Fitting Rooms.
Went to PacSun today.
Have you ever shopped at a clothing store for young people? If you have, you know that most of their fitting rooms are under lock and key, supervised tightly by the oft clueless retail staff. Aside from being locked up, they’re also not very discreet. The door is usually one or two feet off the ground, and you can see over the top of it. Completely open ceiling, and you can always hear the bustle and conversations of other customers. And usually loud music too. Doesn’t seem like the kind of environment where I’d like to be changing clothes and looking in the mirror, deciding how to spend my money. And yet this is how most “trendy” retail stores operate. Why?
There’s one main reason: theft.
I’ve worked at a retail store, I know the drill. Stores don’t trust customers anymore. They teach employees to use codewords when they see suspicious activity. They whisper into little earpieces like CIA agents.
I’ve seen it happen before: A cute couple walks into the store around Christmas time - when stores are busiest and employees and constantly distracted - wearing sweatshirts or big coats. They grab a dozen shirts, a few smaller items, and they go into a fitting room together. That’s where they rip off all the tags and put on as many shirts as they can, one after another, and cover them with their jackets. After that, it’s all about getting out of the store before anyone finds the evidence. Once they’re on the other side of the sensors, it’s game over.
This is why the stores want you to be stressed out. They don’t want you camping in the fitting room all day, trying on every item they have. They want you to grab the first thing you see that looks good on a mannequin, too busy to try it on and probably too lazy to take it back when it doesn’t fit.
And it works, mainly because clothes are hard to make for yourself. They’re hard to design and expensive to produce, even if you had the equipment. So everybody just buys.
But what if things were different? What if it was cheap and easy to make your own clothes at home, in any color, fit and style you wanted? What if people started selling clothes to their friends for a fraction of the cost that the stores are charging? What if you could put in a special order to the guy across the street and he could have it ready the next day? Do you think the stores would still be so greedy and untrusting to their paying customers? Probably not. If they were, they’d likely go completely out of business.
It’s just like the music business.
Except unlike the music business, people can’t sit on their couches and steal merchandise worth hundreds of dollars with the click of a mouse.
Everybody’s in a band now. Heck, I’m in 3 or 4 bands. People are making music using only their cell phones. I just heard a guy who said he used the microphone from his Rock Band game.
It’s not hard to make a quality recording of a song anymore. And a youtube clip of a girl with a guitar can easily get more hits than a million-dollar music video. This is a sign of the times.
Yet it seems like the major record labels, just like the retail stores, still don’t trust their customers. In a world where people are buying music directly from their laptops and phones, if they’re paying for it at all. Why drive to the record store when you can buy it and listen instantly on your iPhone? That’s the future.
Not that people aren’t buying CD’s anymore. But we’re definitely buying fewer CD’s than we used to.
You want to get a Christmas gift for your teenage son or daughter, but you have no idea what they listen to? iTunes gift cards are conveniently nestled in the checkout line at your grocery store. Done.
They’re just going to copy it to their computer and put the CD case in a box anyway.
Oh, yeah: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/come-as-you-are-ep/id334314447
