In person

We offer some observations on spending money.

Our photographer ventured into the metropolis of Washington recently, visiting several places he hadn’t been to in a while as well as some he had.  Based on his trip as well as others we’ve made recently, we offer the following observations.

While the COVID lockdown was hard on retail shops, many weathered the storm and continue to function even after people’s habits have changed to mostly buying online.  However, shop space in a city is expensive per square foot, so only goods that will offer a quick return are stocked on-site.  For photographic stores, this means video-related gear.  The store may indeed have a wide selection of still cameras and other stuff, but you have to search the online site for it, and maybe go to another location.

This is something else we’ve noticed, a very general thing: almost all the places we’ve visited have been one of several locations, throughout a region if not nationwide.  The shop that has only one place to be is rare and getting rarer.  Our tutor had lunch yesterday in a retail district in northern Virginia (it wasn’t even there when he moved to Alexandria in a previous decade), and every shop in it was part of a regional or national chain.  That is, anything there could be found somewhere else, so you needed another reason to visit the area.  (It turned out to be a central location for the people he was meeting.)

Getting back to online shopping: buying stuff and having it shipped to you, rather than going into a store and bringing it back, is nothing new.  The Sears mail-order catalog was going strong by the turn of the 20th century and lasted almost to its end.  It was an enormous expansion of possibilities available to the rural population.  Online ordering is the same sort of thing made faster and easier.  There are, of course, drawbacks.  You cannot know exactly what you’re getting until it arrives.  The clothes may not fit.  And our photographer notes that the condition of a used lens or camera may not be quite as it was described.  Returns are always a hassle and sometimes aren’t possible.  Also, you have to know what you want.  Part of the attraction to an old-fashioned, big-selection store was the possibility of finding something you hadn’t thought of.

Apart from simple convenience, there is another attractive feature of online shopping, as pointed out by our photographer.  If there are very few examples of an item, because few were made or it was only of specialized interest, your chances of finding it in a full-stock store were slim.  There might be some fun in tracking down rumors and visiting out-of-the-way places in the hope of scoring your prize at last; but it was inconvenient and frustrating.  Now, chances are that if the last example is in someone’s hoard in Upper Saxony or Penang, it’s listed somewhere on the internet.

We’ll do our shopping still at local stores when we can, for a number of reason including some not listed above.  But we’re swimming against the stream.