Progress!
25 years ago I could get everything I need within 1 hour by riding the tram or my bicycle to the store.
Where staff with a 3-year education recommended the right product for me, and weren’t aggressively pushed by their employer to upsell.
(This wasn’t in the US though).
Today, the only things left in the city are shops for smartphones, sports betting, vapes and barbers where the haircut somehow costs half as much as the mandatory minimum wage with taxes.
Living in rural Norway this was never an option.
Normal stuff was accessible (and in shops with qualified staff) but anything special was only available if a distributor had it.
EBay, Etsy, Ali Express and amazon (however much I despise their business practice) makes stuff available.
Even now living close to Oslo, Norway is such a small market that stores can’t really have that much capital bound up in stock that occasionally sells.
A few examples:
Pluck foam is impossible to find outside specialized commercial vendors that want to sell it by the ton or something
Small vortex mixer that is not sold by ThermoFischer for an insany jacked up prize.
3mm rubber mat, that apparently you get cut to measure in Home Depot according to the craft YT channel, cannot be found outside companies selling them as health and safety mats to cushion walking surface… Guess if they are cheap?
Same with IT. Unless i order it I can’t get anything better than drop shipped unmarked second hand cables from media market. But we have 20 clothing shops with the same cheap slave made clothes.
Progress!
25 years ago I could get everything I need within 1 hour by riding the tram or my bicycle to the store.
Where staff with a 3-year education recommended the right product for me, and weren’t aggressively pushed by their employer to upsell.
(This wasn’t in the US though).
Today, the only things left in the city are shops for smartphones, sports betting, vapes and barbers where the haircut somehow costs half as much as the mandatory minimum wage with taxes.
Living in rural Norway this was never an option. Normal stuff was accessible (and in shops with qualified staff) but anything special was only available if a distributor had it.
EBay, Etsy, Ali Express and amazon (however much I despise their business practice) makes stuff available. Even now living close to Oslo, Norway is such a small market that stores can’t really have that much capital bound up in stock that occasionally sells.
A few examples:
Same with IT. Unless i order it I can’t get anything better than drop shipped unmarked second hand cables from media market. But we have 20 clothing shops with the same cheap slave made clothes.
25 years ago no agressive push? I was getting pushed for the insurance 25 years ago.