The Reclocking of America (and the death of the mall)
1st January 2011
Grant McCracken has some interesting observations.
The old model of retail says, in effect, “you come to us.” You, the buyer, must stop what you are doing and come to the mall, the high street, the retail outlet. The trip there is time consuming. Parking is almost always a high stress exercise. The place is crowded. The choices too numerous. The undertaking mostly joyless.
How better it is to visit Amazon.com and make the purchase in our “work flow.” Amazon then takes care of virtually every thing else, and the package stacks, quite literally, on our door step. It’s ready when we are. Not the other way round.
This spells the end of retail as we know it. We might use a traditional model and say this represents the “disintermediation” of the buying process and the elimination of the middle of the chain. And this much is exactly what is happening. But I think the deeper, cultural motive here, is the wish to respond to the dynamism and sheer press of our lives with a model of interaction that organizes time more intelligently. To do everything called of us we are embracing another kind of disintermediation, dispensing with that to-do list stop and go model for something more fluid and just-in-time. Thus does “time management” gives way to “improv.” Thus does planning gives way to something closer to an instantaneous “sense and respond” model. Thus do we move in the direction of what Stuart Kauffman calls complex adaptive systems.