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Delivering the online world
If a stranger to our customs asked me how to go about buying a shirt, I would until recently have told him to go to the store and look at the selection, try a couple on, select his favourite, pay for it with cash or a credit card and then take it home and enjoy wearing it.
But that’s so old school. In hip 2018, I am supposed to order a bunch of shirts online, pay for them with credit, have them delivered free to a destination of my choosing; and then keep the one I like and ship the rest back free—within 30 days—for a credit card refund. The ‘retail store with inventory’ concept is becoming extinct.
We know where our beloved Canada Post stands in this transition. All we have to do is consider its corporate slogan, “Delivering the online world” and its new advertisement, “For everything you do online, we deliver.” The ad touts the establishment of Canada Post’s new “Concept Stores” in “select locations” (unfortunately, our Wellington Post Office is not one of them). These Concept Stores are “innovation labs” that will allow Canada Post to “test exciting new services so you can experience the post office of the future, today.”
One element of the Concept Stores ad caught my attention. At the new stores, Canada Post is offering change rooms. Change rooms will give you the opportunity to “open your new clothing and apparel parcels, try them on, and return them on the spot if need be.”
Now I am the first one to sympathize with the financial predicament of Canada Post. Its monopoly over the mail service has swiftly become irrelevant as people communicate electronically and deliver their parcels by courier; meanwhile the government expresses no interest in extending that monopoly to meet those new realities and makes it harder for it to recover the costs of fulfilling its legacy mail obligations.
But a Canada Post office with change rooms? What will this entail? Will you have to pay for trying on more than three shirts? Will the next logical step be to hire advisors to help you select the right items for you?
And maybe the change room for clothing and apparel is just the beginning. Perhaps Canada Post has plans to expand its change room concept to a ‘trial room’ approach for the whole gamut of stuff you once could buy at a retail store and can now obtain online. Say you’ve ordered a barbecue online: before you take it home you want to make sure all the parts are there and you know how to put the thing together. What better way to do it than by providing the means to do so right at the parcel delivery point—perhaps having it staffed by someone who has assembled a barbecue or two before? Or you’ve ordered five pounds of gourmet free-range sausage online from a specialty farm out west. Who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to check out the freshness of the product in a Canada Post trial kitchen, and then be able to return it on the spot if it doesn’t pass muster? And while we are at it, why not staff the kitchen with a nutrition consultant who can verify your conclusion and perhaps offer you the chance to purchase some sauerkraut and potatoes to go with it?
Maybe sometime next year, when purchases have become lawful, you will have ordered online some Willie Nelson special blend cannabis and you want to make sure you have been sent the real McCoy. What better place to test the product than in a trial room right on site—particularly if an experienced user were on hand to help you with the quality assessment? You could imagine just about any online product having an associated trial room.
Maybe this is Canada Post’s long term strategy—to be the hub around which the online world is delivered (and sent back with free shipping). Maybe it sees the opportunity to establish itself in empty shopping centres laid waste by the online trend, and turn them into vast pickup and delivery centres with dozens of different trial rooms. And perhaps it won’t be too much longer until someone has the bright idea that those trial rooms could hold a certain amount of inventory to enable people to buy directly on site and skip the online middleman. By which point we would be back at retail. And I could buy my shirts the way I always did.
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