Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Swept away in the Amazon's flood?


This is posted in the window of a small local business.

I wonder if its correct?

On a related note, recently some group claimed that the appeal of the Affordable Health Care Act will cost Wyoming 4,000 jobs. That's nearly impossible to believe.  When the AHCA was passed it didn't seem to add 4,000 jobs.   I note this in not taking a position on the AHCA, but merely to note that statistics aren't always on the mark on such things and reality is more complicated that simple, or even complicated, statistics would often maintain.

Which takes me back to the Amazon thing.  No doubt, I think, on line retailing does take away from local retailing, especially on some sorts of things.  On the other hand, particularly in the West and rural areas, catalogs used to fill a lot of the same role, in slow motion.  A person could order darned near anything from Sears including, starting in 1916, entire houses. Even really big houses.



Of course, ordering a house, I guess, from Sears is one thing.  But now a person can order darned near anything over the net and have it come to their mailbox, and that definitely is new.  Indeed, not only can you do that, but it's becoming so that you have to do that.  I wrote here the other day about shoelaces, for example, and even though I've tried once again to find some locally, I just can't find them.

Probably if you are in retail you'll notice this the most and appreciate the impact of it the most.  Contractors don't have to contend with Sears mail order homes anymore (which were quite nice, by the way) but book sellers and the like do have to content with Amazon. And that no doubt does have a negative impact on them, and on us all as well. Quantifying it however, isn't easy.

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