!).

The next evolution was from strip malls to enclosed malls with a hundred plus stores in them. Once again, many of the strip malls were closed. Then the big malls went out of favor and new big-box stores with satellite stores took over. These store were places like CompUSA, Circuit City, BestBuy, and the mega-bookstores. Now most of them are gone too, replaced by online shopping.

I imagine most of our readers are like me and do the majority of their consumer electronics shopping online. Just about the only stores I still drive to are home improvement stores like Lowe’s and to the grocery store. All of my other shopping is online.

I wonder where I’ll be shopping in 10 years?