craigb
I expect the next business model for brick-and-mortar will be a showroom-only order online type model. Where you could have what you ordered sent to your home or to the showroom for pickup.
I think you just defined the reason Guitar Center failed as a business model. That is distinct from how it failed as a business. Its failure as a business is well discussed in the referenced article.The
only music store with a significant inventory within a hundred miles of my home is Guitar Center, but except for a few special sales, I have never actually bought anything there. And no, I have never received any useful information from their employees. Aside from teenage illegal aliens there is probably no cheaper or more plentiful labor pool than musicians who need a day job, but I digress. If GC had a device I found interesting, it was almost always cheaper somewhere else i.e. online. The loss of GC (other than the fact that Sweetwater will now have no incentive to undercut their prices) is that I will have no place to audition real exemplars of the products I would be interested in buying.
The reasons for the business failure, as the article indicates, has to do with the switch from investing in the underlying value of a company (what used to be quaintly labeled the "fundamentals" ) to the hope that you could unload the equity for more than you paid for it (speculation, or in the current parlance "value"). It sounds like GS would have failed in the past (because of the fundamentals) except for a ruinous "rescue" by some slick operators. Will consumers suffer as a result of this failure? Sure. Will our access to less expensive and more available products be limited? Of course. Does this mean that all brick and mortar enterprises are necessarily doomed? Remains to be seen. Opening showrooms to allow customers to try the product locally, only to order the product online, is probably not the answer. The competitor who decides not provide such a service will get a free ride from whoever does.