Brick-and-mortar stores are closing everywhere because of competition from online sellers. This one is just cutting to the chase. Or, slightly less silly, it’s an attempt to catch the attention of people who don’t shop much online.
I don’t think the joke involves literal bricks and mortar.
It’s just that not having hours and encouraging their customers to visit them online defeats the point of being a Brick and Mortar Store. It’s an unclear on the concept joke.
woozy said about what I was going to.
I think it is a new brick & mortar store introduced by an established online operator, such as Amazon are apparently doing, but its managers are so used to doing their stuff online that they are not quite sure how to implement a brick & mortar operation apart from, you know, owning a shopping-compatible building made of brick & mortar (and glass).
“Brick & mortar store” is a term that gained widespread usage when internet stores started becoming very common. The term refers to a store that you can physically walk into and buy things in and take things home as soon as you buy them.
These stores have been around since the invention of money, but only since the advent of online stores has the term “brick & mortar store” been used so often to refer to them. (Although I suppose that term could have been used 100 years ago to distinguish them from stores that did their business through catalogs, such as Sears, Roebuck & Company.)
Despite their “Mom & Pop store” appeal, “brick & mortar” stores are succumbing to the online trend by establishing an on-line presence (just like how your favorite breakfast cereal now has its own website). And when that happens, there’s little left before the whole store moves online.
So now I want to go into business selling bricks and mortar from an online store….
of course someone beat me to it, what was I thinking. looks like TrueValue, but it isn’t set up well.
BricksAndMortar.com
Yeah, Woozy got it. This wasn’t a CiDU at all for me. But I’m in tech; that might make a difference.
Well, I *was* assume the phrase “brick and mortar store” was well known and understood….
The amazon Brick and Mortar stores are weird in my opinion. Because the *actual* inventory of the store is the entirety of Amazon, the entire focus of the store is impulse shopping display, … entirely…., and then, kinda like the Mac Stores, they like to keep the checkout counters hidden (I guess commerce is consider gauche) so you wander around saying “Hello, I’d like to leave; can someone take my money please?”, which of course they can’t because not only are the cash-free (my latest pet peeve which I don’t think should even be legal) credit cards a strongly discouraged.
I don’t have a problem with cash-free businesses as long as it’s clearly posted although I have yet to encounter one in my area. Sure the business loses cash-only customers, but that already is the case for online retail. And look at all the pluses – an electronic record of every transaction in case of disputes, no worries about robbery or employee theft, easy end of day reconciliation as opposed to counting cash, etc.
Dang, I am a curmudgeon in my old age (but true to form I was a curmudgeon in my youth so….). But…. Don’t want a paper trial, you shouldn’t need to bank at specific banks or have specific cards to get a purchase, and you shouldn’t have to relenquish any information about yourself to make a purchase. If you have the money, they should take it.
My latest pet (hey! literally) peeve that just came up this morning and last night: friends informed me they were looking for a dog and must of the shelters had adoption fees about $250$ to $1000$ dollars and I thought … what? …. DOn’t they *want* these dogs to get homes! And even when you get a supposedly “questioning” article (such as https://www.dogster.com/lifestyle/adopt-a-dog-adoption-fees ) about whether these fees are reasonable you get strange attitudinal ideas that are just assumed and unquestioned like this “I have to admit that while I balked at the idea of a nearly $600 adoption fee at first, GhostBuster and his behavioral assessment persuaded me that fee was worth it.”
“Behavioral assessment!” …. before I knew, there I was sitting on to porch with a sour look on my face “Why in the old days you did care about behavioral assessment. The dog on the farm next to you got knocked up and your neighbor asked if you wanted a dog and you said sure and he said ‘Bless you’ and you had a new best friend. That’s all the way God intended it”….
And exaggeration but not off the mark. Adapting a dog should be easy. Yes a loving pet is invaluable and priceless but it’s shouldn’t be a luxury commodity. And there sure and fickles shouldn’t be illegal and underground pet theft and marketting rings….
Now how’s that for a tangent!
So you take that neighbor’s dog’s puppy. Assuming that you are a responsible dog owner (and those who go to shelters to adOpt a dog most likely are), you have to worm the puppy. You have to spay/neuter it. You have to give it puppy shots against parvovirus and all the other ills dogs are prone to (more so today that formerly). You have to pay for a heartworm test before starting it on heartworm meds.
Dogs in rescue and shelters are spayed/neutered and vetted so you start out with a healthy (as far as possible) dog. In both rescue groups with which I worked, Airedale and Cairn, we spent a LOT more on many if not most of the dogs than we ever received back in fees, believe me. I could go on with examples, but don’t want to bore you all . . . I have 100s of webpages that would attest to this fact, however, if you want to peruse some heartbreaking stories.
And if you’ve seen puppymills, which is where most of the pet shop dogs come from, you’d be glad to pay for a rescued dog that’s been socialized and vetted.
Behavioral assessment is necessary to find out if a dog is good with other dogs, or not; good with children, or not; good with c*ts, or not; amenable to being handled, or not. Which is a lot more than you’d get from a BYB (backyard breeder; puppy mill on a smaller scale).
If you don’t charge for rescue dogs, people who run dog fighting rings will beat a path to your door; this is why many newspapers no longer run ‘free to a good home’ adverts, and CraigsList has been discouraged (to no avail) from allowing those kind of ads.
What about people who spend 1000s of dollars for labradoodles, goldendoodles, and all those designer dogs, supposedly to ‘legitimate’ breeders? They’re paying a LOT of money for what are, in essence, mutts. Nothing wrong with mutts (or, to put it more nicely, crossbreeds), but to spend 1000s of $$$ on so-called designer dogs is downright ridiculous, if not obscene.
Now the mayor wants to make overly long receipts and receipts with certain chemicals on them illegal in NYC. He also wants to require businesses to offer email receipts instead of paper at customer request. I am putting together a letter to send to him and the NY City Council leader about the law. I also think that receipts from many stores are too long – buy one item and it is over a foot long.
However, I have client in NYC who is a woman in her 80.s who is a Holocaust survivor. She runs the business her father started in NYC sometime after they came here after WWII. It is an antique jewelry stall on 47th Street in the Jewelry District. (For those not in NYC – where in the movie “Marathon Man” he goes to price diamonds.) She is there all alone these years, with a cousin who sometimes comes in with her for something to do and to keep her company. Neither of them uses a computer – if she has to offer emailed receipts she will have to shut down the business. If she has the type of receipt (which is very short, not long, but may have the chemicals in question on it) it will cost her another $600 or so to buy a new credit card processing machine. Since she makes few sales (sometimes months without a sale lately) the best thing for her would actually be to use Square for processing as she no longer would have a monthly minimum to pay and an annual fee, but since she doesn’t use a computer- it would be impossible for her to use Square.
She has been an employee of her corporation until this year. I have made her take $100 (net) payroll check in the years when she can not pay herself anything,but I will shutting down her as payroll this month and did not make her take a check for last year as there is a new NYC law that all companies with any employees must have all of their employees take a sexual harassment class annually – including test at the end. So, this 80+ woman would have to take a class to make sure that she knows not to sexually harass herself?! She always says to get rid of the payroll checks and we discussed it and what else this will affect and when I file the returns this month for the last of 2019 they will be final returns. Will save her some money as she has top pay for NYS Disability insurance and for the Family Leave coverage for herself as an employee.
Thermal paper for receipts not being paper (but instead full of questionable plastics) is a real issue. It’s high time someone did something about it.
Emailing receipts, however, is rubbish. Like I’m going to let every random merchant collect a valid email address…
Dave in Boston – my thought exactly. I finally had a chance yesterday to write a letter to the NYC Mayor, the Speaker of the NYC Council and the majority and minority leaders of same about the subject as both an accountant and a consumer in NYC.
I agreed with receipts being too long. I then pointed out the problem with requiring email receipts to be available using my client as an example – Woman in her 80s, no employees, does not use a computer and keeps her records old style on paper – make a sale, hand write a receipt from the receipt book, staple her copy of a credit card receipt to her copy of the sales receipt… If it was required to have email receipts available she would be out of business from a business that her parents started after the family (including her) came here after surviving the Holocaust and has continued in business in NYC since.
I then mentioned what you said – I don’t give my email address out whilly nilly and don’t want every store that I buy some small item from having my email address. (Though they were not going to say “no paper receipts”, only require the email one to be available, but somehow I know that same will be followed by email receipts only by the stores if not the City.)
Comics I Don't Understand 
Brick-and-mortar stores are closing everywhere because of competition from online sellers. This one is just cutting to the chase. Or, slightly less silly, it’s an attempt to catch the attention of people who don’t shop much online.
I don’t think the joke involves literal bricks and mortar.
It’s just that not having hours and encouraging their customers to visit them online defeats the point of being a Brick and Mortar Store. It’s an unclear on the concept joke.
woozy said about what I was going to.
I think it is a new brick & mortar store introduced by an established online operator, such as Amazon are apparently doing, but its managers are so used to doing their stuff online that they are not quite sure how to implement a brick & mortar operation apart from, you know, owning a shopping-compatible building made of brick & mortar (and glass).
“Brick & mortar store” is a term that gained widespread usage when internet stores started becoming very common. The term refers to a store that you can physically walk into and buy things in and take things home as soon as you buy them.
These stores have been around since the invention of money, but only since the advent of online stores has the term “brick & mortar store” been used so often to refer to them. (Although I suppose that term could have been used 100 years ago to distinguish them from stores that did their business through catalogs, such as Sears, Roebuck & Company.)
Despite their “Mom & Pop store” appeal, “brick & mortar” stores are succumbing to the online trend by establishing an on-line presence (just like how your favorite breakfast cereal now has its own website). And when that happens, there’s little left before the whole store moves online.
So now I want to go into business selling bricks and mortar from an online store….
of course someone beat me to it, what was I thinking. looks like TrueValue, but it isn’t set up well.
BricksAndMortar.com
Yeah, Woozy got it. This wasn’t a CiDU at all for me. But I’m in tech; that might make a difference.
Well, I *was* assume the phrase “brick and mortar store” was well known and understood….
The amazon Brick and Mortar stores are weird in my opinion. Because the *actual* inventory of the store is the entirety of Amazon, the entire focus of the store is impulse shopping display, … entirely…., and then, kinda like the Mac Stores, they like to keep the checkout counters hidden (I guess commerce is consider gauche) so you wander around saying “Hello, I’d like to leave; can someone take my money please?”, which of course they can’t because not only are the cash-free (my latest pet peeve which I don’t think should even be legal) credit cards a strongly discouraged.
I don’t have a problem with cash-free businesses as long as it’s clearly posted although I have yet to encounter one in my area. Sure the business loses cash-only customers, but that already is the case for online retail. And look at all the pluses – an electronic record of every transaction in case of disputes, no worries about robbery or employee theft, easy end of day reconciliation as opposed to counting cash, etc.
Dang, I am a curmudgeon in my old age (but true to form I was a curmudgeon in my youth so….). But…. Don’t want a paper trial, you shouldn’t need to bank at specific banks or have specific cards to get a purchase, and you shouldn’t have to relenquish any information about yourself to make a purchase. If you have the money, they should take it.
My latest pet (hey! literally) peeve that just came up this morning and last night: friends informed me they were looking for a dog and must of the shelters had adoption fees about $250$ to $1000$ dollars and I thought … what? …. DOn’t they *want* these dogs to get homes! And even when you get a supposedly “questioning” article (such as https://www.dogster.com/lifestyle/adopt-a-dog-adoption-fees ) about whether these fees are reasonable you get strange attitudinal ideas that are just assumed and unquestioned like this “I have to admit that while I balked at the idea of a nearly $600 adoption fee at first, GhostBuster and his behavioral assessment persuaded me that fee was worth it.”
“Behavioral assessment!” …. before I knew, there I was sitting on to porch with a sour look on my face “Why in the old days you did care about behavioral assessment. The dog on the farm next to you got knocked up and your neighbor asked if you wanted a dog and you said sure and he said ‘Bless you’ and you had a new best friend. That’s all the way God intended it”….
And exaggeration but not off the mark. Adapting a dog should be easy. Yes a loving pet is invaluable and priceless but it’s shouldn’t be a luxury commodity. And there sure and fickles shouldn’t be illegal and underground pet theft and marketting rings….
Now how’s that for a tangent!
So you take that neighbor’s dog’s puppy. Assuming that you are a responsible dog owner (and those who go to shelters to adOpt a dog most likely are), you have to worm the puppy. You have to spay/neuter it. You have to give it puppy shots against parvovirus and all the other ills dogs are prone to (more so today that formerly). You have to pay for a heartworm test before starting it on heartworm meds.
Dogs in rescue and shelters are spayed/neutered and vetted so you start out with a healthy (as far as possible) dog. In both rescue groups with which I worked, Airedale and Cairn, we spent a LOT more on many if not most of the dogs than we ever received back in fees, believe me. I could go on with examples, but don’t want to bore you all . . . I have 100s of webpages that would attest to this fact, however, if you want to peruse some heartbreaking stories.
And if you’ve seen puppymills, which is where most of the pet shop dogs come from, you’d be glad to pay for a rescued dog that’s been socialized and vetted.
Behavioral assessment is necessary to find out if a dog is good with other dogs, or not; good with children, or not; good with c*ts, or not; amenable to being handled, or not. Which is a lot more than you’d get from a BYB (backyard breeder; puppy mill on a smaller scale).
If you don’t charge for rescue dogs, people who run dog fighting rings will beat a path to your door; this is why many newspapers no longer run ‘free to a good home’ adverts, and CraigsList has been discouraged (to no avail) from allowing those kind of ads.
What about people who spend 1000s of dollars for labradoodles, goldendoodles, and all those designer dogs, supposedly to ‘legitimate’ breeders? They’re paying a LOT of money for what are, in essence, mutts. Nothing wrong with mutts (or, to put it more nicely, crossbreeds), but to spend 1000s of $$$ on so-called designer dogs is downright ridiculous, if not obscene.
I will now step down from my soapbox.
NYC is looking to join other cities – such as Philly – in not allowing cashless stores – apparently they even made the Amazon in same take cash. This is the latest article I found on same – https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2019/12/03/cashless-business-ban-headed-for-a-vote-in-council-1230408
Now the mayor wants to make overly long receipts and receipts with certain chemicals on them illegal in NYC. He also wants to require businesses to offer email receipts instead of paper at customer request. I am putting together a letter to send to him and the NY City Council leader about the law. I also think that receipts from many stores are too long – buy one item and it is over a foot long.
However, I have client in NYC who is a woman in her 80.s who is a Holocaust survivor. She runs the business her father started in NYC sometime after they came here after WWII. It is an antique jewelry stall on 47th Street in the Jewelry District. (For those not in NYC – where in the movie “Marathon Man” he goes to price diamonds.) She is there all alone these years, with a cousin who sometimes comes in with her for something to do and to keep her company. Neither of them uses a computer – if she has to offer emailed receipts she will have to shut down the business. If she has the type of receipt (which is very short, not long, but may have the chemicals in question on it) it will cost her another $600 or so to buy a new credit card processing machine. Since she makes few sales (sometimes months without a sale lately) the best thing for her would actually be to use Square for processing as she no longer would have a monthly minimum to pay and an annual fee, but since she doesn’t use a computer- it would be impossible for her to use Square.
She has been an employee of her corporation until this year. I have made her take $100 (net) payroll check in the years when she can not pay herself anything,but I will shutting down her as payroll this month and did not make her take a check for last year as there is a new NYC law that all companies with any employees must have all of their employees take a sexual harassment class annually – including test at the end. So, this 80+ woman would have to take a class to make sure that she knows not to sexually harass herself?! She always says to get rid of the payroll checks and we discussed it and what else this will affect and when I file the returns this month for the last of 2019 they will be final returns. Will save her some money as she has top pay for NYS Disability insurance and for the Family Leave coverage for herself as an employee.
Thermal paper for receipts not being paper (but instead full of questionable plastics) is a real issue. It’s high time someone did something about it.
Emailing receipts, however, is rubbish. Like I’m going to let every random merchant collect a valid email address…
Dave in Boston – my thought exactly. I finally had a chance yesterday to write a letter to the NYC Mayor, the Speaker of the NYC Council and the majority and minority leaders of same about the subject as both an accountant and a consumer in NYC.
I agreed with receipts being too long. I then pointed out the problem with requiring email receipts to be available using my client as an example – Woman in her 80s, no employees, does not use a computer and keeps her records old style on paper – make a sale, hand write a receipt from the receipt book, staple her copy of a credit card receipt to her copy of the sales receipt… If it was required to have email receipts available she would be out of business from a business that her parents started after the family (including her) came here after surviving the Holocaust and has continued in business in NYC since.
I then mentioned what you said – I don’t give my email address out whilly nilly and don’t want every store that I buy some small item from having my email address. (Though they were not going to say “no paper receipts”, only require the email one to be available, but somehow I know that same will be followed by email receipts only by the stores if not the City.)