Merchants suffer when customers use their stores to check out products, sometimes taking pictures of them, and then buying them online, says Bob Greene
By Bob Greene
In a bookstore, I saw a woman taking photograph after photograph of newly released titles that were arranged on a shelf. She was using her phone to take the pictures.
I didn’t understand. Why would anyone want to take pictures of books?
Then, at a restaurant, waiting for a table, I heard two men, also waiting, talking. One said he had just ended a frustrating day at the store he owned.
“Do they think I’m a showroom?” he said.
He mentioned people who had come into his shop that day, had looked at the merchandise, had taken notes — and then had left.
“Do they think I don’t know what they’re doing?” he said.
It is a relatively new phenomenon. Among retail merchants — owners of stores both small and large — it has a name:
“Showrooming.”
No one showrooms by choice.
And it represents a potential sea change in American life. Its implications are vast.
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