{"id":339001,"date":"2017-04-22T01:55:19","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T17:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1479777"},"modified":"2017-04-22T01:55:19","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T17:55:19","slug":"the-death-of-retail-is-greatly-exaggerated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/the-death-of-retail-is-greatly-exaggerated\/","title":{"rendered":"The death of retail is greatly exaggerated"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Form an orderly queue! Google wants your blood (and other bodily fluids). Oh and your medical\u00a0records<\/h4>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about retail these days<\/a> and I\u2019ve been connecting the dots between the seeming death of retailers like Ralph Lauren<\/a> and the book industry. In short, we are feeling the seismic echoes of the 2008 crash right now on Main Street and things are both ugly and pretty at the same time.<\/p>\n

The book industry, like the music industry, nearly imploded when the world stopped spending its disposable income in the last recession. This led to much doom and gloom and it also led to the rise of ebooks which, at the time, cost far less than a paperback or hardback. Therefore power readers, for lack of a better word, ditched bookstores and only those who enjoyed the book buying experience over the convenience of online kept going to bookstores. And, in seemingly an instant, we saw the collapse of Borders and Barnes & Noble and the death of print in America.<\/p>\n

Or did we?<\/p>\n

What we actually saw was a collapse of the old distribution models. Further, any time an old distribution model dies there are plenty of folks who complain their<\/em> specific sky is falling. As a writer I watched magazines get replaced by websites and bookstores replaced by Amazon and publishers replaced by \u2013 and this could be good or bad \u2013 self publishing. The self publishing jag continued into Medium<\/a> and, I would argue, most of the writing that once ended up moldering in the back pages of business journals and trade publications is now online. In short, all of the old distribution systems that made a few people lots and lots of money in the old days shut down and the new systems that made a lot of people a little money sprang up.<\/p>\n