Anyway

I see that Paul Ked­rosky is talk­ing about a resur­gence of depart­ment stores, based on the fact that lots of people want one-stop shop­ping rather than going from store to store. Fun­nily enough, Wal­mart has been meet­ing pre­cisely this need for years; I gath­er one of the major demo­graph­ics for Wal­mart is har­ried moth­ers with chil­dren in tow who also don’t want to schlep from store to store. Now, if depart­ment stores would actu­ally make it more pleas­ant to shop in them, and more effi­cient, they’d get more of my busi­ness as well. Effi­ciency to me means a reas­on­able selec­tion of products, not only cloth­ing, organ­ised in a way that means I can find what I’m look­ing for (or find out they don’t have it) in a short peri­od of time. People to help in the pro­cess would be a def­in­ite plus, but some logic in where things are would make up for that. Rolling carts for people push­ing strollers or bug­gies would help as well.