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The Diminishing Power of the "Consumer"
This past Thursday we spent about 7 hours in Town, mostly drinking and walking through shops. One thing we noticed was, instead of salespeople they have silly gimmicks that don't even work. Like a machine that claims to assess foot size but is instead asking for personal details like an E-mail address and at the end delivers nothing at all, for purely technical reasons (malfunction). Those are data-collecting gadgets disguised as sales assistants.
Worse yet, there are places that no longer accept cash payments. Sometimes you ask several times (several people) and get contradictory answers, sometimes the answers are the same, i.e. consistent.
It feels like the old days of window shopping or shopping or physically walking into stores isn't the same; many shops are mostly empty, sometimes completely empty, and some tills aren't attended by anybody.
In a world like this, how valued is the customer? █