Quote:
Originally Posted by Baronvonellis
It's seems to be more of a cultural thing in Europe. Cities there have thriving commercial shopping streets that you can walk to close by, or take the fast and convenient public transit too. They respect and trust their local shop keepers, and probably know them on a first name basis. In some ways they are back how retail was in the 1920's in the US, although they love Ikea. Ikea seems to be the popular big box store when I talked to people in Europe. People there don't seem to consider online shopping as an option yet according to this article discussing apparel. I stayed with a young couple in Germany, I had to get a air mattress to sleep on, and when I said I could just order it on Amazon and ship it to their door, they acted kind of confused like it was a new concept.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-euro...ion-1525080604
Germany and the UK are the largest markets for Amazon outside of the US. But they are about a tenth of the sales compared to the US, and the rest of Europe barely uses Amazon.
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The infrastructure for online shopping is probably a big factor as well. The Italian version of Amazon (the only international version I'm pretty familiar with) is limited in selection/prime options. I'm just guessing, but the difference in taxing bodies, shipping, storage, etc. might be what's holding back online shopping there.
Europhiles (including actual European Europhiles) probably would say it's all cultural ("Europeans are just more community-minded and less consumerist!") but in reality, lots of things aren't cultural... until they are. I bet if you asked the average Italian 20 years ago about Ikea they would have scoffed at the idea of furnishing their home from a big box store selling cheap furniture from Scandinavia, but then it's introduced and everyone flocks there because it's convenient and affordable.
The same thing happened with drive thrus, my brother in law used to (condescendingly) awe at the drive thrus here ("That's so great! Italians could never eat in their cars, though") but once they built a drive thru McDonald's in their town (dubbed McDrive by the locals) the line is always around the corner.