It varies. For books, unless I know Barnes and Noble will have it, I’ll hunt for online. Most of my clothes are online purchases - Woman Within. Household necessities and food I buy at a brick and mortar store. When I buy local things as gifts to send I definitely hit brick and mortar stores.
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Most things online. We don’t get UPS or USPS delivery, so we have a box at a UPS store. Works great. They email me when it comes in, and I pick it up on the way home from work.
I’m at the point in my life where I know what I like/want. And I am hard to fit (size 13 shoes, must have a tall in clothes). Very frustrating to pick something out in a store only to discover they don’t have your size.
This stodgy old codger goes to brick and mortar shops and uses online shopping only exceptionally. I don’t shop that much in the first place, and when I do, I like to see the product before I buy it. Plus there’s always the risk of debit/credit card identity theft (has happened to me in the past). I used to buy old things (e.g. used books) on Ebay and will surely buy online again in the future, but it’s always been for specific items I wanted/needed for hobbies etc. rather than everyday goods.
born in the 50’s … i browse products online … but, shop inside b&m stores.
inside the b&m store, i can read the side-panels and back-cover … and will notice if a product is on sale as that moment. if necessary … i use cp and take snapshot of the product and return home … scouring the internet for others’ reviews and detailed specs (compatibility concerns). 99/100 times … i return and purchase the product (from b&m store). another reason i prefer b&m store … they employ local people … if not for that particular store, those people might be living on the street … or robbing pizza-delivery drivers … or breaking into the local pharmacy for drugs.
my general rule of thumb … i only utilize online shopping for very specific items … items that one could never find locally. [keyboard replacement for 7-year old laptop.]
Bricks and mortar. I like to see what I’m buying.
I also like to browse for ideas, which you can’t do online.
In a weird way, I miss christmas shopping and black friday shopping. Everyone was out and about trying to find something for friends and family.
Nowadays all my christmas gifts I get for people are either bought online, or people just want gift cards (which I also can buy online, but sometimes pick up in store if I’m at the store anyway), or they want cash. I don’t do much in person christmas shopping anymore.
I’m 50. If you say the word “shopping” with no context, I would immediately think of bricks-and-mortar shopping first. But give me a few seconds to ponder, and I’d think “Thank God I don’t have to do that much any more.” This year I did 90% of my Christmas shopping online. The other 10% was the sort of specialty foods, liquor, and beer stuff that doesn’t typically ship.
I still do a fair amount of b&m shopping. Now that some local grocery stores have order-online-pick-up-at-no-extra-charge service, I find myself going inside the store less and less often. For clothes and shoes and things you can buy in a grocery store (not just food) I do 50% of my shopping online or pickup, for everything else, it’s 80% or more online.
If I need to buy something that isn’t an everyday purchase and it’s smaller than a bread box, I get it online. Period.
If it’s larger than that, then I actually need to go shopping and try to find it in a store.
Bricks. And if at all possible mom&pop one location type places.
Just don’t tell my employer.
- If I can find it locally, I’ll nearly always buy it locally; though for major items I often do research online first. I want those local stores to stay in business. And I can get actual service from them if needed, and very often advice from somebody who I’ve got reason to think knows what they’re doing. Prices IME are sometimes higher, but usually comparable especially if shipping’s considered, and sometimes cheaper – including sometimes cheaper at local indie stores than at the big box versions.
If you’ve still got a local indie bookstore, by the way: they can almost certainly order you anything that’s in print. Some may be able to order you things that aren’t in print.
There are some things I can’t find locally; if I don’t need them urgently, and there’s a brick-and-mortar source reasonably easy to get to at a city I go to every month or two, then I’ll get them there; including some grocery etc. items which keep, which I generally just buy enough of to keep in stock until the next time I’ll be there.
Some clothes and household stuff I’ll buy mail order, because it’s difficult to get the item or the size or the quality locally; though those are mostly things I buy rarely anyway. And my seed orders are mail order – I grow a lot of different produce items for sale, and nearly always want specific varieties; I often need quantities somewhere between home garden sizes and field crop scale sizes; I have to have untreated seed, and even if untreated if I can’t find the variety as organically-grown seed I need to be able to prove to the certifier that I searched for it that way. So this leads to a complicated ordering process that relies heavily on half a dozen specific seed companies with smaller orders from several others. I find it much easier to do this search using paper catalogs than online, though some portions of the search usually wind up online; and I put most of the orders in over the phone, so I can consult with the supplier, and also to avoid the issues of this-site-doesn’t-work-with-that-browser and/or what’s-gone-wrong-with-this-process-now? which I sometimes run into when trying to order things online.
Hell, we even do most of our food shopping online.
How do you get it?
Do you have it shipped via the regular mail, is it delivered by delivery service, or do you pick it up at the store?
I think grocery shopping is one thing I won’t do online because I enjoy seeing all the variety of food in person at the store, which gives me new ideas for foods to buy. I don’t really get that feeling shopping for food online.
Online mostly, Amazon never!
Online.
I buy things like machinist’s tools, specific electronic gadgets that the big box stores don’t stock, as well as things that Radio Shack had in its heyday, and so on.
If I could find those things easily today, I would go to a store–shipping and sales tax are leveling the playing field quite a bit–but I can’t find them.
Then again, I occasionally find an expensive item in the store after checking their online site (B&N and Walmart I’m looking at YOU), only to have the store shoot themselves in the foot by saying “Oh, we don’t match the price of our own website, you know, cost of the lease, the advantage of you holding the product in your hands, blah blah blah”
The minute they tell me they won’t match what they advertise online with the same company name is the moment when I walk out and place an online order from the competitor.
I am not brazen enough (yet) to order it online from the competition while standing in front of the manager who is still blathering on about why it’s so silly to even imagine that they are the same business as their online presence.
I don’t know about him, but our Safeway pushes on-line shopping, and I usually see workers pushing carts around filling orders.
I’m with you, I don’t do it, but it is a great resource for people who are homebound. You can still cook, you get a much better variety than ordering takeout, and it is probably cheaper also. I figure I’ll be using it in not too many years. It’ll probably be delivered by driverless cars then.
Online. I really hate shopping, so my first thought is always to get it online.
The only exception is poking around the garden center/nursery. I’ll buy hard to find plants online, but I enjoy a weekly trip to the garden center during the season.
Same for me, but there’s usually a time horizon involved. If it’s fairly short-notice or I absolutely need it today/tomorrow (like say… plumbing parts for something broken), then I think brick & mortar stores.
But if there’s no hurry, I tend to opt for online. Like say, a toilet that’s not flushing quite right- the replacement parts can wait a few days without issue.
And sometimes we combine the two with things like Wal-Mart Grocery’s order online/pick up at the store service.
Of course there are caveats- sometimes what I’m looking for isn’t sold locally, or it’s significantly fresher/cheaper locally, like produce. Or there’s an experiential component to shopping- choosing produce or trying on shoes. Those are always local as well. And it works in reverse; I wouldn’t want to hunt all across town for a #4 Torx security bit screwdriver- but I can find a dozen different sorts on Amazon in 30 seconds.
I always check online first, even if I intend on going to a B&M store to get it.
In a lot of cases, when dealing with a major retailer, you can buy online and just pick it up at the store. This is ideal in a lot of cases for me.
Amazon Fresh - groceries delivered to my front door within a predetermined 2 hour window.
I’ve been a fan of online buying for some time but lately I’ve really amped it up.
Need a little doodad that I can get at a B&M? Amazon will deliver it tomorrow, so why bother thinking about it. Just click and get it.
There are still some things we only get nearby. Food, for one thing. (Although Mrs. FtG just bought some French green lentils online since they aren’t available close by.)
And then there’s the thrift stores. I buy a lot of stuff there. (Today some storage boxes, last week some tools. The tools are in fine shape … now.) Can’t buy that stuff online for so cheap, yet. (And neither Amazon or eBay gives a senior discount.)