When I'm in a store, I like to scan product's barcodes to see what the reviews are on Amazon. If it's a few dollars difference in price, then I'll still purchase the item, depending on if the rating is good enough. If the price is more than several dollars, though, I'll have to decide whether to pay extra for instant gratification, or if it's worth waiting a few days to get to me.
If a store attempts to stop me from scanning barcodes in this manner, I just mark it as a store that is not competitive price-wise and will no longer go there.
But you see how this is a one-way relationship between them and Amazon, right? Even if they match the price of Amazon, they are on the losing end-of-the-stick because:
1) They have to pay the expenses for physically hosting that product
2) They may also have to collect state tax
So what they get out this relationship is that the customer uses store resources to investigate a product, and then either a) goes home and orders the product or b) buys the product at the store out of instant gratification.
Amazon either wins big in case a), or in b) incurs the slight cost of hosting the online resources that allowed you to do that research. The store obviously loses big in case a) and it still might lose in case b, if the product was priced so low as to be a loss-leader but you ended up not buying anything else.
Not saying what you're doing is wrong or bad. Just pointing out that the store is kind of against the brick wall, so to speak.
Perhaps the future for retailers is to adopt a gas station model: depend on Amazon to do the supplying, and make money off of something totally unrelated, just as gas stations make more profit off of a cup of coffee than they do for a full tank of gas.
What you are saying is completely valid if you are comparing the prices between two physical stores in the same general area. The problem (which may or may not be an actual problem) is that the overhead of operating a store that allows browsing demands the price to not be competitive against amazon (if you are defining not competitive as 10% more expensive).
This will only become an increasing problem as more people do what is discussed in the article. Best Buy will have to handle all of the foot traffic for both their own sales and for Amazon sales, that will lower their conversion rates which means they have to have an even higher markup which will drive more people to buy online and so on. At some point the store will go out of business and you won't even be able to pay the $10 extra to be able to physically compare products even if you wanted to.
> If a store attempts to stop me from scanning barcodes in this manner, I just mark it as a store that is not competitive price-wise and will no longer go there.
Precisely. If they're doing that, it's because they know you can do better elsewhere.
If a store attempts to stop me from scanning barcodes in this manner, I just mark it as a store that is not competitive price-wise and will no longer go there.