{"id":964,"date":"2012-12-13T17:34:05","date_gmt":"2012-12-13T21:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=964"},"modified":"2012-12-14T08:10:57","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T12:10:57","slug":"friday-14-december-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2012\/12\/13\/friday-14-december-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 14 December 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: #000099; font-family: Arial;\">07:11 &#8211;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\"> I read an article on CNN yesterday that compared the cost structures of major brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy and Wal*Mart with Amazon. The thrust of the article is that local retailers are hampered by a grossly inferior business model, which is a point I&#8217;ve been making since back when Amazon was losing money. There&#8217;s simply no way local retailers can survive, other than those few types of retailers like supermarkets and pharmacies and gun stores that have some insuperable advantage over web-based retailers.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">That made me think of the other day when I bought a Saturnalia gift for Barbara. Now, I&#8217;ve never liked shopping. Hell, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve set foot in Hanes Mall for at least 10 years. Even in the days before the web, I almost never bought locally. Barbara would give me a Bean or Lands&#8217; End catalog with the items she wanted marked, I&#8217;d call the 800 number, and that was that. But for the last decade or more, I&#8217;ve done nearly all of my shopping on-line. This time, Barbara just sent me links on Amazon for a couple items and said that either one would be fine. So I clicked the links, clicked the add-to-cart button, and ordered the item. Barbara had also mentioned that her parents&#8217; answering machine was borked, so I searched for an appropriate answering machine\/cordless phone combo, added it to my cart, and ordered it. It never even occurred to me to get in the truck and drive to some local retailer.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">We continue to build and ship science kits.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 65%; height: 3px; font-family: Arial;\" \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>07:11 &#8211; I read an article on CNN yesterday that compared the cost structures of major brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy and Wal*Mart with Amazon. The thrust of the article is that local retailers are hampered by a grossly inferior business model, which is a point I&#8217;ve been making since back when Amazon was losing money. There&#8217;s simply no way local retailers can survive, other than those few types of retailers like supermarkets and pharmacies and gun stores that have some insuperable advantage over web-based retailers.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2012\/12\/13\/friday-14-december-2012\/\">&nbsp;&raquo;&nbsp;Read more about: Friday, 14 December 2012 &nbsp;&raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}