The biggest issue with these sort of stories are that there are these Neo-Luddites who think that we can keep/make jobs in the face of online retailers killing many types of work. Giant corporations don't hire the same number of people that they used to, and the people they do hire don't tend to be low skill positions.
Retail is dying by inches, but it's dying. People can make "customer service" a rallying cry, but "customer convenience" seems to be the actual metric that matters. We're getting rid of these jobs, and too often we're either not replacing them or we're dealing with people who were in JOB X for 10+ years and are unwilling/unable to change to a new field.
I'm not saying any of this is "bad", just that "soft landing and help finding new work" is a cute dream, but not likely. This is what disruption does. It ruins the current paradigm.
I think the only avenue for some of these places is to make up for the loss of convenience with high margin, high quality products and services for those who care. But many of these smaller communities just don't have the populations to support many, if any, of these businesses.
But a goods distribution network may just be the paradigm that's being disrupted, and what may happen is a far more services oriented set of business, until that gets displaced by new innovations.
Ultimately, I think we have the population globally, and the needs to support most of us having fulfilling work. But it may just require a lot of creative relocation individually.
Exactly. Don't make it hard for me to give you my money.
Home depot and Autozone aren't going to be killed by online retail because a large fraction of their customers need drain snakes and replacement car parts today, not two days from today.
'the free market' here is actually more like an oligopoly than a free market, yet is being legislated as if it is a free market.. that's the problem..
If oligopoly pricing is what happens, how come things are so awesome for consumers right now with these razor thin margins and low prices?
If it was an oligopoly we'd see high prices and the consumer being screwed. Do you think this is happening?
replace 'foreign market' with 'big box' and 'domestic' with 'small guy' and there you have it..
the 'consumer' here also can't realistically open up a factory to compete with any of the products being sold... and so is not really a full market participant
All I care about is the consumer. And consumers benefit when prices are low.
People keep predicting that price dumping will cause prices to rise later or something but those predictions have never come true.
IE, people keep saying that Walmart will do this, but how long have they been around? A long time, and prices are still low. Same with Amazon. Prices are still low.
How many decades from now will those inevitable price increases happen?
People with less disposable income have increasingly prioritized physical products over paying for any meaningful interaction with employees which is fine. It is their choice to do so. If people actually value having meaningful interactions on main street in small town America they will still have them. But I suspect that most people don't value that, which one could argue I suppose is bad, but it should ultimately be left up to the individuals that live in small town Vermont, not me.
I rely on a couple of small businesses near me, one of which is my butcher. One might say well the butcher is an unskilled job, but he is selling me two things. First is better meat than Whole Foods. Secondly he is quite a good cook so he can recommend cooking techniques or I can say "I want to do the brisket sous vide" and he will trim it so just the right amount of fat is on it. Obviously this works better with organic products rather than something made of plastic where everything in the same box is a perfect substitute.
The actual agent of change here isn't really Amazon, it's the average consumer deciding that Amazon is better.
Gravity is also a constant and unrelenting force yet we still fly airplanes.
Are there things like airplanes that defy market forces in a controlled manner that can help small businesses?
Prices don't care about externalities. External consequences, not consequences per some sort of time window. Markets are actually often as good as can be expected at taking time into account at least as it may pertain to a particular good in question.
> Are there things like airplanes that defy market forces in a controlled manner
Markets exist because there are finite amounts of things, you can't really defy that. It would be nice if tradeoffs never needed to exist.
There are similar tradeoffs in markets -- the town here made one of those tradeoffs in excluding Walmart. They relegated their residents to buying from higher priced stores or driving further to shop at a big box store. And they (and I) were happy with that tradeoff.
The tradeoff they have available against e-commerce is higher local taxes on all goods purchased with subsidies from those taxes going back to brick and mortar locations. (You can't only tax mail order goods without violating the interstate commerce clause, as I understand it.)
no, you can't. everywhere people trade, there's a market. all you can do is raise the costs associated with legal markets, and deprive those engaging in trade of the rule of law.
take a look at the drug cartels for what happens when you try and legislate markets totally out of existence.