Shopping

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, procuring goods meant visiting brick and mortar stores and being attended to by salespersons. These days, contrariwise, we make a great per cent of our purchases online with no humans directly involved in our transactions.

Consider that, years before malls swallowed up suburban retail businesses, my mother owned a clothing boutique located among businesses filling a single-story building. Her neighbors were, respectively; a dry cleaner, a barber shop, and a hair salon. Nearby was the community’s independent grocery store. Across the street stood other single-story buildings housing doctors’ offices, and a pharmacy.

During those decades, which predated the advent of social media, news of fashion trends was conveyed in parking lots outside of places of worship or in school study halls. Although Mom bought inch tall ads, in junk mail flyers, to publicize her offerings, her “regulars” shopped weekly to discover for themselves her newest shipments’ contents. What’s more, businesswomen who frequented her place filed requests for us to hold every new pair of pantsuits that arrived in their size; that new breed of “working gals” had money as well as the incentive to buy new garments but had no time to search for them among the racks.

In those days, too, we rang up customers on a mechanical cash register, accepted no credit cards, and averted shoplifting, not with cameras or electronic article surveillance, but by counting the units going into and out of each dressing room. Moreover, there was no Internet on which we could browse wholesale stock, so we seasonally shlepped to an out-of-town warehouse for merchandise and otherwise relied on regional shows open only open to store owners, as well as to literally traveling salesmen who came with dozens of samples plus sundry fabric swatches.

In the past, bounced checks were our biggest risk. All in all, we thrived as the locals’ apparel mart until the aforementioned malls were built.

Unlike my mom’s enterprise, those shopping precincts had multiple floors and countless vendors. They offered credit card purchases. They flooded mailboxes with colorful, multipage flyers. They bought in larger quantities than any mom-and-pop store ever could, hence, most importantly, they offered amazing prices.

Nonetheless, today, more and more malls are being converted into apartments or are being left vacant. Increasing numbers of consumers are prioritizing time-savings over face-to-face service; computer accessible commodities have become trade’s gold standard.

Until recently, I’d personally lost track of how significantly commerce has changed. Yet, during the last few years, given COVID-related restrictions and given age-related physical impairments, I’ve not been visiting too many shops. Consequently, I’ve become aware of the shifts.

Namely, whereas I used to scoff at Big City Folks who storied others about their groceries being dropped off to and guarded by their buildings’ doormen, these days, I depend on deliveries. Yes, the produce that the hourly workers bag up is often ugly, or, at best, mediocre. Certainly, the pictures I click on when curating supplies are often unlike the products left at my home’s threshold. Unquestionably, it’s rare for me to receive provisions that are not missing one, or even a few, of my selections. Nonetheless, I can no longer drive and I walk with great difficulty, so this modern approach to spending buoys the quality of my life.

On balance, while filling out my credit card information is a matter of key stokes, securing my bits and bobs is not. I neither text nor use WhatsApp, so, often an order’s identifying number gets sent to Hubby’s smartphone and then he relays that number to me. Further, if something goes awry, there’s no service desk to which to walk. Rather Hubs or I have to spend tens of minutes or more, sometimes repeatedly, to cycle through a phone tree just to leave a message for a live operator. More exactly, my spouse often has to be the one to play catch-up for us since lots of these online business insist on texting—animation has cost him hours.

Acquiring outfits online is even more challenging. Although food sellers often provide adequate information to determine kashrut status, ready-to-wear merchants don’t always provide enough information to determine shatnez. As per ill-fitting buys, at times it’s so costly to ship pieces back that, in my family, some brand-new garments are donated straightaway.

Granted, my personal sphere may not be typical. Nevertheless, it remains true that the business world has shifted. For instance eBay will be closing its Israeli R & D Center. One implication is that this organization has many international centers. A second is that it has grown sufficiently to require complex, professional support teams.

It seems as though, just days ago, this company, which deals with auctioned or directly peddled stuffs, and which was founded in an apartment in the 1990s, was nuevo. I recall asking my computer scientist husband whether it was safe to shop there since it was online.Apparently, lots of folks thought online transaction were adequately secure. Amazon was founded around the same time. Etsy, Target.com, and like-minded services, similarly, sprang up. If someone was willing to pay for shipping, that someone could shop the world.

These days, there’s Temu and AliExpress for general possessions and a host of others for more specific kinds of purchases. QR codes make even print media interactive. Shopping’s no longer the stuff of neighborhood purveyors or even of gallerias. Doing the marketing, per se, has evolved, for the most part, into an electronic errand.