America’s Retailers Are Closing Stores Faster Than Ever
I&#x27;d buy more from the local stores of some retailers if they would make their websites work better. I&#x27;m willing to pay more now and then to support keeping the stores open, but not if they make me jump through too many hoops.<p>A good example of doing it wrong is Barnes &amp; Noble.<p>Suppose I&#x27;m thinking of buying a book, and would like to go take a look at it in person before making my decision. So my first question is simple: is it in stock at my local Barnes &amp; Noble?<p>That&#x27;s fairly easy to determine. Just go to barnesandnoble.com and search for the book. On the page for the book there is a &quot;Want it Today? Check Store Availability&quot; link. Hit that link and you get a pop up to enter your zip&#x2F;postal code. Do so and it will then show you a list of their stores near that area, and whether or not each has the book in stock.<p>OK, that&#x27;s fine if you are only interested in one book. But I&#x27;m usually interested in taking a look at several books. So navigate to another book&#x27;s page and click &quot;Want it Today? Check Store Availability&quot;.<p>And guess what happens? You get the pop up that asks you to enter your zip&#x2F;postal code! They didn&#x27;t set it in a cookie when you entered it for the first book. You have to enter your stupid zip&#x2F;postal code for EVERY book you want to check!<p>OK...maybe it works better if you login. If you login you can set a store as your local store, and the site remembers that. For instance when you ask about upcoming events it shows the events from that store.<p>Nope. Logging in makes no difference. There is no way I&#x27;ve found to make it use the &quot;my local store&quot; setting to save from having to actually enter zip&#x2F;postale code for every book you want to check.<p>If I&#x27;m looking up a half dozen books or so I usually get annoyed around #4 and say &quot;screw it&quot; and make do with Amazon&#x27;s &quot;look inside&quot; feature, and then buy from Amazon.<p>I could simply not believe that they could do this, and so guessed that it might be because I use Safari on Mac. Maybe they don&#x27;t test with Safari? Nope, I then tried Chrome and Firefox, and had the same problem. I then tried them on Windows, and also Edge, and same problem.<p>At the very least, B&amp;N needs to use a cookie to remember the zip&#x2F;postal code for that browsing session.<p>I say &quot;very least&quot; because that just solves the problem when I have a specific list of books in mind that I&#x27;d like to come look at.<p>Another common case is when I just know the category I&#x27;m interested in. For instance, I would like to get a book on improving my memory. There are a lot of books in that category. To find out online which are at my local B&amp;N I&#x27;ve got to find them all on the site, and then check each one by one to see which ones are at my store.<p>What I really want is an option to select a store, and then have the site show me only items that are in stock at the store. If I search for &quot;improve your memory&quot; I don&#x27;t want to see the 244 matching items that are available at the union of B&amp;N stores and B&amp;N online. I want to see only the 5 items that are actually at my local store.<p>What B&amp;N needs to realize is that I don&#x27;t care what B&amp;N sells online. If I&#x27;m going to buy a book online I&#x27;m going to buy from Amazon because I have Amazon Prime. If I&#x27;m at their website it is because I&#x27;m interested in what is in their retail locations.