The batteries are coming tomorrow

[ARW]

I asked a friend with a smoke alarm bleeping problem to pick up 3 x PP3 batteries for me to swap for him.

So he ordered on line as it is cheaper than using a shop!

The world has gone mad.

[williamwright]

My kids do that sort of thing.

Bill

[Graham Harrison]

Not totally. Until 12 years ago i lived in a town environment; supermarkets, clothes shops, W H Smiths, McD's and almost anything else I wanted within walking distance. The DIY sheds were about 5 miles away on the odd occasion I needed something.

Now I live in the country. It's a 20 minute walk into town (large village) with no pavements for about a quarter of the distance. I can buy sufficient food and PP3s (but nothing "fancy") there but eveything else is anything between 6 and 13 miles away. Trains are fine if I want to go to London and other places on the main line but not very frequent. Buses exist (just) but not at weekends. The sheds are about

15 miles and in 4 different directions (only 1 served by bus but have to change) so I tend to click and collect if I really want to go to one but I reckon the cost of driving (even if I only factor in the fuel) is more than delivery as a rule.

It's horses for courses but don't get me wrong, in the circumstances you describe I might well agree with you I just dislike blanket statements!

[Tim Lamb]

I ordered 10kg of grass seed yesterday. Waiting in the porch this morning!

[Owain Lastname]

I did that too.

Also because I have a choice of Premier / Post Office or Home Bargains locally and I don't expect either of them sell particularly good batteries, so while I might trust them if I had to use a remote control urgently for my smoke detectors I'll get some proper alkalines from CPC.

Obviously the "cheaper" is disregarding all the unnecessary things I add to the order to get the free P&P.

Shopping is also a pain, but the postman with a parcel still feels exciting.

Owain

[Bob Eager]

Online can be better. I ordered 60kg of cat litter and 6kg of dry cat food.

Go out, load it onto a trolley, load it into car, drive home, ferry it (20kg bags) to the front door?

Or have it arriving at the front door (and cheaper)? No contest.

[misterroy]

In town at work, I could buy most things after work. What usually happens is get to end of work and I would rather go home and go out with the dogs than spend the twenty minutes it would take to buy the batteries. This might happen for days, so I am quicker buying online. If someone else was involved in the repair, I would get whatever from town .

[newshound]

Not really. I keep AA, AAA, and PP3 in stock (also 23A and several types of button cell). When I am down to the last one, I order another pack.

My hardware shop is only a 5 minute walk away, but that is 20 minutes by the time I've put some shoes on, and queued. Although I might use the shop if I had to go down for the post office or supermarket, etc.

[Theo]

I've started doing that. A trip to TS/SF/sheds/etc is probably an hour all in (plus petrol etc), where Amazon Prime will deliver stuff for free next day.

The stock on Prime is not very good and pricey for what it is, but it's handy when you've stalled a job because you need a <thing>; unless you have to finish the job first thing tomorrow you just get on with something else until the Amazon delivery turns up, and saved the hour in travel time.

Similar goes for other places that deliver next day - eg Farnell/CPC, although they rely on UPS who have been very hit and miss this year (possibly Brexit issues in Jan/Feb). TS are mostly next day, including weekends if you pay extra. The nice thing about Prime is there's no minimum order for free next day (although it's priced into the products).

I'd be quite interested to know if there's anyone else recommended who have free next day delivery (over an order threshold presumably).

Theo

[Bob Eager]

Same here. I have a couple of battery racks (the same sort, but increases capacity) on the workshop wall. Anyone in the household can grab what they need. I also have a box of different sorts to top that up. That box also has 'rare' ones.

[ARW]

I went into a post office last year and there were two open counters with no other customers in the place.

I asked "No queue then?

And one of the staff replied "I can come and stand in front of you if it pleases you"

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Yes, I hope they are genuine ones and not by some weird make like Flying bomb or something incomprehencible or have been in some damp store in India through a flood. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

What bleep like Smoke alarms? Not heard of that before. Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

Years and years and years ago when we were electronic hobbyists, a new firm started advertising resistors and capacitors by mail order. My friend saw that they were 5 miles away and cycled over 'Its not a shop, its a bloke with a garage full of bins' It became as big as RS at one point.

No, its just cheaper not to carry the overhead of a shop and a man to serve customers.

Didn't you do economic geography at school? Market towns where people could go to sell what they made at home, and get all the stuff they couldn't make at home, existed because it was a 'one stop shop'.

Same as manufacturing towns, where the water power existed, became the places where people lived. and coal towns where the coal mimes were.

Naturally since they were successful, the gimmement taxed them. Now the Internet replaces the high street, because its cheaper and you don't pay high street taxes.

Towns today have no reason to exist *at all*, by and large. Nor most shops

[Fredxx]

It goes to show that the overheads of retail are much higher than the cost of maintaining a website and postage.

There was a time where retail parks were built the same time as housing. That has now become less common. Retail premises are dying.

[Richard]

While there is still a sense of humour, all is not lost.

[Tim Streater]

What a big outfit such as Curry's might do is to pare down to one store per county, located somewhere central to that county, where they carry everything, and have their local warehouse. If they staff the retail side properly, with people who know what they're doing, and put the store somewhere out of town and ideally with decent PT connections, they could then advertise that as the place to go to fondle the products.

IOW they need to make a virtue out of necessity; people want to buy conveniently online, but thay often also want to see the kit up close. And if the staff are explictly focussed on meeting that need rather than selling and adding unnecessary extras such as warranty insurance, I would have thought it would make a good marketing approach.

[alan_m]

I ordered something at 3pm on last Sunday, it was delivered 11am on the following day.

As for grass seed, all the "local" shops seem to sell packets of repair seed which is 98% "growth promoter and soil condition" aka bulk rubbish and around 2% actual grass seed.

[72y33]

The Natural Philosopher [e-mail] wrote

The main advantage of them now is far more people can be fitted in the same acreage and you have to travel less to go to the places you have to visit in person like schools, doctors, hospitals, sports places etc.

[alan_m]

I no longer buy stamps when I need to use Royal Mail to deliver something. I go on-line pay and print the label with the QR code.