We already know that UK consumers spent a record £4.5 billion on online retail last month. The shift of retail spend online presents some obvious challenges to high street retailers: the costs of staff and premises alone means they are generally unable to compete with the web on price alone. Of course, there are strategies they can use to continue to win business even so - I can buy glasses online but I can't try them on, I can buy a computer online but I can't weigh it in my hand or see how it fits in my rucksack. The high street still has a competitive advantage when it comes to trying products out.
Given that this represents one of the very few competitive advantages they have left I was therefore astounded to find myself in PC World yesterday forbidden from even picking up an Asus EEE to see how much it weighed, or indeed even glimpsing the battery that would constitute much of its weight during day to day use. Apparently PC World (the one on Kensington High Street about whose ludicrously overzealous security my colleagues at Thisismoney wrote so scathingly earlier in the year) has suffered a lot of thefts, and no longer lets people take the computers from behind their screens.
Logically, I understand that high street retailers will face a vicious circle of thefts as more and more retail moves online and shoplifters are left with fewer and fewer options. Covering the costs of petty thefts that their online competitors do not have to face is only going to make their margins lower or their prices even less competitive. But the solution to this - a shop which actively works to prevent its customers from handling the merchandise - is just a different road to ruin. If I can't usefully touch the PCs in PC World, I may as well do all my research and buying online.
22 February 2008
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