I didn't really need anything at the moment but last Saturday I went on a little shopping spree in town. Besides the usual food supplies needed, I had a little wish list with some books and old CDs to look for. A couple of hundreds of Euros of goods that I buy when I want to give myself a treat, or, if I find it at a bargain price. That sounds like a bit of fun and a time consuming treasure hunt. But in our modern Era it is not.
I searched for elements in my wish list in the usual giant stores as Fnac and Virgin, deciding to cut the chase and just bring home some new book or something else. I searched for some non mainstream Tolkien books (not related to the Lord of the Rings books) but I could not find any of those. I even searched in the French book section as I naturally search for the original version every time I know the language. There were somewhat 30 copies of the Lord of the Rings. Nothing else.
Afterwards I decided to check the music section with a certain doubt, as Metal is usually not very well represented in those temples of uniformity. Barely just a couple of copies of the new CDs: Nothing to be found older than a couple of months.
That's what you get for being a lazy geek I thought. So I started to ran into every bookstore and music store in town. I am sure I didn't get them all but I am confident I got the big part of them under my scrutiny. And all for what? From the biggest to the tiniest, all offered me the same. Hundreds of copies of Twilight, dozens of Hunger Games books, thousands of pop CDs and other canned sound. The globalisation turned all the stores into identical ones. Call them what you want - you'll find in them the same products from the same time frame dicted by the Marketing sections. Everybody sells the Intouchables DVD and surf on the trend of the month. More sports products for the Euro 2012 are to be seen everywhere too. Now, our world is so connected that we are all supposed to do, see, eat and think the same. The way we do shopping has changed too, even if most of the consumers refuse to see it. It is worthless to go shopping in a shop that sells the same as the other hundreds in town. Everybody sells the same. On a day like this, I saw that the stores sell their products at a higher price than they should, prices varied between 5 and 15 Euros from one store to another for the same product that everyone of them had. It's a question of being willing to go a little further.
In today's World buying online is the best approach. I get the best deals for all the products I desire. I don't need to pay 15 euros more to feed a company and pay an employee to be there for me when, most of the time, they don't really know what they are selling anyway. Is this good? On one hand yes, we can all get our products cheaper and delivered in two days - but at what cost? Job losses. Or transformation. If there is no stores, you will need more people to make the orders rolling. Stores need to adapt and become cultural areas where you can talk and from where one can order very specific products - not a place from where you can buy anything from someone who doesn't know a thing of what you are talking about. What I need are more places where I can have what I can't order with the help of internet access and a computer. Automatic labor is for machines. Actually if we turn that into reality most of the jobs will disappear. Most of the Help Desks can be automatic, most of the production lines too. We don't need the mauls of the 50' nor 120 sales men for each of them.
We don't even need the stores. We need time for us, and time to serve others, to give them a bit of what makes us unique. Art, builders of manufactured products, food or even services. Do we really need someone in a Gas station to fill up gas? Or so many people in a supermarket to pass the products over to us when we can just shop online and have them delivered a couple of hours later at our doors?
I don't even want to listen to the usual “we will lose human contact, that's not good”. Well wake up, it's lost for a while. Most of the people barely say hello and goodbye to the ladies at the supermarket. We need to get rid of all of this time consuming useless tasks most of humanity call a job or, better said, a living. Most of us do not actually create anything. We pass by or resell. Blessed is the one that makes a living creating something or doing something useful. And no, I don't think that trying to sell me an iPhone is useful. I can do that all by myself online.
What if I am not sure? Well I'll ask another human being that won't make 0,23% of the sales plus bonus if I get a warranty on it. No thanks. Face it. You're useless at that position. DO something. Create, innovate. Leave the rest for the machines.
