I used to love shopping. Not necessarily buying things. Shopping. Walking through a store. Looking around. Finding something I didn’t know I needed. Checking clearance. Seeing what was new. Comparing prices. Maybe grabbing something small on the way out. That experience feels like it’s disappearing. And I don’t think Amazon killed it. I think retailers did a pretty good job killing it themselves.
When Shopping Starts Feeling Like Work
Walk into a Walgreens now and half the store can feel like a museum exhibit. Toothpaste behind glass. Deodorant behind glass. Skincare behind glass. You find what you need, press a button, and wait for someone who is probably already doing three other jobs to come unlock it. I understand why stores do it. Theft is real. Shrink is real. But from the customer side, the result is simple: Why did I leave my house for this? If buying a $7 bottle of face wash requires tracking down an employee with a key, ordering it online starts looking pretty attractive. That’s the problem with a lot of retail today. Customers are being asked to do more while getting less.
Would You Like a Credit Card With That?
Then there’s the credit card obsession. Old Navy. Victoria’s Secret. Plenty of other chains. You walk in wanting a pair of jeans and suddenly you’re being recruited into a banking relationship. “Would you like to save 20% today?” No. “Are you sure?” Yes. “You could earn rewards.” I would actually just like to buy the underwear. I understand why retailers push store cards. They make money. They build loyalty. They collect customer data. But there’s a point where “loyalty program” turns into friction. If every transaction feels like an application process, the shopping experience gets worse.
Retail Got Lazy
A lot of stores also just stopped trying. Messy shelves. Empty displays. One employee covering half the building. Products in the wrong place. No one at checkout. No one available to answer a question. Then retailers act shocked when people decide to shop online. You cannot make the physical shopping experience worse every year and then blame customers for not showing up. People will leave the house. You just have to give them a reason.
And Then There’s Kohl’s
Kohl’s might be one of the best examples of how disconnected some retailers have become from reality. The entire shopping experience seems built around fake pricing. A product is $79.99. But today it’s 30% off. Unless you have Kohl’s Cash. Or a coupon. Or their credit card. Or it’s excluded. Or the coupon starts tomorrow. Or the Kohl’s Cash expired yesterday. At some point I don’t know what anything actually costs. And I’m The Frugal Gay. I LIKE discounts. But a discount only feels good when the original price feels real. Customers have become smarter. We can stand in the aisle and check the price online in ten seconds. We know when a $70 product is really a $35 product wearing a fake sale sign. Retailers can’t keep pretending shoppers don’t have Google.
The Stores That Still Get It
This is why Costco and Sam’s Club are so interesting to me. They still give people a reason to physically show up. The prices are usually straightforward. Checkout moves. There’s constantly something new to look at. You can try samples. You can wander through seasonal merchandise. You can find a random clearance deal. And then there’s the food. Costco has somehow kept a $1.50 hot dog and soda combo alive while everything else in America got more expensive. Then you walk out with a $4.99 rotisserie chicken that can feed you for multiple meals. That isn’t accidental. It’s part of the experience. You went in for paper towels and somehow spent an hour browsing furniture, eating a sample, checking out televisions, and debating whether you need a six-pound bag of pecans. That’s retail. Sam’s understands this too. Make it easy. Make it fast. Make the customer feel like they found value. Give them something they can’t completely replicate by scrolling on their phone.
People Don’t Hate Stores
I don’t think people stopped liking stores. I think people stopped liking bad stores. There’s a difference. We still go to farmers markets. We still wander through Costco. We still visit flea markets. We still go to TJ Maxx and HomeGoods looking for something we didn’t plan to buy. We’ll stand in line for a bakery, visit a cool independent shop, or drive across town for a great deal. The appetite for physical retail is still there. What disappeared is our tolerance for inconvenience.
Retail Can Still Be Fun
I actually think there’s an opportunity here. Physical stores have something online shopping will never completely replace: Discovery. You can touch something. Try it on. Smell it. See the actual color. Find something unexpected. Talk to another human. Walk out with it immediately. Those things still have value. But retailers need to stop treating stores like expensive warehouses customers happen to walk through. Give people good service. Make checkout painless. Price things honestly. Stop harassing customers about credit cards. Keep the store clean. Give people something fun to discover. Maybe even feed them a cheap hot dog. Retail doesn’t have to die. It just has to remember why we used to enjoy going shopping in the first place.
Where I Still Go Looking for the Deal
That hunt for overlooked value is also why I built Cheap Cheap Closeout: the online side of the same clearance-table thrill, without pretending a fake original price makes the deal better.
And when I want the opposite of another aisle—a real place with history, personality and an experience worth leaving home for—that’s The Katie Lee.