I remember when I was younger, shopping was done in stores, and I mean, physical stores, where you had to go through the front door and purchase items from an actual shop clerk, who had some idea of what kind of products they had in the store. Of course, when I was younger, I shopped with my parents, and most likely with my mother. Most of the time shopping was for clothing, though there was always shopping for Christmas and school supplies.
I remember that the shopping was always a labored affair. One particular incident comes to mind when I think about shopping with dear old mom. I don't recall the store. Probably it was one of those stores that opened only for a short time and then went the way of the dodo. I remember it was in one large room filled with those round fixtures which clothing was hung along with the clothing hung on the walls. I remember having a blow-up with my mother about some particular clothes that I wanted. It was embarassing because I wanted some particular shirts or pants or something or other, and mom had other things in mind.
There were so many choices to fight over, or, at least I thought there were.
This was at the time when there were very few cable channels, and what channels there were, there wasn't a lot of prime, original programming. But people wanted it.
I recall these things because with the advent of the internet, things have changed. We have have been bombarded with a number of choices and options. The day of stores with limited selection have disappeared. It used to be you could walk into a Barnes and Noble and look for a book that you wanted, and, perhaps, that store you walked into might have the book, and then again, it might not. And perhaps they could order the book, but then it would get to you three to four weeks later. There selection was limited.
Similarly, if you wanted to buy an album that was old or not popular, the likelihood was that it had to be ordered. I know that I had to order the music a few times. But know, iTunes and Amazon have made it simple to order the music. In fact, things have gotten to the point where you don't even need to have a physical media on which the music, book, movie comes on. It can be sent to the computer on which you were looking for the music, movie, and/or book.
The problem in all this is that in having access to all this material is that it takes time to sift through the items. If I want to buy a nook book for my Barnes and Noble Nook, I spend at least an hour looking for a book deal. The shear number leads me to believe that there is something out there that I am missing, that if I don't find it, I will miss out on the deal, something in our modern American culture is impermissible.
What is even worse is that after finding the deal, after buying the deal, instead of finding the intrinsic value of having it, the simplicity and ease with which the item was obtained decreases its apparent value. I can't tell you how many times I have had the opportunity to buy a great novel and passed it up because it was too low. Why would they put such a book on sale that low? And then I miss out.
The sad thing about it all is that because there is no correlation between the face value of the book and the merit of the content of the book, the novelist, the musician, the director, the actor lose out. They perhaps get a reputation unwarranted.
It would be easy enough to say, "Give every book, album, or movie a chance." The problem with that is that there is too much material out there for us to do that. I have wondered how many books, movies, and albums come out each year. But obviously too many to spend time testing the merit of each. In the end, we have to rely on something to give us some idea of the value of the books content.
Most of the time it is the price. Although websites provide rating and reviews both by consumers and professionala reviewers alike, such reviews are unrealiable, unreliable because we are not alike. What I like certainly what other like. My opinion of good writing, good charater development, good plotting, is not the same as others. In fact, I often purchase books when others have said they dislike the samme
So, what the internet has created is not simplicity and ease but more complexity and time consumption. The internet essentially increased the stress of shopping.
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