Lee Semel

It’s the holiday shopping season, a time when I reflect on the fact that I hate shopping. Whether online or in person, I find shopping to be a frustrating, time-consuming experience that ranks low on my list of favorite activities. Before you denounce me as somehow un-American, let me explain just a few of the many reasons, and some ideas about how shopping could be better:

• Shopping is all about gathering information. But there’s too much information, and once you’ve made your purchase, it all becomes worthless. Shopping is like a big research expedition, the goal of which is to discover the exact right product at the exact right place to buy it. Because of all the different product models and minute differences between them, there’s a lot of information to sift through. You can spend hour after hour researching a $250 purchase. It’s fine to spend the time if you’re buying an expensive item like a car, but a total waste for small things, like gadgets and cell phones. All that time you spend learning about the products is basically useless once you finally buy something. It would be better to use that time to learn something with some long-term value.
• Reviews and recommendations are of dubious value. Reading countless reviews is a big time sink. They often disagree and it’s hard to know what sites to trust. If you happen to be in a store, good luck finding anyone working there who knows anything about the product. Aside from Consumer Reports, there’s very little that’s trustworthy.
• Shopping = schlepping. I hate the physical chore of shopping, having to go from store to store, finding products on the shelves, and waiting on line to pay for them. What a waste of time and energy. I hate it when I schlep all the way to a store only to find out it’s out of stock for what I want. This is one aspect of shopping where the suburbs beat New York City hands down. It’s a lot easier to shop in a mall, and bring home your purchases in a car, than to take the subway all around town, from store to store, lugging your purchases with you.
• The need to keep track of little slips of paper. I hate having to worry about the return policy and customer service of a particular retailer. And reciepts are an archaic concept. It’s ridiculous that have to keep little slips of paper around to prove I bought the product in case I need to return it. The store has a computer system and knows my credit card number – why can’t they just look it up?
• What’s the real price? Who knows. Companies are always inventing complex schemes to try to test your price sensitivity in hopes of getting more out of you–coupons, affiliate points, rebates, special limited time sales, and price variations based on your cookies or purchase history. Whenever I buy computers or electronics, I now go and scour the Internet looking for coupon codes, not because I need a discount, but mainly to avoid the feeling of being screwed by paying full price. Even without coupons and discounts, companies aren’t even consistent internally. Every time I find a book I want in B&N, I hesitate to buy it because I know if I order it from their website, it’ll be cheaper. Why the difference?
• Comparison shopping sites are all but unusable. You get hundreds of listings of the same product, because the site’s not smart enough to know that ‘Manufacturer Cellphone Model ABC-123” and “ABC-123 Manufacturer Cellphone” are the same thing. This could be improved with some kind of visual matching that would be able to tell from the photos which products are identical. Moreover, I can’t search or filter on the attributes that matter most to me. For instance, if I’m searching for a gadget, it would be great to be able to pick and choose specific features, and have the site reliably find products that match them. Even better would be the ability to search on “soft” attributes, like color, aesthetics, hipness or style. For instance, I should be able to search for something like “mid-century modern coffee table”, and if I don’t immediately find the piece I’m looking for, adjust sliders different qualities like the shade of color, or how modern vs. traditional its style is. Otherwise, you need an expert advisor who’s familiar with everything available.
• EBay is in a class by itself. I especially hate eBay. EBay is only good for one thing: its tremendous product selection. Every other aspect of its user experience is absolutely terrible. Not only do you have to first choose the product you want to buy, you are on your own to judge countless offers for that product, all of which differ slightly by condition, terms, accessories, shipping charge, and other factors. You then have to judge hundreds of different sellers. You are one your own to decide who’s the best, and all of them seem to have 99% positive ratings. At that point, you’re ready to place your bids, so even after all that research, you have no guarnatee of even getting the item. An auction format might be find for collectibles or rare items, but buying standardized current products at auction is insane because of all the additoinal information you need to gather. Have a problem with a seller? EBay’s ready to offer no help whatsoever.

Those times I do enjoy shopping are at stores where collection is heavily edited by a group of experts, and comes at a predictable price point and quality, and when there aren’t hundreds of choices differing in minute ways. For example, shopping for furniture at Crate and Barrel is a great experience. All of their products basically match because it’s all in a certain style, it comes at a predictably high level of quality, and they are always good about returns. It’s a strong brand and I know what it stands for, and it lives up to its promise. Brand names continue to be important, even in the age of the Internet. Most of the reason people rely on brand names, of both products and stores, is to overcome the information-gathering chore and the explosion of choices. When used properly by their owners, brand names are great shortcut because they allow consumers to bypass the information gathering chore.

Any company that can make shopping even marginally more pleasant, and cut down on the amount of information gathering, will definitely be getting more of my shopping dollars!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 7:38 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.