The Amazon effect: sometime in the early teens, we needed a Weber Smoky Joe portable charcoal grill for a camping trip. We went to the camping aisle in our local Walmart and found the shelf and the price tab for the product, but it was out of stock. We pulled up the Amazon website on our phone—I recall being surprised we could get service inside the store—and ordered the Smoky Joe on the spot. It was the first time we’d done something like this, but certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The Amazon effect: this week we visited a couple of CVS stores in search of the 16 ounce bottle of coal-tar dandruff shampoo we like. They only had a shelf space for the 8 oz size and were out of stock. We checked the CVS app and found that only the 8 oz size is now available and it costs what the 16 oz used to cost. We abandoned the many CVS coupons we had loaded on our device and searched for “coal tar shampoo” on Amazon. A 16 oz bottle ships free for what the 8 oz bottle costs at CVS. We ordered it on the spot.
Non-Amazon marketers like to bemoan the chilling effect of Amazon on smaller retailers, but these are examples of mercantile Darwinism at work. Neither Walmart nor CVS would have lost the sale but for decisions they made about inventory management. Walmart has adapted quite well in recent years, while CVS seems to be going in the opposite direction. They’ve built a flashy app, but it is hard to use and you have to pay for shipping for that out-of-stock item; there’s no ship-to-store option.
And here’s a reverse Amazon effect: we’ve recently been doing a lot of Chinese cooking using The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop. As a result, we find ourselves browsing the aisles of our local Asian supermarket for products which are hard to find because the labels are not in English. So what do we do? Go on Amazon, find the product we want with a search term like “black Chinese vinegar” or “broad bean sauce”. We then show this product, the photo blown up so the Chinese characters can be read, to a store employee. They guide us to the shelf where we find the product, always at a much lower price, and we buy it on the spot. Amazon loses the sale in this instance; mercantile Darwinism at work.