Competing with Netflix
Just passing along an interesting story written by Kelly Bit of the New York Sun about how traditional brick-and-mortar video stores are struggling to stay afloat.
What is common among all the successful ones is that they each claim to provide a customer service that Netflix does not. In many of these cases, the “something extra” is the supposed “human element,” which, when actually explained, seems to amount to nothing more than telling someone else to type words into a search engine instead of doing it yourself. What makes this explanation fishy, however, is that thile it is true that sometimes the most detailed description you can offer of a movie you want is not enough to search for it yourself, it is far from necessarily the case that a video store clerk will be able to help you. (The best part of one clerk’s explanation of this supposedly wonderful service is that he still gets the name of movie wrong while telling his heart-felt anecdote about one customer’s search for “Baby Geniuses 2″).
Speciality stores, of course, usually have more knowledgeable staffs and may even have titles that Netflix does not (especially if these haven’t been released on DVD), but this is what makes them speciality stores. Speciality stores can survive operating with outdated economic models because they have always, and will continue to have, niche markets. Their existence (and even success) says nothing about the survival of that out-dated model.
The most interesting explanation, however, of why some of these stores stay in business has to do with their locations. Most of their business is from neighboring residents, who visit the shops on-foot. Immediacy has always been the advantage of brick-and-mortar stores and it seems these that urban-residential locations are best able to live off of it.
Click the link above to read the full story.