Shopping and the Market

The NYT has a piece today about changing strategies for retailers. A number of strategies are being attempted. Having recently engaged in various forms of shopping myself, I compared my experiences to the retail reality.

For one thing, supply chain management is huge. I have recently come into the market for a television, and after tons of research, settled on a particular model. While I normally shop online, I decided to check the local stores and kick the tires, so to speak, finding my model on the floor. Three times now, in the past two weeks, I have been thwarted in my attempts: the model is out of stock, and there are no guarantees as to when new stock will arrive. In fact, even when I use the retailer's online store to find where they stock the model, I have found them to be sold out by the time I get to the store.

This is one of two points in the NYT article. For one thing, retailers are beginning to combine their online shopping with in-store shopping, through shopping kiosks where customers can essentially order online within the store for in-store pickup. For another thing, consumers are buying within shorter, less predicatble time horizons, and so stores are not stocking as much inventory ahead of time. The result sems to be - in my case at least - that items in production are still hard to come by, unless I commit by ordering online, which is what I tend to do anyway for small items. It's one thing to order an external hard drive through the mail, quite another to order a television.