Online Shopping Dominating the Market

We’re embarking on a new series here on the Louisville Switching blog. It will deal with the economic shift that’s being created as retail is dying and online e commerce sales are rising. Let’s face the music, most of what we buy is being shipped directly to us— including our groceries.

Right before our very eyes, the paradigms are shifting in the way consumers do business. The economics are complex and the changes are swift. How quick will businesses be able to adapt? Which industries will need to reinvent themselves. What industries will benefit the most? What new products and services might fill the gaps? What are some of the statistics and numbers driving this paradigm shift? These are questions we’ll attempt to tackle over the coming months as we unpack this topic.

Retail Stores Relevance in the Future

Maybe one day down the road we’ll pack our families in the car and take them to do some "shopping". There will be some stores pop up, purely for the nostalgic pastime we used to call shopping. Better yet, what if the stores that are closing start to become distribution centers. We don’t go there to shop, but simply to pick up what we’d rather not wait an extra day or two for on a delivery. Then one day down the road 10 or 20 years from now, when we show up to pick up our items, we notice an inventory of other items off to the side. The distribution clerk may say, "why don’t you shop around while you wait for us to pull your package". "Shop around you say" why I’d love to. Will it come back full circle? Who knows, but it’s more likely shopping will become a pastime that we do for memories and nostalgia than a part of our daily life and economy. Maybe people will gather together in large "stores" and shop from their computers, pads, phones or other devices. It’ll be a parlor for online shopping as consumers desire the social aspects, much like shoppers going to catalog stores in the 1970s to purchase their goods. 

Who knows how far off our future casting is, but one thing is for sure, some of these changes are happening right before our eyes and there isn’t much we can do to stop them.  Check out this article by The Atlantic, giving more insight on this matter.

Is this paradigm shift gonna happen overnight? Probably not, but it’s happening way faster than we thought. In Louisville, our small city of a million folks, just this past quarter we’ve seen major retailers like Walmart, Toys R Us and Babies R Us closing shop, along with several area grocers.

It might not be the age of the Jetsons, or flying cars from Back to the Future, but the changes are real and they are not waiting for us to adjust. They are coming full force.

So if you’re in the logistics industry like Louisville Switching Truck Sales, what do these changes mean for you? In the age of Amazon, with deliveries happening at a record pace, how to we keep up with the demand? Shipping and distribution are the backbone of this shift. It may be the same amount of products being shipped but how they are getting to the end user is changing drastically. When Amazon made the decision to use contracted workers to be their army of delivery people last year, some of us may have scratched our heads and said how will they pull this off without the assistance of UPS, Fedex or the USPS? But they seem to be doing it.

If you’re intrigued, then stay tuned over the coming months as we address these topics and the application they have to our industry.