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Time Lapse

Interesting article on winners and losers in retail. This past holiday season, I happened to be at an outlet mall. Last time, it was the year J was born to get her a picture with the mall Santa - an experience she thoroughly disliked as the pictures show. That was ofcourse a long time ago and Amazon was still a new kid on the retail block and waves of store closings was not the norm. 

The mall was where all the action was - not only was the volume of traffic very high, people also stuck around until they had worked through their list. The volume of shopping was a spectacular sight to behold - specially to people like me who were new to the country. The mall Santa was a very busy man - the whole place was a hive of human activity and the holiday music served only as ambient noise.

This time, it was hard to tell it was the holiday season judging by the size of the crowds - they did not seem to be buying too much either. Likely, these were show-rooming. I was there with my friend A who did have something pretty specific to buy and had already done the research the "reasonable" price for the shoes in question. There were only two brands in consideration so we spent less than five minutes in each store, completed the purchase and left. 

This was a small part of A's Christmas shopping - just about everything else was bought online. The strident holiday music that overpowered the relative silence of the place felt out of place. Lot of the gifts A bought were that of experiences that the recipients would value - not material stuff. Not sure if that is part of a larger trend as well. There is nothing remarkable about any of this - retail apocalypse is old news by now and so is the evolving customer preference. Yet, seeing the change first hand with the benefit of such a long time lapse made it all very real.

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