While I get your point here's a counter example. I needed a power adapter for a router urgently. I checked Amazon and they could deliver it by Prime the next day. I decided instead to go out into the real world and check first. I went to 3 different small electronics stores near my home - none of them had it. After an hour of searching/wasting my time I bought it on the Amazon app as I walked home. I think the point is - it depends where you live. These electronics stores were small places that doubled as internet cafés and were run by local people. I would have really had to go out of the way to find a Maplin/Radioshack/Best Buy kind of store. If I drove a car or lived near a mall I probably could have gotten the item easily but I live in a city and small locally run stores are much more common than chains which stock everything. It wasn't even that obscure an item but without wasting several hours and spending £6 on public transport Amazon was the only solution.
Going to Best Buy in my experience means paying more for the same product. It's also a 40-minute round trip, minimum. It's 30 minutes if I go to Target, or Barnes and Noble, and similar times for most other stores I'd go to.
If I could walk to a store to get most of the stuff I'd otherwise get from Amazon, I'd consider it more often. But driving 20 minutes or more to pick up something small is not a good use of my time. It's not enjoyable. It's not a meaningful amount of exercise to walk through a store. And frankly driving for a small item is not very earth friendly. I suspect that it's better for the environment to have UPS add another package to their truck than it is for another car to drive to the store and back, even if you consider the environmental cost of the box.
> aimed at promoting instant gratification and maximizing consumerism
So it's a retail company. I feel like this statement applies to at least 99% of retail companies, likely including the ones you're shopping at instead of Amazon.
