The year shopping changed forever
On March 4, I commuted into Vox Media’s New York City headquarters for what would end up being the final time during the godforsaken year of 2020. On the way in, I made a pit stop for some coffee, spending $3.89 on a bottle of Chameleon Cold-Brew, but left without handing over a card or cash on the way out. That’s because I had made that final purchase at a cashierless convenience store owned by a certain e-commerce giant: Amazon. Nine months later, that last stop looks like an appropriate harbinger of the major changes that would sweep across a big part of American life this year: how and where we shop.
Over the next few weeks, my family, and millions of others in the US, began relying on Amazon and other shopping websites and apps in record numbers as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the US. Masks, toilet paper, soap, and hand sanitizer were in high demand. But so were groceries, restaurant meals, puzzles, printers, and even dumbbells.
At times, government-mandated store closures in some parts of the country meant that if you needed to purchase something deemed nonessential, the only places to get it were “essential” big-box stores — or online. As a result, Amazon and other retail giants like Target and Walmart reaped the rewards, while retail chains and small boutiques that sold apparel or other “nonessential” merchandise were forced to close their doors and turn customers away. Nearly 10,000 stores in the US have closed permanently this year alone.
When we look back at 2020 in the business world, we’ll remember it as the year online shopping stopped being the future of retail and catapulted firmly into the present. This was the year that local governments forced us to give up in-store shopping for weeks or months, and then when we had an opportunity to return when stores reopened, we mostly kept shopping online anyway.
There’s a reason people who previously shunned online shopping for stores are now sticking with it: It’s typically much more convenient than browsing through rows of aisles to track down what you need. But the acceleration in online shopping this year — which otherwise would have taken several years to happen — will have profound consequences on the way millions of Americans work; the way corporate power is concentrated; and the way local communities are reconstructed to account for the decline of retail store chains like department stores and the malls they’ve long anchored.
