The Amazon Topic

In the last four years while living in Germany, I've come to utilize Amazon on a thirty-odd occasions.  In the prior decade, I might have used it five or six times.  Obviously, I've gotten use to menu....the options....and the pricing scheme.

Around Germans, Amazon will bring a reaction and a discussion.  If you under the age of forty...the majority of people are pro-Amazon, and they use it at least once a month minimum.  Clothing, electronics, books, maps, etc.  If you are over the age of forty....the majority of people will voice a negativity about Amazon.  Some will use it and others will be fairly hostile that it's destroying commerce in small villages and towns around Germany.

This got brought up with a terrific article on Focus today.

There's this village in northern Bavaria (not that far east out of Stuttgart)....Gunzburg.  Twenty-thousand people, and a downtown area of small shops.  Before Amazon came along in the last decade, these small shops made up the core of business and survived easily.  Now, as Focus tells the story....it's a harsh environment.

One guy noted (Sports clothing)....people come in...browse....try on different pieces of clothing, then leave.  They go out and order the item via Amazon.  

Course, one could point out that pricing matters to a German, and these items in the smaller shops have a price-tag which Amazon can compete against very easily.  In the bigger cities, with the major shops....their pricing scheme is at the same level of Amazon....so competition doesn't readily occur.

In the smaller towns, shops are dying.  I can say that for my village, and the village over the hill.  A handful of shops have a unique item....like florists or eyewear.  Those are untouchable for Amazon.  But the rest represent something that you can challenge.

Amazon made 12.8 billion Euro last year.  A lot of that was profit that twenty years ago went to the smaller shops in villages.

So what did the Bavarian village do?  They took some grant money, and opened up a internet section where they put their products up in the fashion that Amazon did.  You can browse....find an item, and order it.  The city then has the local taxi-service deliver to your house (I might assume at the time you'd like the delivery to occur....something Amazon can't do).

What Focus says is that one out of every two dealers in the nation of Germany will shut down in ten to fifteen years.  All of that in some way....will relate to the unemployment situation.  Across Germany, out of 82-million residents....roughly three million have some stake in store commerce.

Odds of success with this web site and personalized service?  It might make some difference.  But you'd have to take one additional step and lower your cost to come near the Amazon price, and it'll make operating a small shop in Germany very difficult.  Offering some tax incentive to help the small shops?  That'd likely never be a solution that the government would want to entertain.

You can sense that in thirty years....you won't be able to buy much of anything in a village of ten-thousand people, and you have to order it via the internet.