Suzanne Kappner

Retailers, they've expanded the breadth of their online offerings tremendously in recent years, you know, to compete with this endless aisle that... Amazon offers. On top of that, they've been opening smaller stores. So there's been a confluence of factors that have contributed to this sense by consumers that, God, shopping's not so much fun anymore.

IBM conducted a survey last year that found that Three-quarters of consumers actually prefer shopping in physical stores, but only 9% are satisfied with the in-store experience. And a big complaint is that the stores lack product variety and availability. The consulting firm Alex Partners recently looked at 30 retailers. and compared their online assortment to what they carry in stores.

And they found on average only 9% of the online offering of women's clothing was available in physical stores. For department stores, the percentage was 7%. At mass merchants, it was only 2%. Specialty retailers were a bit better with about a third of their online goods available in stores.

You know, it's funny because a lot of retail CEOs will say, well, I don't really care where a customer shops. They can shop wherever they want, online, in-store, a combination of the two. But in fact, when a customer shops in-store, it's much more profitable than when they shop online because the cost of packing that order and shipping that order and then online returns tend to be higher.

All of that eats into profits of online orders.