I call it recce shopping because that’s exactly what it is – we brave the high-street on a military style reconnaissance to gather information about desired merchandise. I will explain…

The internet was always going to change the way we shopped, but unless your name is Jeff Bezos you probably didn’t realise quite how much. The high-street shop has become a place to gain inspiration and window-shop but not necessarily spend. Without a mouse in our hand, we feel exposed and at risk of paying far more for goods than if we bought online. Fear of discovering how cheap you could have got the same item for online helps overcome the impulse that says “I have to have this now”. We return the item to the shelf and make a note for later – I often send myself a quick text or email to myself so I don’t forget.

Once settled in the comfort of our own home we begin our comparison, feeling immense pleasure with every £ we save. We quickly recognise those annoying sites that don’t give postage and packaging costs and we get faster and faster at filling in our address. Soon we have found our store, checked for voucher codes and qualified for cashback.

We will always need high-street shops for browsing, sampling and the emergency presents, but with internet enabled phones we can compare as we go, reducing the need to ‘phone a friend’ for a price-check. This is the main issue for me – the high-street just isn’t transparent enough, and there is just too much variation between prices on- and off-line.

The online shopping environment and the high-street are often seen viewed as distinctly different, but in fact the experiences are surprising similar. Amazon is the department store, with a salesman suggesting other things you ‘might like’. There are the regular specialist and general stores that depend on reputation, first impressions and visibility (or location). The high-street wouldn’t be complete without the ‘golf sale this way’ sign that is twitter, where retailers offer virtual flyers with special promotions. The only anomaly is ebay, which is far too sophisticated to be compared to a street market.

We shouldn’t view the shopping experience as a single-channel exercise; the high-street versus online. It’s a multi-channel world where we have the theatre of the high-street, the specialisation and intelligence of the internet and the community of social networking. I do sometimes worry that the high-street is fading, but so long as it realises that shopping habits are evolving all the time then there is no reason why the two environments can’t co-exist – we will always have a need for the atmospheric high-street.
T.
Fatcheese.co.uk